Hateyou
amd
Hatorade
have a lot more experience with this game than me, but I will give you a little insight as someone who has only recently been playing. I think I got the base game....2 months ago?
Although I love the game and I have backed the latest KS, I understand there will always be people who will not enjoy it as much as some of us. I think $500 is lot of money to put up front for something that you may not enjoy. Also, when I look at the pricing, you are not really saving that much money. When the Pledge Manager opens, you will be able to get items......for what looks like retail price. The only thing you are saving on is shipping, and you also have the issue where you *might* be getting everything in December (they are in discussions about split shipping, but it's not an affirmative yet).
So my advice to you would be to get the base game now from the Chip Theory website. As a leap of faith, if you want, get either the $40 Splice and Dice expansion....or get the $165 pledge from the new KS - but realize, $75 of that pledge is for a storage box for a game you may or may not get more components for. It also looks like you will be able to buy that box in the future for $85. Regardless, you won't be getting any of that until December, and you will be playing the base TMB game in the meantime to determine if you like the game enough to invest further.
In my case, I've played it about 5 times, and really enjoy the game so I went ahead with the $165 pledge. In the meantime, I also ordered the 40 days of Daelore, Age of Tyranny, Ghillie, and Tink expansions, which cost me a little over $100 with shipping. So I will get to enjoy those components way before December (it's actually scheduled to arrive tomorrow! I'm psyched!).
I'm actually not excited about Undertow. Because I have the base game it seems like the game is overpriced for me because there are some components in the box that are redundant, like a lot of the dice. For me it would be about getting 2 other Gearlocs, and getting a different battle map.....but is that worth $80? I figure between the 4 gealocs that come with the base game, Ghille and Tink arriving soon, and Dart and Gearloc interns coming in December.....that's plenty of content for now. More than likely I'll just have someone give it to me as a Christmas gift or something.