..... there are a couple of issues with it that I'd like to share in the interest of aiding future releases.

Before I start though Denny, please don't take umbrage at the criticism in this post. I genuinely love CastleWorks Ultimate, it's been my favourite set from WWG for a long time now and will completely knock my gamers socks off when they see the build (it can be seen over at http://www.worldworksgames.com/forum/vi ... php?t=3448 if interested). I could gush and gush, but I hope you already know how much good there is in the set. Listed below are a few things that I would like to see handled differently in future releases

1) 1" Grid requiring the use of inserts

Although I am really glad that CWU came with a 1" grid option (otherwise it would be useless to me) I got heartily sick of it being the poor cousin. Having to constantly print out 1" grid inserts and to glue them on top of 1.5" grid models got both tiresome and wasteful imho. Rather than go down the insert route, it would have been much better/efficient for the modeller to include both 1" and 1.5" models of the bits that mattered (specifically the wall and the moat sections).

2) 1" grid option missing on some parts

It was a shame that no 1" grid option was included for the Catwalks.

3) Too many parts with no grid at all

Specifically, it was a shame that the ground floor tower sections, the drawbridge, curved walltops and the exit/entry ramps came with no grid option. Whilst it might spoil "the look" a little, it's pretty much essential for D20 games, again imho.

4) Corner Tabs are too wide

To get the second storys of the houses to fit, I had to quite drastically trim the width of the corner tabs. Am I the only one to have this problem ? Assuming I didn't have printer setting problems (I checked) on the dozens of corner tabs I printed, surely you must have noticed this during test builds ?

5) Inefficient placement of models in PDF files

Some PDF files contained odd combinations of model parts on the same page. The classics for me where the moat transparencies (one straight and one corner peice on the same page) and the 1" moat inserts (again, one straight and one corner on the same page). Most builds will only require 4 corner sections and many more straights. This leads to a quite blatant waste of paper/transparency/ink, none of which is cheap.

6) "Floating" models don't work well !

Specifically, the Curtain Arch and the Hoarding models are designed so that the parts that touch the "floor" are free standing. This never worked well for me. They tended to warp too easily and always ended up floating a 1/4" off the "floor", looking unrealistic. In the end I always added extra tabs to firmly fix them to a base somewhere.

7) Internal staircases are too wide

This got fixed by a kitbash, but until I discovered this, it was very annoying on my initial builds to have 25% of the width of a room taken up by a staircase. The supplied 1" wide staircase kitbash saved the day, but it would have been better to have included this as a standard option.

8) Uneven support for the different stone textures (hey, I typed an "eight" followed by a "close bracket")

Although the walls came in plain, ridged and stucco stone textures, the complex crenelations only came in ridged. The left hand external staircase only came in stucco and the right hand staircase only came in plain. Also, whilst we had the choice of stone or plaster house walls, the gable ends of the roof sections only came in plaster. It would have been nice if, having been offered the choice in one place of the build if we could have maintained that choice all the way through.

9) Moat Sections need to be in variable lengths

I found that no matter how I designed my castle, I couldn't get a "tight" moat fit with only the 6" lengths offered. It would have been great to have been offered a few odd lengths to give us more options on our designs (BTW, the moat is a fantastic way of binding the build together and stopping non paper-linx'd model pieces from being knocked out of place). It wasn't a difficult bash" to get the different lengths I needed, but it might have stymied a novice.

10) House doors in exactly the wrong place.

If you opted for a 1" grid build, the doors of the houses neatly came out straddling two squares. In the end, I used plain doorless walls and stuck the doors on manually, but I had to throw away a couple of models before I "discovered" this technique. In the end, it just re-inforced the aftrethought nature of the 1" grid.



That's all I can think of for now. Being realistic, all of the above flaws are nitpicky and will not take away from the wow-factor of the model, but if some/all of them could be addressed in relevant future releases, I would be ecstatic.

I hope you find the above useful. As I said when I started this post, I am over the moon and dead chuffed with CWU. It's the best $15 ever spent and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to any modeller. It's just that I feel that the additional thought would have made it the 100% satisfaction product it so deserved to be.

Keep up the good work

Frank

One term comes to mind; 1.5" . Unfortunately CastleWorks Ultimate was designed at the peak of 1.5" popularity and it was for this scale that the set was primarily designed. In that intended scale the model set is 100% working. The vast majority of your issues are due to the issue of creating a usable 1-inch set from the 1.5" paradigm. One thing I don't want people to misunderstand by your above evaluation is that you can indeed create a completely workable 1-inch set from CastleWorks Ultimate. I did my best to design it for both crowds but 1-inch did suffer in some minor areas. In fact I took an additional 2 months to design in a workable 1-inch system.

One thing I took great pains to include with the set was options. You have to agree that there is a tremendous amount of material in there that allows you to tweak the model however you like. Some of these 1-inch issues you mention pushed me into creating as many useful options as I could to cram into the set. Extra doors, windows and blank walls were all designed with those issues in mind.

Esthetically there were a few areas that did not have a visible grid but I always assumed that players would reference neighboring grid patterns to move through those tiny areas. It would have looked ugly as hell to place a visible grid on the drawbridge. Although it is noted that a grid within the interior of those corner towers would have been useful. In terms of the corner tabs I'm not aware of anyone having issues there and I can only assume this was a printer or driver issue. I know I didn't have any problems stacking multi-level structures and I put a lot of time into making sure those tolerances were correct.

Please don't take any of the above the wrong way as I do appreciate the feedback. I just don't want new users coming away confused by certain statements or impressions. CastleWorks Ultimate is one of those sets that I lost sleep over and worked obsessively hard on. You can do incredible things with the model set for a very small investment and I would hope smaller issues of compatibility would be forgiven for the sheer volume of goodness included.

Hey Frank, nice to know you feel "it's the best $15 ever spent and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to any modeller.. And thanks for the heads up about things I'll encounter (as a 1" gamer/builder) when I get to CWU.

As for the issues you raised, it looks like we could do with:
A) A few kitbashes
- Some 1" specific wall and moat sections
- 1" grids for those floor sections that are missing them
- Better corner tabs (Is this practical? Or are they built onto lots of different parts?)
- Better basing for the "Curtain Arch" and "Hoarding" models
- Different length moat sections
- Walls with preprinted 1" doors
- 1" staircase (already available)

B) A set of design/build tips for 1" builders
Do you have any other tips for 1" builders that you'd add?

C) Rearranged PDF layouts for a couple of the parts
Which ones would you recommend?

D) Including some of the 1" kitbashes as patches in CWU
I don't know how pratical this is for Denny to do - but some of these things sound a lot more like fixes than extensions to the CWU set.

The Open Source project GIMP can import PDF for editing (with a little bit of setup) and since it is open source it is FREE (and me like that word...free).

Here is the link to the download section for GIMP