Goonhammer Reviews: Mantic’s Companion and Vault Apps

The Mantic Companion is the first of Mantic’s major digital offerings. It’s an all-in-one website covering their current major game systems; Kings of War, Armada, Deadzone and Firefight. For each of these the Mantic Companion provides list builders, searchable rules, tournament integration and even a “Math Hammer” tool.

The basic functionality of each of these are all available for free, yet only two army lists can be saved at a time, and only the “basic rules” are available. The Bronze Tier of membership (£2.99 / month), which is the lowest, provides unlimited list building for a single game system. The Silver Tier (£3.99 / month) unlocks all the rules and the ability to run tournaments for a single game system. The Gold Tier (£5.99 / month) unlocks Silver Tier but for all game systems, perfect for players of multiple Mantic games.

Any errors in rules or the army lists are readily fixed by the developer. This was more of an issue in the early days of the Companion, but the speed of response remains.

For each of the game systems the List Builders are excellent, and are some of the best such tools we have ever used (sorry Battlescribe). To start a new list, one simply needs to pick their faction and the points limit, then all the units are presented in a clean list. Each unit’s stats can be revealed by clicking on them, and hidden again, making the whole list building experience painless, rather than needing to scroll through all the information all the time.

List building mechanics, such as the Kings of War Unlocking System, are also included. When an army list is created that violates these, a warning pops up indicating what the problem is. In Kings of War, this could be the inclusion of too many monsters versus the number of Unlocking hordes or regiments. In Firefight, too many Specialist units versus Troops would bring up a warning. For new players this is incredibly helpful, as it quickly drums in how list building works, and makes it very difficult to create illegal lists unknowingly.

The most useful aspect of List Building is the ability to build armies for any faction in the game. There’s no codes required to access any army lists, or books that must be purchased. This makes the planning of new armies and collections much easier to navigate, compared to the need to purchase additional codexes or army books. Be careful though, it’s a slippery slope to developing MAD (multiple army addiction)!

One particularly user-friendly aspect of the List Builder is that the army lists are interactable when viewed in browser or in application. Clicking on any special rule brings it up while keeping you in the list builder. Furthermore, when exporting lists as images or PDF, the complete list of relevant special rules and their explanations comes after the army list. This truly streamlines the whole gaming process.

The entire rules of each of the games are available in the Mantic Companion, organised neatly under their headings. The search function in particular enables the rapid look up of rules, which is particularly useful mid-game. Unfortunately it does not search the entire text, only headings and subheadings, hence some knowledge of the rules is required to search them effectively. Example: The word “Forest” does not bring up anything, as there is no rule specifically titled thus, but “Difficult Terrain” brings up rules that dictate forests (and all other kinds of such terrain). That aside, it is still monumentally faster than looking up a rule in a book and they are updated with every FAQ and Errata, so it’s always current.

While the point of playing games involving dice is that nothing is ever certain, the knowledge of how powerful or tough a unit can be helps set up more advantageous situations. The Math Hammer tool available for Kings of War, Firefight and Deadzone in the Mantic Companion can calculate the average amount of damage any given unit can achieve. All offensive and defensive stats can be manipulated, from special rules that affect combat to magic items that might be used.

The Tournament Companion allows for the hosting of event scoring live in the Mantic Companion. Tournament organizers can create a tournament, link it to an event listed in the “PLAY” tab, and then attendees can sign up. From the point of view of an organizer, much of the event can be tailored to suit, with multiple scoring systems, soft score components, and pairing of players in any given round. It can event take into account player team’s, so that members of the same team will play each other for at least the first round; a common practice in most tournaments.

Being all in the same digital ecosystem, army lists created in the Mantic Companion can be directly submitted to a tournament, which is the best part of the whole process. This eases the workload for tournament organizers as they need not check every list for basic validity. The Companion locks these submitted lists so that they can’t be changed, and the due date for submission can be set.

Each monthly pack contains support for a number of Mantic’s ranges, including Armada, Kings of War and Deadzone. Previous months have seen the inclusion of terrain pieces and generally the packs offer a nice variety. They’ve chosen to run their own file hosting and library system, which might be mixed news for those of your already subscribed to makers over on MyMiniFactory (MMF). I personally like the Vault layout and it allows Mantic to offer freebies for subscribers and an easy link back to the Companion. While it’d be nice to have a way to see what I’ve picked up from their Armada Frontier over on MMF, it’s by no means a dealbreaker.

Wanting to give Armada a shot, and having already purchased their Armada pack over on MMF, I set sail on the resin seas and printed the contents of the starter box. The pre-supported models worked great without any changes, and while the solid models were resin hungry during printing they made for some nice, substantial feeling game pieces. There’s a good level of detail on all of them, and the sub-assemblies provided make sense for both printing and painting. Just don’t do what I did and excitedly glue your masts in to the hulls before painting, you’re only making your own life harder.

I managed to fit a good number of ships on each build plate and had the entire starter set printed in only a few batches. You’ll notice some detail lost on the Basilean Gur Panther and I’ll admit, this was me being lazy. I needed to change out the IPA I use for cleaning and have since upgraded my entire cleaning set up.

Which brings me on to my main complaint, and it’s a pretty minor one, there isn’t hollowed and pre-supported version. Larger solid layers can cause issues for users if the pieces are under-supported, running the risk of delamination or print failures. I always pre-heat my resin, and for this print run was using a fairly high layer time, so I didn’t see any issues personally but I think it’s worth being aware of if you plan to print the models yourself. I think in the future I’ll either take the time to hollow and then fix the pre-supported models myself, or start from the un-supported model.

Overall The Vault offers a refreshing opportunity to pickup models which might be hard to find in your area, and with everything coming pre-supported and support free there’s something for everyone. It would be great to see more companies offering something similar as it opens a huge space for hobbyists to engage with companies they may not normally have considered.