But PDC are based in England, and Mantic is getting their stuff from China. Also, I don't think that perhaps they would have had a chance to get PDC in on all of that. Would be great if they hooked up with them in the future, as they could see them quicker than having to travel to China, and get information and prototypes back quicker for review.
I think rounded sprues is just the norm to be honest. Most scale model makes use that method, so I would say it's more of a coincidence. Having a flat piece with a letter on it is pretty normal.
Have you received any PDC stuff yet? Would be interested to see how it has turned out. Their stuff is pretty basic, but that's not such a bad thing.
Can I ask a favor of anyone at home with a few minutes of spare time?
I'm wondering what the Confrontation AoR (prepainted) Lion figures look like next to the Elohi angels. Specifically I'm wondering if the Lion Paladin heads can be used as replacement Elohi heads.
judgedoug wrote: Can I ask a favor of anyone at home with a few minutes of spare time?
I'm wondering what the Confrontation AoR (prepainted) Lion figures look like next to the Elohi angels. Specifically I'm wondering if the Lion Paladin heads can be used as replacement Elohi heads.
If you still need this in a few weeks when my KoW stuff arrives, I'll be able to help you out.
judgedoug wrote: Can I ask a favor of anyone at home with a few minutes of spare time?
I'm wondering what the Confrontation AoR (prepainted) Lion figures look like next to the Elohi angels. Specifically I'm wondering if the Lion Paladin heads can be used as replacement Elohi heads.
If you still need this in a few weeks when my KoW stuff arrives, I'll be able to help you out.
Nah, it's just that I'm at work and can't compare them (I have them at home) and MiniatureMarket's deal of the day is the Lion starter army for $35. I am thinking about buying a bunch more and using them for my Basilean force plus the Mantic Elohi (with new heads). I think I'll order them anyway - Lion Guards for Men At Arm, Lion Paladins for Paladins, Lion Knights for Paladin Knights, Lion Archers as Crossbowmen(ish), heroes for various heroes, female Chimera for Ur-Elohi or Jullis, and probably the Griffon commander from CMON for a High Paladin on Griffon (the rider even looks like a Rackham Lion figure)
The GW Plastic skellies (TK and VC) are also rather excellent. We'll have to agree to disagree on those Orcs
Sure! Some people like the cartoony gorilla-armed tiny-legged oversized-head(with non functioning jaw inaction!) and fingers the size of forearms. I like my orcs to be menacing, correctly proportioned, hunched over, with metalworking skills.
Fenriswulf wrote: ... Also, hooking back up with Bob Naismith or another talented bloke...
He is good for cheap, fast sculpts. I wouldn't look to him for increasing the quality of the line.
~Eric
He sculpted the zombies, ghouls, and orcs; the best plastics of any of those on the market.
Zombies and Ghouls are "good" because they are nondescript. Not because they are particularly well sculpted. The Orcs aren't that good. I like them for what they are, but they aren't as good as you suggest.
Also, some decent sculpts are bound to happen when you pump out so bloody many pieces. He is capable of decent sculpts. Not ground-breaking awesome ones, mind. But his output keeps him from hitting decent that often.
He sculpted the zombies, ghouls, and orcs; the best plastics of any of those on the market.
Zombies and Ghouls are "good" because they are nondescript. Not because they are particularly well sculpted. The Orcs aren't that good. I like them for what they are, but they aren't as good as you suggest.
Also, some decent sculpts are bound to happen when you pump out so bloody many pieces. He is capable of decent sculpts. Not ground-breaking awesome ones, mind. But his output keeps him from hitting decent that often.
~Eric
The zombies are leagues better than WF and GW's. The ghouls are an order of magntiude better than GW's. That'd make them the best plastics for those types on the market.
He sculpted the zombies, ghouls, and orcs; the best plastics of any of those on the market.
Zombies and Ghouls are "good" because they are nondescript. Not because they are particularly well sculpted. The Orcs aren't that good. I like them for what they are, but they aren't as good as you suggest.
Also, some decent sculpts are bound to happen when you pump out so bloody many pieces. He is capable of decent sculpts. Not ground-breaking awesome ones, mind. But his output keeps him from hitting decent that often.
~Eric
The zombies are leagues better than WF and GW's. The ghouls are an order of magntiude better than GW's. That'd make them the best plastics for those types on the market.
WF Vixens are better sculpts and variety of design. Less utility though. Their original zombies are laughably bad, but still useful for some things. GWs Zombies suffer from issues, for sure, but the Mantic ones aren't better sculpted. Better proportioned, and more generic, sure.
The two Ghoul sets are so different in design that you really can't compare them.
I like Mantic's Ghouls and Zombies better than GW's too, but that doesn't mean they are better sculpted, nor that they are the best on the market necessarily. That is where our disagreement lies, I think.
Naismith is a mediocre sculptor. At best. I have an example that I can PM you if you like when I get home next week. I got both of the Oni figures from the Goalsystem Delves Kickstarter and can show you what I mean. The two iterations of the figure are the exact same character brief done by two different sculptors. One is demonstrably better sculpted than the other.
Fenriswulf wrote: A good choice with the Rackham pre-paints. Almost tempted to buy a bunch from overseas, but the postage kills me, and I don't need yet another army.
Having said that, Mierce is going to have their second kickstarter soon and I hope they flesh out their ogre line...
the Miniature Market online chat support customer service people are great. just ask them to buy the confrontation stuff and repack it - they're used to overseas customers ordering at-43 and confrontation pieces and shipping without the original boxes; saves a ton of money on shipping.
WF Vixens are better sculpts and variety of design. Less utility though. Their original zombies are laughably bad, but still useful for some things. GWs Zombies suffer from issues, for sure, but the Mantic ones aren't better sculpted. Better proportioned, and more generic, sure.
The two Ghoul sets are so different in design that you really can't compare them.
I like Mantic's Ghouls and Zombies better than GW's too, but that doesn't mean they are better sculpted, nor that they are the best on the market necessarily. That is where our disagreement lies, I think.
Naismith is a mediocre sculptor. At best. I have an example that I can PM you if you like when I get home next week. I got both of the Oni figures from the Goalsystem Delves Kickstarter and can show you what I mean. The two iterations of the figure are the exact same character brief done by two different sculptors. One is demonstrably better sculpted than the other.
~Eric
No! My opinion is objective I'm sure sculptors have good and bad days. Gary Morley = Nagash, but also the 6th edition Swordmasters of Hoeth.
I did a digital painting of the original concept sketch for the drakon riders (can be seen here)... it was a really good design, that the sculpts just plain didn't match.
This really is the biggest issue with sculpts.. translation from 2d to 3d. Bob Naismith is actually pretty good at this process and working to a brief.
He did the gargoyles, harpies, obsidian golems and immortal guard from the KoWKS minis, which are considered to be some of the better sculpts.
I think they're pretty good, especially the harpies,which have a real Harryhausen look to them:
Spoiler:
Certainly superior to the GW ones and better than the rather odd AoW ones with punk haircuts too I'd say.
Anyway, new Kickstarter update, where Ronnie talks about the men-at-arms sprue:
Ronnie Renton wrote:We used a new process from the one with which we made Goblin plastic sprue, and I think the Men at arms are a big step up in quality from those. While I think they meet the reasonable price for a good number of army figures, I am still not happy that these are at the level I want to see our hard plastic figures. We are still working on this. Until we can find a method that takes the details back to those we have had in the past we will not stop. Every time we learn more and we get better, but we are not there yet, and I thank you for your patience.
The Harpies look good to me. And I for one love Mantic's zombies. Ghouls not quite so much due to all of them squatting, but otherwise, they're great sculpts too. But then again, I like their elves, so clearly my taste is in question.
Ronnie Renton wrote:We used a new process from the one with which we made Goblin plastic sprue, and I think the Men at arms are a big step up in quality from those. While I think they meet the reasonable price for a good number of army figures, I am still not happy that these are at the level I want to see our hard plastic figures. We are still working on this. Until we can find a method that takes the details back to those we have had in the past we will not stop. Every time we learn more and we get better, but we are not there yet, and I thank you for your patience.
Seems like a fairly reasonable statement.
I've got a solution, go back to Renedra. If they can do the Perry's stuff (which is better and cheaper), Mantic should just go back cap (full of money) in hand. Honestly, the shots I've been seeing of the MAA remind me of this guy http://www.eccentricminiatures.com/ which are decent, but he's one guy doing it in his garage. I want (much like a lot of people here) Mantic to do well, and thought that with the cash from the Kickstarter they would start pulling it back together. Their undead are great (I've got ~3000pts worth), and I also like their orcs (though I prefer mine more Tolkien, less GW). Their elves are good too, if you leave the aesthetics aside and focus on execution (Exception: Drakkon riders). Unfortunately a lot of the stuff from the kickstarter is a bit underwhelming. I'll hold off final judgement until I have my stuff in hand (I got it all in the third shipment, not yet here), but I haven't got high hopes.
Ronnie Renton wrote:We used a new process from the one with which we made Goblin plastic sprue, and I think the Men at arms are a big step up in quality from those. While I think they meet the reasonable price for a good number of army figures, I am still not happy that these are at the level I want to see our hard plastic figures. We are still working on this. Until we can find a method that takes the details back to those we have had in the past we will not stop. Every time we learn more and we get better, but we are not there yet, and I thank you for your patience.
Seems like a fairly reasonable statement.
He's still not happy with them - but he released them, to us. And I don't think they've ever said a word about the universally-poorly received sisters.
And has anyone gotten shipping notices? If they started Monday then there's a slim chance I could get mine tomorrow, which is the last mail-having day of my vacation. Which would be nice.
WF Vixens are better sculpts and variety of design. Less utility though. Their original zombies are laughably bad, but still useful for some things. GWs Zombies suffer from issues, for sure, but the Mantic ones aren't better sculpted. Better proportioned, and more generic, sure.
The two Ghoul sets are so different in design that you really can't compare them.
I like Mantic's Ghouls and Zombies better than GW's too, but that doesn't mean they are better sculpted, nor that they are the best on the market necessarily. That is where our disagreement lies, I think.
Naismith is a mediocre sculptor. At best. I have an example that I can PM you if you like when I get home next week. I got both of the Oni figures from the Goalsystem Delves Kickstarter and can show you what I mean. The two iterations of the figure are the exact same character brief done by two different sculptors. One is demonstrably better sculpted than the other.
~Eric
GW's plastic zombies are ...15? years old and were designed to be compatible with the original GW plastic skeletons that are 20 years old. (and their slightly updated cousins) - Not the newish VC or TK skelly kits.
GW's plastic ghouls are much more recent, and yes, are awful.
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timetowaste85 wrote: Wait, we could have them by tomorrow? That would be nice. Amazing, actually. Hell, any time up to Thursday would be great.
Well, not you. Your little flag says you're in the US.
Cyporiean wrote: IIRC the reason they haven't been using Rendra is because they can't, Rendra doesn't have the room for additional work.
Given the total number of new plastic sets Mantic have actually released since they made the switch(2), I'd bet that it was more of a cost issue. And now if Warlord have moved production in-house, it leaves the Perry's as Renedra's only consistent client.
Cyporiean wrote: IIRC the reason they haven't been using Rendra is because they can't, Rendra doesn't have the room for additional work.
Given the total number of new plastic sets Mantic have actually released since they made the switch(2), I'd bet that it was more of a cost issue. And now if Warlord have moved production in-house, it leaves the Perry's as Renedra's only consistent client.
Cyporiean wrote: IIRC the reason they haven't been using Rendra is because they can't, Rendra doesn't have the room for additional work.
Given the total number of new plastic sets Mantic have actually released since they made the switch(2), I'd bet that it was more of a cost issue. And now if Warlord have moved production in-house, it leaves the Perry's as Renedra's only consistent client.
Fireforge. Also Agema miniatures.
I did forget about Fireforge. I didn't mention Agema because they (like Gripping Beast) haven't put out new product regularly, 1 full and one half sprue in the last several years for both combined. That said, if a new start up like Agema can get a sprue done, I don't see why Mantic couldn't. Even looking at Fireforge, it appears (from posting dates of photos) to take six months to a year to get something from green to end product through Renedra. I'm sure everyone of us here would have rather waited an extra six months for a proper Renedra tooled, full option (i.e. crossbows) sprue, rather than the half-arsed looking shots we've got so far (which given Ronnie says he's not fully happy with means I'm not holding out much hope for it to be better in person).
scarletsquig wrote: Anyway, new Kickstarter update, where Ronnie talks about the men-at-arms sprue:
Ronnie Renton wrote:We used a new process from the one with which we made Goblin plastic sprue, and I think the Men at arms are a big step up in quality from those. While I think they meet the reasonable price for a good number of army figures, I am still not happy that these are at the level I want to see our hard plastic figures. We are still working on this. Until we can find a method that takes the details back to those we have had in the past we will not stop. Every time we learn more and we get better, but we are not there yet, and I thank you for your patience.
Seems like a fairly reasonable statement.
Geez... I don't know. Why do Mantic continue to release figures they themselves are not happy with? He admits as much here! If it's subpar, demand better... don't have your customers foot the bill of your learning curve .
I'm glad he admitted there was a problem, but that is not a satisfying response to it. "Every time we learn more and we get better"... so the next "time" being Deadzone? Good luck, fellas
I do agree they're getting better, I just don't see why it's so hit-and-miss. Dreadball Season 3 looks good, which is concurrent with these KoW models... so why are these so poor (on some releases, not all) by comparison?
Nah. They're just trying to manage our expectations so that our first responses will be "they're better than I expected" or "they're not that bad."
EDIT: The real problem is the shamefully negative community of backers. If those tweenie boppers hadn't been weaned on Twitter and instant gratification, this never would have happened.
The goblin archers were terrible - yes they pass the '3 feet' test, but the amount of work needed to get them to that point was far too much.
By contrast, have a couple of the DB season 2 teams and they are great. Pledged a medium amount on the Deadzone KS, so fingers crossed for that one.
Just stuck my head in through the door at some of the new GW Marine stuff. No desire for collecting more of them as that is an (extremely!) well trod road for me, but looking at the prices the only thing I can think to say was 'feth me' !
The reason I mention that is because I think Mantic have really got an opportunity here, if they can just notch the quality up a bit, keep these imaginative releases coming but also keep the prices low. For any kid coming into wargaming, and wanting to collect a mass battle system, the fact that GW is pricing themselves even further towards the upper-end of the middle class means there is a big gap in the market there. But they have to try and keep the 'core' of wargamers (the type who take it seriously enough to spend time on forums) happy with quality releases. Just undercutting GW's, by itself, isn't enough.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Nah. They're just trying to manage our expectations so that our first responses will be "they're better than I expected" or "they're not that bad."
EDIT: The real problem is the shamefully negative community of backers. If those tweenie boppers hadn't been weaned on Twitter and instant gratification, this never would have happened.
Maybe it's because I'm older and wiser than you lot, but when I used to buy things, I'd hand the money over the counter and get my product immediately. No waiting at all! I'd also usually talk to the people I was buying things from, and either simply ask for my product, make small talk or even have a chat, depending on what I was buying. You know what they did? The people selling me products would talk back to me and communicate!
Not like you young whippersnappers, raised in an era of patiently waiting weeks, months or years for your items and communication from those selling things to you. No, in my day, when you spoke to someone, they spoke right back.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Nah. They're just trying to manage our expectations so that our first responses will be "they're better than I expected" or "they're not that bad."
EDIT: The real problem is the shamefully negative community of backers. If those tweenie boppers hadn't been weaned on Twitter and instant gratification, this never would have happened.
So Mantic's poor sculpts and quality control is the fault of their fans? Way to pass the buck.
Personally I think their fans would be much happier if Mantic had come out 6 months ago and said "We are not happy with our first pass at all the Basilean models, so rather than shipping out substandard products, we are going to ship 6 months late and spend that time getting them right."
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Nah. They're just trying to manage our expectations so that our first responses will be "they're better than I expected" or "they're not that bad."
EDIT: The real problem is the shamefully negative community of backers. If those tweenie boppers hadn't been weaned on Twitter and instant gratification, this never would have happened.
So Mantic's poor sculpts and quality control is the fault of their fans? Way to pass the buck.
It's sarcasm, and a direct reference to some stuff going on elsewhere on these forums and the internet. As is my "grumpy old man" reply to it.
Cyporiean wrote: IIRC the reason they haven't been using Rendra is because they can't, Rendra doesn't have the room for additional work.
Given the total number of new plastic sets Mantic have actually released since they made the switch(2), I'd bet that it was more of a cost issue. And now if Warlord have moved production in-house, it leaves the Perry's as Renedra's only consistent client.
Fireforge. Also Agema miniatures.
Victrix! Who are probably larger than Perry, Fireforge, and Agema combined.
Cyporiean wrote: IIRC the reason they haven't been using Rendra is because they can't, Rendra doesn't have the room for additional work.
Given the total number of new plastic sets Mantic have actually released since they made the switch(2), I'd bet that it was more of a cost issue. And now if Warlord have moved production in-house, it leaves the Perry's as Renedra's only consistent client.
Fireforge. Also Agema miniatures.
Victrix! Who are probably larger than Perry, Fireforge, and Agema combined.
Also, it should be pretty obvious why throwing a £10-£20k tool into the trash when there's plenty of people who would like to buy the models isn't something any company would consider.
The detail/sculpting on the GW empire state troopers is pretty bad*, but you're not going to see those remade anytime soon.
*When those were released GW were at a similar point where mantic is now with digital sculpting, good at hard armour/ weapons, can't sculpt organics.
Also, it should be pretty obvious why throwing a £10-£20k tool into the trash when there's plenty of people who would like to buy the models isn't something any company would consider.
If they paid £10-£20k for that sprue they should have gone to someone else.
The detail/sculpting on the GW empire state troopers is pretty bad*, but you're not going to see those remade anytime soon.
*When those were released GW were at a similar point where mantic is now with digital sculpting, good at hard armour/ weapons, can't sculpt organics.
Problem is, I don't see Mantics Basileans competing with GW's empire state troopers, they are competing with guy's like Perrys, Fireforge, etc. GW can get away with having/not replacing crap stuff because their are still people out there who only buy GW stuff. I can't see Mantic having that much hold over people.
That said, I'm hoping that the bodies at least of the MAA come out ok, I can manage to scrounge up enough arms/heads from my Perry and Fireforge bits.
The detail/sculpting on the GW empire state troopers is pretty bad*, but you're not going to see those remade anytime soon.
Gonna have to call you out on this one. At least you can make out facial features on the State Troops...Actually, the facial feature definition on them is about equal to that of other GW figures. There are some areas on the waistlines of the figures, particularly when an organic item (scroll/skull) is next to a metallic item(dagger, hourglass).
Okay, having actually gone to the Mantic forums, the guy who posted the crappy pictures admitted to having a crappy camera on his phone and that the pictures don't do the models justice at all, as the details look very soft. I'm not seeing too many complaints about the detail from people that actually have them, mostly people complaining about the picture. Hopefully this suggests a crisis averted. I think with having the minis in front of me, a proper flesh wash to pick out the detail, and washes over the regular paint, and the models will look good. Maybe not "OMG, leaps and bounds over GW!!!!!" (obvious exaggeration), but will still be good and a phenomenal deal. Anybody who is unhappy with their goblins want to sell me a cheap 20-man squad? I'm thinking $15 shipped, which is likely the KS amount you paid plus the shipping needed to get them off your hands? I'd like to see how bad they are for myself.
The detail/sculpting on the GW empire state troopers is pretty bad*, but you're not going to see those remade anytime soon.
Gonna have to call you out on this one. At least you can make out facial features on the State Troops...Actually, the facial feature definition on them is about equal to that of other GW figures. There are some areas on the waistlines of the figures, particularly when an organic item (scroll/skull) is next to a metallic item(dagger, hourglass).
~Tim?
Having personally bought the 7th edition GW state troops, I'm well-qualified to comment on their suckitude. The faces are poorly-sculpted monkeyish blobs, all of the details mush into each other, they're plastered with skulls, bones, and SIGMAR KARL FRANZ SIGMAR on every surface and quite generally look a bit terrible. The guy with no shoes doesn't even have any toe detail, it's just a big mush. Mould lines were terrible too, really thick and had lots of parts where the plastic seeped into the gap between the 2 mould halves. Also, the spears/ halberds are an absolute pain to assemble straight, I made a half-hearted attempt at gluing them together before selling them. Then the empire greatswords were previewed, and I thought "cool, I can make an army out of those instead, they got the Perrys to sculpt them".. and then of course, the £25 price tag hit, the first mark of GW pricing really going into fruitloop territory as opposed to "just about affordable if you buy from discount webstores".
Perrys and Warlord etc. are definitely better looking than either GW or Mantic for humans. Athough the Mantic ones do have the fantasy theme rather than historical, so if you like that and it is something you want, the option is there.
The intent of my post wasn't to declare the state troopers as competition, just relaying an experience with a GW kit I'd personally bought and disliked that was released when they were still struggling to make non-crap minis using digital sculpting.
Also wanted to point out that if GW is happy to let poor core troop sprues out of the door (and then, in a lot of cases, keep selling them for 20+ years without considering a replacement), then it just goes to show that the plastic tooling is a serious investment, not the kind of thing where you can afford to just throw it in the bin and start over if it's less than perfect.
As I've said, I'll review the things when I get them (my camera is decent enough), it's a little pointless for me to comment on them further at the moment when I could just wait a few more days and do it properly.
Although, that said, I can't imagine it'll be a rosy review, jusdging by what other people whose Kickstarters have arrived are saying...
Seen the men at arms in person now.
They are, awful.
They're too big, they tower over even GWs heroic scale Bret men at arms. The detail is lost in what seems to be cheap nasty plastic, and don't seem to fit together well either.
I'm still trying to source a pic of the elf and TK cavalry, so far all I know is that they seem to be restic, not hard plastic, so, good news there.
Maybe it's because I'm older and wiser than you lot, but when I used to buy things, I'd hand the money over the counter and get my product immediately. No waiting at all! I'd also usually talk to the people I was buying things from, and either simply ask for my product, make small talk or even have a chat, depending on what I was buying. You know what they did? The people selling me products would talk back to me and communicate!
Not like you young whippersnappers, raised in an era of patiently waiting weeks, months or years for your items and communication from those selling things to you. No, in my day, when you spoke to someone, they spoke right back.
In my day, one waited hours for the cashier to total up one's purchase with her slide ruler and blue wax pencil. And that was if there was no line of precocious youngsters buying [see forum posting rules] hounds and penny candy at the general store.
Why the Kickstarter delays take me back to the days of mail-ordering my FASA starships through Starlog Magazine with SASE and cheque, waiting half a year for the delivery and then another half a year for the back-ordered majority of my original order. Good times are here again.
@Will, Sorry for the confusion. Kickstarter threads are just gold mines for sarcasm, memes and general human cruelty. They're so shameful.
Also, it should be pretty obvious why throwing a £10-£20k tool into the trash when there's plenty of people who would like to buy the models isn't something any company would consider.
The detail/sculpting on the GW empire state troopers is pretty bad*, but you're not going to see those remade anytime soon.
*When those were released GW were at a similar point where mantic is now with digital sculpting, good at hard armour/ weapons, can't sculpt organics.
Just checked them out. The faces are pretty bad, and the bare feet are an ...interesting aesthetic decision, but the rest of those kits, and the actual sprues, I'm sure beat the living snot out of the Mantic ones in sculpting and quality. "Similar" is being - let's face it, rather generous to Mantic.
Also wanted to point out that if GW is happy to let poor core troop sprues out of the door (and then, in a lot of cases, keep selling them for 20+ years without considering a replacement), then it just goes to show that the plastic tooling is a serious investment, not the kind of thing where you can afford to just throw it in the bin and start over if it's less than perfect.
Well, any plastic core troops sprue that's 20 years old has to be considered with the aesthetics and technology of the day before you can fairly call them "poor". Which kits are you talking about in that instance? I still think of the old Skeleton Army/Horde stuff as quite good, and the Zombies were put together to be cross-compatible, and while not as finely detailed as the Mantic ones, still work well in a GW-context and by virtue of being so multipart. I've got easily converted ones for RPGs and Blood Bowl and they look perfect for both roles. (Since my "undead army" is a recent, unpainted and unassembled thing which is more off the tail of our LotR Army of the Dead figures, expanded, and the Mantic ones better fit that particular aesthetic).
As I've said, I'll review the things when I get them (my camera is decent enough), it's a little pointless for me to comment on them further at the moment when I could just wait a few more days and do it properly. Although, that said, I can't imagine it'll be a rosy review, jusdging by what other people whose Kickstarters have arrived are saying...
I'm still trying to source a pic of the elf and TK cavalry, so far all I know is that they seem to be restic, not hard plastic, so, good news there.
I look forward to seeing all of these. Are Mantic using shipping notices, or just mailing stuff out?
Forgetting about the current empire troops -which GW have taken in a pretty divisive aesthetic direction- these Mantic men at arms are objectively worse than their own initial plastics, and GW's 4/5/6th edition plastics from 16 BLOODY YEARS AGO.
I can't believe I swapped from nuns to more of these :(
Sounds like I'll be able to pick up some Basilleans cheap, either discounted due to low demand or untouched second hand ; p They're not great but I like the style, even if the sculpting and casting isn't great. Certainly not the crisp Eisenkern plastics sadly, maybe they've spoiled me.
I stand corrected. Mantic needs to swtich to them ASAP. SK Engineering sprues are arguable better than some Renedra sprues I've seen.
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Dawnbringer wrote: Problem is, I don't see Mantics Basileans competing with GW's empire state troopers, they are competing with guy's like Perrys, Fireforge, etc. GW can get away with having/not replacing crap stuff because their are still people out there who only buy GW stuff.
That's the crux... the only people who would be tricked into buying Empire State Troops are only Warhammer players; effectively Empire is it's own separate market. Perry and Fireforge (and Gripping Beast to some extent) are the Basilean's main competition, and only tangentally. The Men at Arms are basically the only true D&D-style fantasy plastic soldier kits, but they look to be so poor that there's basically no reason to buy them. The overall poor sculpting of the army convinced me to use Confrontation Lion figures for mine, with only the Elohi (with head swaps) and that cool character dude on Lion as the only Mantic figures in it.
Also wanted to point out that if GW is happy to let poor core troop sprues out of the door (and then, in a lot of cases, keep selling them for 20+ years without considering a replacement), then it just goes to show that the plastic tooling is a serious investment, not the kind of thing where you can afford to just throw it in the bin and start over if it's less than perfect.
Well, any plastic core troops sprue that's 20 years old has to be considered with the aesthetics and technology of the day before you can fairly call them "poor". Which kits are you talking about in that instance? I still think of the old Skeleton Army/Horde stuff as quite good, and the Zombies were put together to be cross-compatible, and while not as finely detailed as the Mantic ones, still work well in a GW-context and by virtue of being so multipart. I've got easily converted ones for RPGs and Blood Bowl and they look perfect for both roles. (Since my "undead army" is a recent, unpainted and unassembled thing which is more off the tail of our LotR Army of the Dead figures, expanded, and the Mantic ones better fit that particular aesthetic).
Terrible sculpts are terrible sculpts. Mantic's plastic Men At Arms at least look to be better proportioned than the absolutely terrible plastic High Elves or Dark Elves. My bajillion point High Elf army is composed of, quite literally, a hundred metal 4th/5th edition HE archers and another hundred metal 4th/5th edition HE spearmen because I want to vomit when I look at the plastic melon-headed hamfisted High Elf soldiers. The Dark Elf/Mierce Khthones army I'm planning _had_ to be Gamezone based because of the awful GW Dark Elf plastics. The HE spearmen, archers, and DE warriors are all sculpted as 3-ups and pantographed for tooling, which is what Renedra uses as well... There are very few infantry kits that GW make even with their CAD tooling that are not laughable compared to, say, Perry Napoleonics.
All this is moot though, as this is about Mantic and the Men At Arms are garbage. I'll still use 'em for roleplaying figures, as they'll look fine as generic fantasy town guards or something.
SS, with that picture of putty instead of glue, I assume you have the models in hand now? Can you build and paint a single one, using washes and stuff to show off the detail so we can get a good view of them? Thanks man. I'll do the same as soon as mine come in, but an early look wouldn't hurt as well. Bare plastic can hurt detail with the camera flash.
That's the crux... the only people who would be tricked into buying Empire State Troops are only Warhammer players; effectively Empire is it's own separate market. Perry and Fireforge (and Gripping Beast to some extent) are the Basilean's main competition, and only tangentally. The Men at Arms are basically the only true D&D-style fantasy plastic soldier kits, but they look to be so poor that there's basically no reason to buy them. The overall poor sculpting of the army convinced me to use Confrontation Lion figures for mine, with only the Elohi (with head swaps) and that cool character dude on Lion as the only Mantic figures in it.
Looking at the finished/unpainted figure above... what makes him a "true fantasy" figure? Oversized sword and oddly-designed shield? Silly looking helmet? The rest of him is really rather generic, and while you can take that as "generic fantasy" I see it as "easily proxied for almost anything else on the market."
Automatically Appended Next Post: Well, any plastic core troops sprue that's 20 years old has to be considered with the aesthetics and technology of the day before you can fairly call them "poor". Which kits are you talking about in that instance? I still think of the old Skeleton Army/Horde stuff as quite good, and the Zombies were put together to be cross-compatible, and while not as finely detailed as the Mantic ones, still work well in a GW-context and by virtue of being so multipart. I've got easily converted ones for RPGs and Blood Bowl and they look perfect for both roles. (Since my "undead army" is a recent, unpainted and unassembled thing which is more off the tail of our LotR Army of the Dead figures, expanded, and the Mantic ones better fit that particular aesthetic).
Terrible sculpts are terrible sculpts. Mantic's plastic Men At Arms at least look to be better proportioned than the absolutely terrible plastic High Elves or Dark Elves. My bajillion point High Elf army is composed of, quite literally, a hundred metal 4th/5th edition HE archers and another hundred metal 4th/5th edition HE spearmen because I want to vomit when I look at the plastic melon-headed hamfisted High Elf soldiers. The Dark Elf/Mierce Khthones army I'm planning _had_ to be Gamezone based because of the awful GW Dark Elf plastics. The HE spearmen, archers, and DE warriors are all sculpted as 3-ups and pantographed for tooling, which is what Renedra uses as well... There are very few infantry kits that GW make even with their CAD tooling that are not laughable compared to, say, Perry Napoleonics.
Missing the point entirely there, Doug. SS made some generic point about "poor" GW kits from "20 years ago". Mine is that some (most? all? need a list of what was out in 1993!) of the GW kits from 20 years ago were pretty damned good for the time, and others still hold up today. The "terrible sculpts" thing doesn't quite work either. Comparing the RTB01 Plastic Space marines to the latest iteration of the Tactical squad is apples to apples ...except it really isn't - even though the RTB01 models wouldn't pass muster as a new kit today.
All this is moot though, as this is about Mantic and the Men At Arms are garbage. I'll still use 'em for roleplaying figures, as they'll look fine as generic fantasy town guards or something.
Similarly, I'm getting the bare minimum of them as freebies, and they'll work in the same vein as many of the Bones models. Generic space fillers and learn-to-paint figures.
Anyway - we want pics of the elusive dark/elf Cavlalry models. Do they even exist? When we see them will it be some kind of Cthulhu-esque moment where we scream and run in terror? Or will it be quite a pleasant surprise?
I don't necessarily mean kits from 20 years ago that are out today, I mean terrible kits from GW currently that will be over 20 years old before GW even thinks about updating them. Although there are 20+ year-old things present in the range (empire horses, wolves, eldar jetbikes) that look like they'll be sold for at least another decade.
Stuff like high elf core infantry, probably won't get a new sculpt this side of 2020, GW only releases big monsters and whatnot these days, there has not been a single core infantry sprue released in the entire of warhammer 8th edition, last ones were the beastmen (which didn't really desperately need it and didn't change much).
The M@A pics aren't mine, and neither is this shot of the TK Dark Knights:
seems the fellow who took that pic didn't get any horses (though he did get an additional rider?) so no pics of those yet.
I kind of suspect that even if the horse on Mikayel (Twilight kin backer hero) isn't a plastic horse, it'll at least be quite similar to these models.
and if we really get that many heads in a single kit then building a Twilight Kin army has just become a lot more attractive.
Still, not the right size of pic to judge anything from and I don't really like the look of those bent spears - at least one of those is part-broken, not just the usual 'fix with hot water' thing I don't mind.
four new ones in addition to the metal ones in the other TK kits though - that makes for plenty of additional variety to add to otherwise a wee bit repetitive TK infantry units.
rosafari wrote: Forgetting about the current empire troops -which GW have taken in a pretty divisive aesthetic direction- these Mantic men at arms are objectively worse than their own initial plastics, and GW's 4/5/6th edition plastics from 16 BLOODY YEARS AGO.
I can't believe I swapped from nuns to more of these :(
I swapped out 80% of my Basilean's for Ogres. Based off that photo I wish I swapped out the last 20%.
I find it amazing how poorly these compare to the original Mantic plastics (like the Undead I have a metric ton of).
The forearms on the Dark Elves look problematic. Also, I would love to see a side view of the Man at Arms, because I remember the original Mantic photo made it look like they were forearm simians, too.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The forearms on the Dark Elves look problematic. Also, I would love to see a side view of the Man at Arms, because I remember the original Mantic photo made it look like they were forearm simians, too.
It looks like the upper arm/bicep/shoulder region is part of the body sculpt, but it's hard to tell from that pic.
Other than the shield, and from the poor pic, I am happy with the TK cav design!
Looking at the finished/unpainted figure above... what makes him a "true fantasy" figure? Oversized sword and oddly-designed shield? Silly looking helmet? The rest of him is really rather generic, and while you can take that as "generic fantasy" I see it as "easily proxied for almost anything else on the market."
Yeah, those are the main points. When I look at the MaA, I think, crappy D&D plastic soldier. When I look at Perry WotR I think, amazing medieval plastic soldier. When I look at GW 7th/8th Empire I think, ugly monkey with no shoes that someone gave a sword to.
Missing the point entirely there, Doug. SS made some generic point about "poor" GW kits from "20 years ago". Mine is that some (most? all? need a list of what was out in 1993!) of the GW kits from 20 years ago were pretty damned good for the time, and others still hold up today. The "terrible sculpts" thing doesn't quite work either. Comparing the RTB01 Plastic Space marines to the latest iteration of the Tactical squad is apples to apples ...except it really isn't - even though the RTB01 models wouldn't pass muster as a new kit today.
I think I just starting making my own point somehow and got sidetracked. Perhaps I'm just frustrated with the huge quantity of poor plastic kits flooding the market and the fact that GW doesn't replace it's older kits as it's not financially viable for them, so I have limited places to turn to when I want to build an army for some reason.
Similarly, I'm getting the bare minimum of them as freebies, and they'll work in the same vein as many of the Bones models. Generic space fillers and learn-to-paint figures.
I think perhaps better than that. I still love the old HQ and AHQ men at arms and I think these guys will fit the same purpose quite easily. A quick prime, few colors, dip, flock, and now I have the city guard patrols for a game. Still a shame that's all they're good for, for my purposes :/
scarletsquig wrote: there has not been a single core infantry sprue released in the entire of warhammer 8th edition
Not that I disagree with the thrust of your point but: Savage Orcs, Plaguebearers.
Not speaking for SS but I believe the point was that GW doesn't replace pre-existing plastics anymore, no matter how badly they're designed. They replace metal or finecast models with plastic kits, nearly always dual purpose, so that current players of that army have to buy it anyway for the new unit. but getting off topic now
Not speaking for SS but I believe the point was that GW doesn't replace pre-existing plastics anymore, no matter how badly they're designed. They replace metal or finecast models with plastic kits, nearly always dual purpose, so that current players of that army have to buy it anyway for the new unit. but getting off topic now
If only they didn't replace the older plastic Empire troops!
Whether they could have scrapped the sprue is kind of immaterial now, though. This should've been caught much, much earlier. Mantic needs to pay for better sculpting, pure and simple. A few les units in this KS, to put more funds into sculpting the rest, would've made a big difference imo.
RiTides wrote: Whether they could have scrapped the sprue is kind of immaterial now, though. This should've been caught much, much earlier. Mantic needs to pay for better sculpting, pure and simple. A few les units in this KS, to put more funds into sculpting the rest, would've made a big difference imo.
Exactly!
Also, Quality Assurance might need an upgrade or two as well...
Not speaking for SS but I believe the point was that GW doesn't replace pre-existing plastics anymore, no matter how badly they're designed. They replace metal or finecast models with plastic kits, nearly always dual purpose, so that current players of that army have to buy it anyway for the new unit. but getting off topic now
If only they didn't replace the older plastic Empire troops!
I agree, but they had to. There was no way to do spearmen with the older multipose kit and they had to discontinue the old single pose spearmen/handgunner sprue.
seems the horses for the elves are just the horses we've already seen for the paladin cav.
Heroes look pretty well cast to me - then again metal casting is not something you can ever really fault mantic on.
Not entirely happy with the samey horses, on the other hand, they are decent horses and I can appreciate sculpting eleventy different types of "horse" is a bit wasteful.
I agree, but they had to. There was no way to do spearmen with the older multipose kit and they had to discontinue the old single pose spearmen/handgunner sprue.
Keep the heads, torsos, legs, redo the arm options. The plastic tactical marines have been almost identical from the release of 3rd ed until now, but the sprues have been through several iterations. Remember each marine being on it's own mini-sprue and the arms and bolter being on a second, with backpack sprues for the third?
I agree, but they had to. There was no way to do spearmen with the older multipose kit and they had to discontinue the old single pose spearmen/handgunner sprue.
Keep the heads, torsos, legs, redo the arm options. The plastic tactical marines have been almost identical from the release of 3rd ed until now, but the sprues have been through several iterations. Remember each marine being on it's own mini-sprue and the arms and bolter being on a second, with backpack sprues for the third?
That would make sense if they were sticking with that style, but they moved away from the Landsknecht and Swiss Renaissance influence into bizarro cartoon steampunk. Plus they repackaged them into ten-soldier boxes.
And come on, marines as a range sell better than all of WHFB combined. Of course they'll get more plastic love.
I have emailed them and am awaiting a reply but not too worried. However to rub salt in the wound it appears they did supply me with the bases for the hero's
Automatically Appended Next Post: The elven cav are both pretty nice if no one has done it by the time I get home I will throw some pics up.
Bloody hell, it's seems like this conspiracy is spreading!
Seriously. People are getting them all over the official forums but just post descriptions instead of pics:
"The restic horses are absolutely gorgeous. As are the TK and Elf cavalry. Brilliant miniatures. Great sculpting, crisp details and well cast. Hands down beat the equivalents from GW. Why on earth didn't we see photos of these?"
It's quite frustrating as my Elf army has the metal Elf Stormwind Cavalry and I'm wondering if the new cav will be compatible or if I'll use them for another army. And I'm wondering if either of them would match Gamezone's Dark Elves, as I've got several units of their plastic spearmen and light cav coming in the mail and could use a heavier cav in the army.
Hold your horses, everyone, there's plenty of pics now. :p
Looking quite nice, I like the regular elf ones a little more than the TK knights, huge improvement over the original metals, and the sculpted-on cloak is a better decision than having it separate.
Oh, those both look excellent (other than the goofy TK shields). I am very happy with them and it boggles my mind that Mantic didn't show these guys off on the KS page yet.
Winterdyne, have you painted any of these Elf cav? Cat's out of the bag, show us painted pics
If I was lucky enough to have had mine delivered at the weekend, I'd have painted up and posted pics of a unit already just for the fun of being first.
I am very rapidly becoming a fan of restic, despite having the exact opposite opinion previously.
The detail on the material is good. Mould lines are minimal as long as China doesn't deliberately try to cut corners (and it seems like they do need supervision to prevent them from doing this).
And.. my previous major reservation, pricing, has been largely solved by an interesting move by Mantic; the Basilean Paladins are £20 for 20, instead of just the single £15 for 10 box offered previously.
If they keep up that sort of £1 per mini pricing, then I'm totally happy with the material being used rather than pursuing a seemingly endless and expensive endeavor to make a non-renedra plastic sprue that doesn't suck.
I'm actually a little concerned for Deadzone now, I was fairly certain that the mistakes with the goblin sprue were in the past, but they aren't, and Deadzone shipping is in December (this is non-negotiable, the enforcer hard plastics at the very least have to ship then), so it's possible they're going to have to stick with the same tooling company to meet the ship date... which, combined with the lack of info about what the sprues are going to mean for backers adds quite a lot of uncertainty to the DZ KS at this point.
Horses look good, from what I can see! But regarding this:
scarletsquig wrote: I'm actually a little concerned for Deadzone now, I was fairly certain that the mistakes with the goblin sprue were in the past, but they aren't, and Deadzone shipping is in December (this is non-negotiable, the enforcer hard plastics at the very least have to ship then), so it's possible they're going to have to stick with the same tooling company to meet the ship date... which, combined with the lack of info about what the sprues are going to mean for backers adds quite a lot of uncertainty to the DZ KS at this point.
Why would they "have to ship then" or try to meet the ship date with lackluster product? Clearly, as shown with some items here, that is not a winning strategy. If they've got a better method, I imagine the vast majority of backers would rather have good product late than shoddy product on-time. MUCH rather...
RiTides wrote: Horses look good, from what I can see! But regarding this:
scarletsquig wrote: I'm actually a little concerned for Deadzone now, I was fairly certain that the mistakes with the goblin sprue were in the past, but they aren't, and Deadzone shipping is in December (this is non-negotiable, the enforcer hard plastics at the very least have to ship then), so it's possible they're going to have to stick with the same tooling company to meet the ship date... which, combined with the lack of info about what the sprues are going to mean for backers adds quite a lot of uncertainty to the DZ KS at this point.
Why would they "have to ship then" or try to meet the ship date with lackluster product? Clearly, as shown with some items here, that is not a winning strategy. If they've got a better method, I imagine the vast majority of backers would rather have good product late than shoddy product on-time. MUCH rather...
maybe a month or two, but relic knights being pushed back 6 months caused loads of outrage and a fair amount (apparently) of refund requests,
if they switched companys who would they go to and what would the wait be
good companies will probably) be busy,
unknown quantities are just that (the goblins company was poor, this lot are better but still not great what would a 3rd new company in Mantics price range be like)
WGF have the skills (if supplied with good starting 3d sculpt like Dreamforge's stuff) but are very heavily behind: I'll guess 12+ months delay if Mantic could afford them
Renendra again have the skills but are (reputedly) very busy too so lots of delays (I'll guess WGF level) and being in the UK almost certainly significantly more expensive than anywhere in china : Could they afford to tool what they've now promised at Renendra's prices my guess is not
so Ronnie has to roll the dice and choose which is the less worst option and since they are planning at least one more KS this year I think he'll go for potentially iffy minis rather than loose the reputation for delivering on time (based on what Mantic has done so far)
unknown quantities are just that (the goblins company was poor, this lot are better but still not great what would a 3rd new company in Mantics price range be like)
WGF have the skills (if supplied with good starting 3d sculpt like Dreamforge's stuff) but are very heavily behind: I'll guess 12+ months delay if Mantic could afford them
Renendra again have the skills but are (reputedly) very busy too so lots of delays (I'll guess WGF level) and being in the UK almost certainly significantly more expensive than anywhere in china : Could they afford to tool what they've now promised at Renendra's prices my guess is not
so Ronnie has to roll the dice and choose which is the less worst option and since they are planning at least one more KS this year I think he'll go for potentially iffy minis rather than loose the reputation for delivering on time (based on what Mantic has done so far)
Another comparison pic, this time with a mantic elf (the paladins are about the same height):
The more I look at the faces, the less I like them... they all have this weird, pudgy, creepy look to them.
Makes it look like a unit of sex offenders or something.
Think I'll definitely be replacing the heads... eccentric miniatures looks like the best bet since they sell a head sprue seperately ($2 for 16 heads is about as good as it gets), and also sell plastic giant crossbow artillery at 2 for $10 (which is an entry in the basilean army list which I will definitely need).
Cyporiean wrote: Wow... I didn't expect the Humans to be taller then Elves, thats a rarely seen fantasy trope.
D&D Elves (except for Grey possibly) were noticeably shorter than humans in at least 2nd and 3rd edition. I don't play 4th and didn't play 1st so can't comment on those.
Cyporiean wrote: Wow... I didn't expect the Humans to be taller then Elves, thats a rarely seen fantasy trope.
D&D elves in the last couple editions have been smaller than humans, iirc.
warboss wrote: D&D Elves (except for Grey possibly) were noticeably shorter than humans in at least 2nd and 3rd edition. I don't play 4th and didn't play 1st so can't comment on those.
Pathfinder:
D&D:
Apparently Forgotten Realms had Elves being as tall/taller as the standard, also LOTR.
This is the best I could find in the Mantic fluff for Elves
"Elves are slender, much thinner than a man, but
deceptively strong. Their muscles are hard and supple,
and they can perform athletic feats that other races
could not hope to perform. Next to an Elf, a human
is graceless and ungainly. They are beings of poise,
uniformly beautiful, quick to laugh and quick to anger.
They are long-lived and wise, and yet impulsive. They
love to create, their arts are beyond compare, and
an Elven sword is as fine as it is sharp."
SeanDrake wrote: Which hero's come with the 225 pledge because I got none of them?
Here's the full list of free heroes at the $225+ level for anyone else that needs to check. 11 models!
* J'zik Gearlund, Dwarf Healer
* El'Rik Nisleen, Elf Mage Hero
* Atlak Nakh, Twilight Kin Hero
* Mikayel, Lord of Nightmares, Twilight Kin Hero
* Basilean Angel Hero Jullius -
* Basilean Angel Mage Hero Samacris
* Basilean Lord on Lion
* Druid Keris
* Air Elemental Shaarlyot
2 pet dogs.
All really nice models, too... the people who put down $225+ on this Kickstarter got an insanely good deal, not only 11 hero sculpts, but two of them are large angel minis, and another is a feth-off great big lion rider sculpt.
Nice to see my pictures made it over already! Here are some more:
The Men At Arms, Perry guy and Viking guy here were all done using the same method - Vallejo white airbrush primer with an Army Painter Strong Tone wash. Unfortunately I forgot to do the Orc at the same time.
From left to right on the mixed picture: Man at Arms, Perry Miniatures War of the Roses, Man at Arms, Gripping Beast Viking, Mantic Orc, Man at Arms.
So, now I've undercoated and inked them they don't look too bad. I think the bare plastic shots we've been seeing made them look worse than they are, but they still aren't good. The biggest problem is that these guys are BIG. They tower over the Orc, ludicrously so over 28mm humans. I think that scaled down to proper size then some of the detail would be forgiven. However, there are still issues with the arms (long arm syndrome is not unique to the sisters), chainmail and lego hands.
I've got two theories; firstly that the 3D scanning process wasn't very good and missed a lot of detail. I think that a 3D sculptor went back in to tweak and try to fix, including things like the chainmail but didn't do such a good job. Secondly I think these guys were sculpted for Restic originally, and someone forgot to scale them back down. A reduction of 20% in size would go a long way to correcting some of the problems. If the detail problem areas (including faces) were scaled down 20% then they wouldn't be too bad). The base disc fits in the Mantic bases perfectly (even if the hollow base isn't ideal), but may have been added after in the CAD program.
Having just the exact number of parts needed on the sprue with no spare arms or heads means that variety will be a problem. 1 in every 5 will have to be holding the spear in the attack pose. Having attack poses in the front rank would be great, but not if they're all exactly the same. God help you if you lose an arm or a head (easy to do and I almost did). You're a man down if you do since there are no spares.
Wow. Those arms are really horrible. I think they look much worse there than the sprue pictures, because you can really tell just how out of proportion the arms are. What was Mantic thinking? Do they really not care how bad their miniatures turn out? Did they make enough on the Kickstarters that they don't care if nobody every buys any more of these?
Apparently Forgotten Realms had Elves being as tall/taller as the standard, also LOTR.
I said in D&D 2nd/3rd edition. Your picture is either from Pathfinder or 4th edition but absolutely not from any of the ones I referenced. In both standard and FR D&D in 2nd/3rd, the majority of elf racial variants were slightly shorter than humans except for possibly Gold/Sun elves in 2nd which may have been within an inch or two of human height IIRC in either direction. If 4th edition changed elven height, you can add that to the list of things that were changed willy nilly just 'cause in that edition (along with the destruction of the realms in general to fit in with their points of light mechanic).
edit: Here is a 3/3.5 picture of the FR elven variants. I don't think they had a nifty height comparison in 2nd edition as that tradition started in 3.0. You can cross FR off your list as "taller" since it isn't the case in the majority of editions 3.5 existed (2nd/3rd/3.5). Below is a 3e FR pic IIRC.
Either way, I agree it's off topic....
Back to the topic at hand.. the human spearmen don't actually look as bad as when on the naked sprue. Don't get me wrong... they'll certainly never win any sculpting awards but the faces are the only noticeably sub-par parts if you're looking at them from more than 12" away. Compared with the monstrosities that the gorrilla-hands basilian nuns have or the itty-bitty Looney Tunes Taz legs ogres get, that's nothing!
Casting issues aside, which are impossible to really factor in as we don't have these models cast elsewhere, I can't imagine that the initial outlay to have them sculpted well would have been dramatically more than whatever they paid for this gak. Maybe they would have had to sell more units post-KS to justify it...but guess how many units of this garbage they'll be selling.
Such a shame.
The arms are really what ruin the models for me. I was planning on using Perry or Eccentric minis' arms instead of the MaA arms, but now I doubt they will fit. This may be the rare occasion when I grab some GW HElf Spearman arms for their perfect proportions. Or any GW arms, I guess.
The height is actually not a deterrent for me. I like slightly larger models than Perry and Warlord, and these MaA will probably look like large, elite soldiers after arm and probably head swaps. Eccentric, Gripping Beast and WGF minis can be the bulk of the army with these MaA forming the brute squad. All in all, they definitely inspire one to make lemonade.
I foresee many Mantic-goblin-style blowout sales in their future.
Maybe Dystopian Legion players will find a use for them?
scarletsquig wrote: Hold your horses, everyone, there's plenty of pics now. :p
Looking quite nice, I like the regular elf ones a little more than the TK knights, huge improvement over the original metals, and the sculpted-on cloak is a better decision than having it separate.
Apparently Forgotten Realms had Elves being as tall/taller as the standard, also LOTR.
I said in D&D 2nd/3rd edition. Your picture is either from Pathfinder or 4th edition but absolutely not from any of the ones I referenced. In both standard and FR D&D in 2nd/3rd, the majority of elf racial variants were slightly shorter than humans except for possibly Gold/Sun elves in 2nd which may have been within an inch or two of human height IIRC in either direction. If 4th edition changed elven height, you can add that to the list of things that were changed willy nilly just 'cause in that edition (along with the destruction of the realms in general to fit in with their points of light mechanic).
edit: Here is a 3/3.5 picture of the FR elven variants. I don't think they had a nifty height comparison in 2nd edition as that tradition started in 3.0. You can cross FR off your list as "taller" since it isn't the case in the majority of editions 3.5 existed (2nd/3rd/3.5). Below is a 3e FR pic IIRC.
Either way, I agree it's off topic....
Back to the topic at hand.. the human spearmen don't actually look as bad as when on the naked sprue. Don't get me wrong... they'll certainly never win any sculpting awards but the faces are the only noticeably sub-par parts if you're looking at them from more than 12" away. Compared with the monstrosities that the gorrilla-hands basilian nuns have or the itty-bitty Looney Tunes Taz legs ogres get, that's nothing!
Both pictures in that post by Cyp are pathfinder, the lower is from the older playtest version art.
scarletsquig wrote: Hold your horses, everyone, there's plenty of pics now. :p
Looking quite nice, I like the regular elf ones a little more than the TK knights, huge improvement over the original metals, and the sculpted-on cloak is a better decision than having it separate.
Son of a.... work blocked!
The conspiracy continues!
Rest assured, you'll at least moderately approve of these models, too. Probably even like them
Think I'll definitely be replacing the heads... eccentric miniatures looks like the best bet since they sell a head sprue seperately ($2 for 16 heads is about as good as it gets), and also sell plastic giant crossbow artillery at 2 for $10 (which is an entry in the basilean army list which I will definitely need).
I'd rethink using eccentric miniatures for bits for the Men At Arms there squig, I've got some of the eccentric miniatures and they are a bit smaller than the Perry mini's so I think they'd start looking like the Elohi heads if you used them with the Mantic MAA.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The arms are really what ruin the models for me. I was planning on using Perry or Eccentric minis' arms instead of the MaA arms, but now I doubt they will fit. This may be the rare occasion when I grab some GW HElf Spearman arms for their perfect proportions. Or any GW arms, I guess.
Yeah, I'd definately rule out Eccentric, as they are smaller than the Perry arms.
I can't tell if you're joking about your name or if you're serious... if it's the latter, congratulations! If it's the former, you need to type bazinga! after your posts.
warboss wrote: I can't tell if you're joking about your name or if you're serious... if it's the latter, congratulations! If it's the former, you need to type bazinga! after your posts.
Really good issue this month with a huge unit-by-unit KoW Orc tactics article, painting showcase, LED lighting tutorial, KoW scenario and Warpath fiction.
Was asked (on the mantic forums) to take a few pics of the basilean plastics, not even sure if this is what the guys there wanted yet but hey, might as well throw it up here, too.
Will probably get a pic or two of the elf cav stuff tomorrow if anyone is specifically interested - just say so. (or anything else for that matter, I think I have most everything from the KS lying around).
So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?
I think the knights on foot look alright, but I can't tell in those pictures. And the pictures of the females continue to accentuate their giant pop-eye forearms. Ugh.
frozenwastes wrote: So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?
I'm confused, while we haven't seen the elf cav yet, for everything in that shot we've already had official Mantic pics of for a while now.
I don't recall Mantic posting component pics of any of the Basilians. There's moderately sized completed and painted pictures, but as far as the first impression with the actual model in the box, there's very little. I remember they used to send Beasts of War some sprues to look at under their close cam or something, but that's about it.
frozenwastes wrote: I don't recall Mantic posting component pics of any of the Basilians.
Ah, true, they haven't posted component pics just straightened, completed, and painted shots. But amonst many of the larger companies (GW, Warlord) getting component shots is hit or miss at best. Try figuring out what metal bits exactly come in Warlords hybrid kits for example.
True. The reason I think it's more of an issue with Mantic is that their heavy use of hard vinyl means they have more bending and more of a shiney surface that doesn't photograph well. There's simply more potential for the first pics of their stuff to give a bad first impression.
It's possible that everyone who's had a negative experience of any of the Basilian release because of these pictures is wrong. It's possible that the figures actually are nicer than these pictures are making them look.
I'm not sure Warlord is having a similar issue. People get their stuff, build it and that's that. There's an occasional blog or youtube channel that might post an unboxing, but that's about it. Mantic has created a following of people who want to know what the miniatures *really* look like.
frozenwastes wrote: So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?
I think the knights on foot look alright, but I can't tell in those pictures. And the pictures of the females continue to accentuate their giant pop-eye forearms. Ugh.
Yeah, but at this point I'd say most regular forum-goers have, between PP, reaper, mantic, CMoN andsoforth, heard/read pretty much what the limitations of photographing these models are.
Basically these are there to show the components the models come in and answer a few questions about what will work and what won't.
The look of the model, well, by now the sharpness of Mantics restics is understood widely enough that I didn't think this would matter all *that* much anymore. besides, ever photographed regular 'styrene components that way? doesn't exactly turn out all that great either if your lighting isn't entirely up to snuff (which mine isn't, I'm not digging out all my lamps etc. etc. for a few component count shots...) so I figure most forum users will have seem what user pics tend to do to models.
I can attest to the detail being easily sharp enough to paint pretty much as in the painted pictures shown. Granted, IMO it still isn't helping the sisters all that much but then again I never liked this concept anyway.
Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy. Still, I think in the end I paid like a nickel per model in this KS and have gotten two excellent armies and about 30 awesome games of KoW in, so when all is said and done and even if I trade away my Basileans, man, this KS definitely had the most value for the money than any other I've done.
judgedoug wrote: Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy.
That's precisely how it looks 'in the flesh', yeah. Sisters are a bit of a writeoff; paladins are solid, good even and the MaA don't look anywhere near as bad as those initial pics make them out to be. It's not razorsharp but from what I've seen it's easily good enough to take a solid paintjob without issues, and certainly leagues beyond the goblins. If the DZ plastics are another leap like that (or even just a slight improvement!) they won't attract the least bit of (valid) complaining anymore once people have them in hand.
judgedoug wrote: Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy.
That's precisely how it looks 'in the flesh', yeah. Sisters are a bit of a writeoff; paladins are solid, good even and the MaA don't look anywhere near as bad as those initial pics make them out to be. It's not razorsharp but from what I've seen it's easily good enough to take a solid paintjob without issues, and certainly leagues beyond the goblins. If the DZ plastics are another leap like that (or even just a slight improvement!) they won't attract the least bit of (valid) complaining anymore once people have them in hand.
If Mantic uses another third rate plastic company then they will probably be mediocre. They need to go back to Renedra, to SK Engineering, to Wargames Factory, to whomever AREN'T the goblin and men at arms sprue manufacturers. The problem isn't whether the plastics are "good enough" (I was able to make 200 plastic goblins work for my goblin army, as they're "good enough", but people aren't scrambling to buy them), but whether they're just plain "good". Most people won't buy crap! If Deadzone plastics are "good enough" then people won't have the urge to open their wallets, they'll just say "meh" and move on or watch a game and wish the plastics were good. If the plastics are "good" (or even "great") then people will whip out their dollars and want to buy them, especially at Mantic's very reasonable price points.
Mantic needs to stop accepting "good enough" and go back to the "good"/'great" from their first few years. I think the success of the KoW Kickstarter was too much for them; reports are they overspent anyway (by like 20k or more!)... notice Deadzone's stretch goals were much further apart than Kings of War - I think so they built in extra padding for better sculpts and tools. Perhaps the Kings of War KS they just couldn't afford to do resculpts, retools, etc. There's been rumblings of another KoWKS in a year or so to focus on the Abyssals (Abyssal Dwarves, Twilight Kin, Abyssal/Chaos army) and they better do some hard plastic sprues of "great" quality for those. They'd fly off the shelves.
Another KoWKS for the abyssal side? My wallet just ran away, sobbing in a corner. Why would you cause it pain like that?! It never did anything to you.
I think you misunderstand - the MaA are in a totally different league from the goblins. 'Good enough' is not a phrase I'd ever use for the goblins even though, indeed, they can be made to work well enough. The MaA tooling is pretty solid. Little soft here and there but not extremely.
It's the sculpts you can take issue with (boorish heads, strange arms, mediocre chainmail) but since the renders we've seen for the enforcers are good that's nothing to worry about.
Sharper is always nice but those enforcer renders, tooled at current MaA tooling standards, would be good. Period. Tooling quality would no longer get in the way of final paintjob quality, I'd estimate.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Actually I'm going to take back a bit of what I just said - the MaA have some downsides which weren't obvious to me before I started building them. Generally, I think those will be largely obsured by either the weapons or the quiver for the crossbow bits, but not entirely. Not sure how much the all-plastics will leave these issues (mostly down the sides of the thighs, lack of detail/smudging) visible under the weapons; the crossbowmen however look to work out AOK after putting the quivers on.
...Which is fine for me since I was primarily planning to use them as such but I'm taking back what I said about the quality being close to AOK. there's a few definite issues in tooling which need fixing before doing the DZ plastics.
Curious to see what will happen there.
- Tooling is great. No issues there, other than the number of pieces for some parts, specifically the more dynamically-posed bodies need 2-3 pieces to avoid detail loss in hard plastic.
- Pretty sure the tooling is still done in China, judging by the fact that the sprue comes in the same pre-packaged plastics as the restic parts and goblins.
- Spears are great, shafts aren't too thick.
- Heads *all* have moustaches sculpted on (look very very closely at the detail and you can see where they begin and end). Golem painted them wrong which is why the official pics look terrible.
- Sculpting is mediocre, particularly the cloth which is very poorly done. Leg proportions are the worst, and the arms vary.. some are fine, there's a couple that look weird. Not as bad as the nuns, mind.
- They are 35mm heroic scale miniatures in a truescale 28mm line. Using the stock minis will look almost as bad as using GW elf spearmen in a mantic elf army.
- Swords are 3 times larger than other infantry swords in the KoW mini range (elves, undead), and larger than the 2-handed paladin swords.
- The spears and swords don't fit all that well in the hands.
I'm going to convert mine rather than replacing them with alternate bitz/models. I'll go into more detail about the process later and post some pics, but early results are promising and around 5-10 minutes of conversion work gets you a very nice looking mini.
To summarize the steps I'm taking with them:
- Remove 5mm of height from the middle of the miniature... cut it in half in the middle of the belt then remove more material from the top of the legs (the thighs are out of proportion anyway, so filing them down works really well). Glue back together.
- Clip off the shoulder pads, cut down the top of the mini quite a bit.
- Completely clip off and file down the baggy cloth sticking out on the backs of the minis (it looks like a backpack or something).
- Clip/ file off the helmet rim to reduce the mass of the heads.
- Use the spear heads as swords.. attach them to the sword handle and it works perfectly for proper true-scale swords!
So, in short, my review of the minis would be "terrible if you're looking to buy them to use in a basilean army without conversion work" but "really great if you are willing to spend a little time on them fixing the scale issues".
I would rank the kit as "about as good as the mantic dwarves".. in that you need to put some work into them if you want to get them looking good and fitting in with the other minis in the army.
I need to have a better look at the sisters, but so far I'm liking the cavalry minis a lot more than the infantry.
Paladins, Knights, Angels, Lion rider etc. everything else in the army is top-notch. Panther chariot is surprisingly cool, the chassis has a great design.
I'm happy with everything else from the kickstarter too, with the exception of the trolls. The brocks, elf cav, and fleabags are lovely, they did a great job of the cavalry.
So the minis are out of proportion with the rest of the line, are poorly sculpted, and only fit in if you take 5 - 10 minutes per miniature to make them serviceable.
And you compare them to Mantic's Dwarfs... one of the more derided/polarizing kits to be produced.
scarletsquig wrote: I'm going to convert mine rather than replacing them with alternate bitz/models. I'll go into more detail about the process later and post some pics, but early results are promising and around 5-10 minutes of conversion work gets you a very nice looking mini.
To summarize the steps I'm taking with them:
- Remove 5mm of height from the middle of the miniature... cut it in half in the middle of the belt then remove more material from the top of the legs (the thighs are out of proportion anyway, so filing them down works really well). Glue back together.
- Clip off the shoulder pads, cut down the top of the mini quite a bit.
- Completely clip off and file down the baggy cloth sticking out on the backs of the minis (it looks like a backpack or something).
- Clip/ file off the helmet rim to reduce the mass of the heads.
- Use the spear heads as swords.. attach them to the sword handle and it works perfectly for proper true-scale swords!
So, in short, my review of the minis would be "terrible if you're looking to buy them to use in a basilean army without conversion work" but "really great if you are willing to spend a little time on them fixing the scale issues".
So compared to the Perry miniatures, you're paying 40% more for the privilege of spending two to four hours per regiment on tedious repair work?
First off: No SS, the tooling is not entirely up to spec. It's certainly serviceable but it can stand improving a bit.
OTOH: I'd love them to be at the level of perry minis but TBH, it's a different kettle entirely. Those perry minis have a substantially different look and for a fantasy army, I at least prefer the *concept* of the MaA vastly. the execution let's them down a bit but still, I'd take the MaA.
The perrys are better for historical purposes than the MaA are for fantasy, but the MaA still beat the perry stuff at fantasy use IMO.
Will say I'm not a fan of any of the sisters, though. Didn't like the concept all that much and with the problems in execution (arms, mostly) I really don't think I'll even bother with them in any way.
@Alex: Basically, yes, although 20% more is more accurate (40x perry mercs = £20, 40x Mantic M@A = £25).
The advantage is getting a more fantasy-styled miniature rather than a historical human, if that's important to you (it is to me, anyway).
If not, perry mercenaries kit is the better option to have minis that are in scale with the paladins and the rest of the Basilean line. It comes with pikes, crossbows and swords etc. so the equipment options are covered too. Maybe wait for the foot knights kit if you want something more armored and aren't in any hurry.
Naturally, having paid for vast quantities of the things in advance factors into my decision to stick with them and kitbash rather buying something else. It's a real stretch to find serious reasons to recommend them... wanting them to use in a GW army could be another reason since they will scale great with GW models. Border princes army, dogs of war or whatever would be a perfect fit.
@Bolog: Agree on room for improvement, but the sculpts are so bad in this case, it makes it tougher to judge the tooling (which is at least, way better than the goblins)... stuff like the horrible detail loss on the sides of the more dynamic bodies is a sculpting error moreso than a tooling one, a professional 3d designer is able to sculpt with undercut limitations in mind, GW produce some pretty amazing stuff in hard plastic precisely because they handle this sculptor/tooling interaction well. Undercuts could ruin the Deadzone sculpts if there aren't enough separate components on the sprue to eliminate them, or they weren't kept in mind during sculpting.
I don't know if I got different sprues than you guys did or what, but my MAA sprues are awful. They are easily the worst miniatures in my pile of plastic, and I have box after box of the old Wargames Factory Numidians, Germans, Zulus, etc. The plastic reminded me a lot of the old MB Battlemasters box, but with inferior tooling.
I guess it is hard to tell whether it is a tooling problem or a sculpting problem with them, many of the "and faaaaaaaade to mush" parts are likely just bad posing decisions, but I guess I just hope that some of the lack of detail is tooling fails.
The arms are awful. They are all of different sizes, have awful detail, and are universally too long. I guess the MAA and sisters are cut from the same stock or something. I glued some old GW militia crossbow arms and spare Perry heads on some of mine, and the arms and heads look great! It mostly made me sad that this is what Mantic is willing to sell these days compared to their old dwarf, skeleton, ghoul, zombie, and skeleton sprues.
Why would Mantic even sell something like the MAA? I would like to point out that both Wargames Factory/Dreamforge (their new stuff is great) and Kingdom Death and Wyrd get their tooling done in China, and somehow they manage to come up with beautiful high impact polystyrene miniatures. For that matter, I understand that Renedra has some long backlog (why they haven't expanded already is beyond my comprehension), but it isn't like they knew they would need these last month, and surely even if they doubled their one time costs to use Renedra it would pay off in the long run to have a product that is worth money? I honestly wouldn't pay even 10 cents a piece for more of the MAA...well maybe 10 cents a piece for the spears or swords if I ever need more...which is unlikely.
Ugh, it just makes me sad to see. Well, I am off to try to scrounge up some Mantic Dwarves for a crazy conversion idea...but I sure won't be buying anything sight unseen from Mantic again. If I had pledged for Dreadball I would be seriously sad right now.
Hearing these horror stories about the men at arms sprue is giving me a real bad feeling about the deadzone plastics. I originally bought some of the goblin plastics which have remained on the sprues do to their shodyness. I was willing to risk the plastics for dz because im sure id heard somewhere that they knew what had gone wrong and had travelled to china to sort out the problem.
I really hope that my fears are unfounded but have Mantic said anything to address these concerns over the sprue's quality?
Oh man - I got home from work with a big ole box waiting for me.
It's funny - even though I know I'll be selling almost all of it now (since the Basileans area flop for me). It still feels like Christmas anticipating opening it.
Azazelx wrote: Anyone want to trade some Perry Mercenaries for my Mantic MAA plastics?
I have a bunch of historical minis I'd love to trade for more MaA, but no Perry Mercenaries. I do have a sprue or two of WotR I would be willing to send to you for an equivalent number of Mantic minis, but the shipping would probably be more expensive than a new box of minis for both of us.
-------------------
Anyway, now for my review of the box...so far.
Bullets!
-The ogre hero looks pretty good.
-The troll looks worse in real life than online. Much, much worse. Mold lines and poor casting on the face make it look like a child's first attempt at clay. The bird's eye viewing angle makes their legs look like chicken drumsticks.
-Elf palace guard looks amazing. I will definitely buy a box of them.
-The mummy's sword is comically short and "girthy". Reminds me of an unrelated video I saw on the internet...
-Brock rider has some great parts. I think it will look good assembled. I'll probably buy more of them.
-The Gargoyles look pretty good, but I suspect they will look even better if I just leave out the bodies and glue their heads directly to the Lovecraftian wings-and-tail monsters.
Thoughts on the Basileans:
-The nuns are extremely tiny. WGF amazon arms might be too large for them, but if not, then they are saved.
-The Paladin Humans look very nice, but tiny. I think their heads are smaller than Perry minis' heads.
-The Angels look fantastic. They might be the best models in the bunch. Their heads are the same size as the MaA heads, but larger than any other human's head. Still, they are too small for the body. Perhaps the artist was inspired by very tall basketball players, but in miniature form the effect is not "he looks tall" but rather, the angel looks like a pinhead.
-The Men at Arms sprue...Oh boy, the Men at Arms...
First of all, the tooling of the legs, chainmail and faces remind me of WGF's "melty" Romans. The knees on two of the bodies (A1 and A4) look like the old Warzone plastics, where the manufacturers just decided to forget the idea of even pretending to care about undercuts--the top half of the armored pads just T-1000 into the boots and possibly turn the leg into some kind of stabbing weapon. It wouldn't have been so bad if they just made both legs that way, but no, there's a perfectly good left knee staring you in the face and daring you to say something. Also, A1's right shin bones must be 30% longer than his left shin bones. In fact, all the models' shoulders line up in height due to the fact that the bodies with bent knees have noticeably longer legs. Salvador Dali must have inspired Mantic with his painting, "Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament Knights Kneeling Wait Crap Wait Crap Crap Forget It".
I don't think Scarlet is correct about the mustaches. A3 doesn't appear to have one, but I do believe he is impersonating Don Corleone. A1 has more of a "soul 'stache" under his lip. Fortunately, I think GW heads will work in a pinch. (I haven't checked yet.) A1, A3 and especially A4 would also work if you painted them silver or black or something, because they work as some kind of mask.
The arms are both terrible and fairly easy to fix. The proportions are all over the place, but the large elbow pad will make it fairly easy to clip off small slices of the upper arms fairly easily. A1 may defy rescuing. Once again, GW's generous abundance of spares will save the day, I suspect. I really, really wish Mantic had thrown in a spare head and a couple of spare arms per sprue. The lego hands look worse than I thought they would. It looks like someone sculpted the fingers in clay anticipating a metal model, because they are thick and doughy. The shield arms are mostly mercifully hidden behind their shields... mostly.
The spears and swords are fantastic. 10 out of 10. ( I don't want to be too shameful in my negativity.)
The size is my favorite part. These are some big, 80's action movie motortruckers.
All in all, I'm fairly happy with my MaA for the price I paid and for what I plan to do with them using my extensive bit box. I would not recommend them to anyone who takes things like quality and detail seriously.
I came to do a quick review of my box too - but Bob here beat me to it - so I'll just add some stray thoughts.
- One of my metal heroes was broken - thanks whoever threw them all in one bag! Sorting what went with what was a pain too.
- I'm pretty pleased with the orc chariot/goblin mincer - I didn't know these shared the same base - but they're pretty nice.
- I like the trolls less (for the reasons Bob has mentioned) than I thought I would based on the internet pics. However I like the Werewolves and Abyssal golems more. All are tinier than I was expecting too. Werewolves will be swimming on 40mm bases.
- I had some stray Ogre parts and extra bases in my boxes.
- Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.
- Angel heroes look awesome, glad I don't have to put them together.
- Wasn't expecting the KS exclusive undead minis (BSB & dog handler) to be restic.
- Ogres turned out the best overall IMO.
- Took me like 2.5 hours to sort through it all! Intimidating!
- Pretty much all of my order is "for sale" if anyone is interested feel free to PM to negotiate. Lotta Basilieans + most of the misc.
Of 264 minis - I'm keeping ~8. The chariot/Mincer - 6 of the trolls. (down from 9 - though I'm debating selling all of the trolls). *sigh*
Schmapdi wrote: - Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.
The dogs go with the male and female Basilean wizards (standing up for the female, other one for the male IIRC). I too am confused about the antlers though, they look like the belong to the Green Lady who wasn't part of the deal, though the illustration of the male Basilean wizard does have fairly prominent antlers on his chest - I haven't rechecked the model since I spotted that though.
Stray ogre should be because you had mispacked Ogre Shooters in your 2nd shipment I think.
Schmapdi wrote: - Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.
The dogs go with the male and female elf mages (standing up for the female, other one for the male IIRC). I too am confused about the antlers though, they look like the belong to the Green Lady who wasn't part of the deal, though the illustration of the male elf mage does have fairly prominent antlers on his chest - I haven't rechecked the model since I spotted that though.
Stray ogre should be because you had mispacked Ogre Shooters in your 2nd shipment I think.
Hmm - the human mage does have 2 little holes on his chest. I can't imagine they'd put antlers there - but strangers things have happened I suppose. Like me getting the stray Ogre body despite only getting one shipment, and not ordering any ogre shooters!
the human mage is where the antlers are supposed to go. It actually looks AOK once you've glued them on - makes him a bit more naturey, I suppose.
Wouldn't have missed them for a second though
As for the extra ogre body, well you've certainly got more than the requisite number of weapons to build three ogres in your free set (they come with enough arms to build 6-7 ogres) and two extra heads so that's a free extra ogre for you.
Don't really see the problem.
Really, given the costs of plastic casting it was probably cheaper just to drop one in each and every box they sent out rather than actually check where they had to put one and where not to (and risk extra shipping costs and man-hours to fix mistakes).
between my reshipped (first got lost to the mail-gods) second shipment and my third shipment I have eight extra bodies. No complaints from me though - extra bases are easy to come by.
Wow, seeing the reports of how folks packages are coming is pretty eye opening.
Before the Baselian pics started arriving I was briefly disappointed that I missed the KoW kickstarter. Now I'm really glad I bought a batch of metal historical humans instead. Even the worst of my historicals (Old Glory Halberdiers) are more consistent and better looking than the Men at Arms!
Also makes me quite glad that Mantic allows non-mantic figures in their tournaments. I hope to play my human army in a KoW tournament someday, but not if it means buying miniatures from a line as uneven -and sometimes shoddy- as the Baesilians.
Absolutely nothing about the MaA suggests that they are ready for primetime, especially when you figure that they are coming from a company with as much experience as Mantic.
generally speaking your historical humans would most likely proxy for a kingdoms of men list (featured in the main book) rather than basileans. Just sayin'
when I think about it, my initial pledges netted me _hundreds_ of pre-existing Kings of War models. our initial pledges and models were already a substantial savings over retail prices. it started my Orc army and my Goblin army. since then Kings of War has become my favorite ruleset, with dozens and dozens of games played.
and now with all these free models arriving, it's like super mega Christmas. i feel that i've already gotten tons of value from my pledge (this and Mierce are the best KSers i've backed, out of the 26 i've backed). even though I could care less about half of the free stretch goal models I got... the rest are great and are going into and expanding the armies I've been playing with since the first KS shipment, or, in the case of the Dark Knights, starting new ones for me.
^ I've been pretty happy with it too, I should also mention that the basilean legacy book is really awesome for the £10 price tag on it.. worth buying just to read the extensive background and get the new magic items and magic rules, even if you're not interested in the three army lists.
I was reading through it last night and was impressed, a much, much better book than kings and legends which isn't all that great (supplement dedicated to special characters, basically).
I snapped some pics of my first attempt at a men-at-arms conversion... it's not perfect and I'll take a little more material off the lower chest next time (and carve out the undercut between the right shoulder and the shield), but I'm happy with the end result, it's a good model that I'm happy to use as part of my basilean army.
Shown with a sister legs/torso (which is really tall itself) to show off exactly why using the stock minis is not an option if you bought the models to use with a basilean army, they're like 7-foot giants when compared with the restic minis in the line.
And the sword is as tall as a regular mantic mini on its own... GW scaling at play.
And from the side, to better show off the height difference and some of the carving-off I did at the back:
A major issue with the kit is the posing on the arms.. most of them are sticking out at crazy right angles to the body (as you can see in the stock build.. that wasn't me posing them that way to be obtuse, the join is flat and that's the only way you can glue them on).
So, you pretty much have to angle off the upper arms just to make them so they're not flailing around everywhere in ridiculous poses.
In fact, I probably need to cut the arms down a little too, but this is trickier since the left arm is moulded on to the shield. I probably won't bother.
In all fairness Squig thats actually a pretty decent conversion, its especially noticeable from the side, your conversion a least sorts out the curve on the guys back, the original looks like he's trying to do a "booty pop". The
height is also a great improvement (seriously why are they so tall?), the only other thing that still needs improvement is those arms, both the positioning and the scaling. Out of question how long are these conversions
taking per model and whats your overall opinion on the details of these miniatures?, they look a little doughy to me, the sister looks pretty crisp at least.
So, the biggest fix is cutting part of the torso out, SS? Easy enough, though a bit time consuming. Mine still hasn't come in, despite having a ton of Basilean stuff. Is the Basilean legacy going to hit DL options? Or hard copy only?
I would say that is a pretty good fix you have done there Scarlet. I still think that I will use some Empire heads I have lying around (from the greatswords and pistoliers probably) and possibly weapons too, those swords are just too big. I cannot believe the curve of the back on the standard figure without your conversion, it just looks weird and was an angle/issue we have not previously seen. This kit could have been so much more, bit of a shame really.
@Rolt: The details are fine, don't forget those pics are about twice the size of the minis IRL.
The shinier and darker plastic doesn't photograph as well as the light grey restic does either,so the pics earlier in this thread with the ink wash are a better guide to what the details are like.
On the whole it's good, stuff like the raised detail on the spear shafts must be around a third of a mm deep, extremely fine detailing there.
I really think that the mushy parts like the cloth are down to to the 3d "poke it around in zbrush until it looks passable" sculpting more than anything else.
Chainmail isn't as bad as I thought it would be either.
Of course, there's detail loss on the sides and horrible undercuts, which is something mantic could have easily avoided by making the legs 2-part and the shield separate from the left arm.
Even that doesn't necessarily mean bad tooling... mantic could have said "how about we do seperate legs, torso and shield" and the toolmaker could have come back and said "yes, but that'll be an extra £10k", which would have stretched their budget too far.
Bean-counting is the eternal flaw with Mantic, which has led them to making mistakes with their hard plastics even when they were using Renedra.
With Kickstarter being a potentially infinite source of seed capital, there's no need to keep cutting corners. Just straight up say:
1. "This is our new kickstarter for X army. It's going to be 100% hard plastic, and super-affordable, and all of the sculpts will be gorgeous".
2. "Here are massively hi-res, multiple angle pics of all the 3-up sculpts/ 3d component renders for the first three units in advance so you can see they're not crap, or tell us to fix them if they are".
3. "For every $100k of funding, we'll make a new hard plastic kit with all the bells and whistles".
4. "Our shipping estimate is an estimate, if it takes longer it is because we need more time to ensure that the product is high quality".
5. "Have at it, backers!"
They'd knock kickstarter flat if they only took that approach instead of their current "rush as much stuff on to the market as quickly as possible and see what sticks" approach.
I think out of all the wargaming companies, Mantic is most likely to replicate the same success that Reaper Bones had, if it can start taking quality control, and scale/style consistency seriously.
I'm looking forward to the rumoured next Kickstarter for KoW, which is supposed to be "Nature and Abyssal armies" + "large monsters" from what Ronnie has been saying. It sounds like it might arrive early on next year, before warpath or anything else.
@Thraxas: Yeah, the "leaning backwards" thing is odd, so I clipped/filed down the cloth on the back and glued the head on further forward to fix that.
I kept picturing the stock mini as doing this (fruity obnoxious meme warning ):
Spoiler:
So, the biggest fix is cutting part of the torso out, SS?
Yep, remove 5mm of material straight from the middle, obliterate most of the belt and a good chunk of the top of the legs, then glue together.
In addition, I clipped down the back, cut off the shoulder pads at the top (which get in the way of posing the arms properly anyway), filedall of that down, glued the head in a lower, further forward position and trimmed off the helmet rim.
Took about 10 minutes with good tools (saw, clippers, file), I can probably get that down to 5 minutes with an assembly line process and a dremel would speed things up even more.
I won't be using any of the swords, will be cutting the spear heads off, gluing them to the sword handles to use as swords.
I plan on being quite conservative with my posing on the spears (I loved the 4th edition empire monopose plastics, a unit of 50 looked awesome) and using the more dynamic bodies for the swordsmen.
I think that is the approach to take with the next Kickstarter. The original 10 man Skeleton sprue, and even the 10 man Revenant sprue with its duplicate parts are great for me. Easy to assemble, with a good variety of options, the MAA are so far away from that. If they could do core troops funded at 100k per stretch (maybe 75k?) for the main fantasy archetypes then the money would roll in. The issue is they have plenty of the options covered already, just not at the quality that most people want.
^ Yeah, that would be great, although I think they're on to the right idea with one KS per army.. simply because it will add value for backers.. 100% of their freebies will be stuff that they want, as opposed to a scattered selection from various different armies.
On a tangent, the Nature army list is really cool. There are unicorns.
And from the side, to better show off the height difference and some of the carving-off I did at the back:
Wow, you did an amazing salvage job. That simple conversion turned a trainwreck into exactly what people want... a simple, good looking rank and file.
I honestly don't understand how you were supposed to rank those dudes up with the silly chicken wing arm pose from the stock model. Will people cut the torso out of 40 men? maybe... At least it is an option besides the trash can.
If they would have 'repaired' the model pre-casting, they would have had a better model, happier customers, and used less material for cheaper models. Such a simple fix too.
With Kickstarter being a potentially infinite source of seed capital, there's no need to keep cutting corners. Just straight up say:
1. "This is our new kickstarter for X army. It's going to be 100% hard plastic, and super-affordable, and all of the sculpts will be gorgeous".
2. "Here are massively hi-res, multiple angle pics of all the 3-up sculpts/ 3d component renders for the first three units in advance so you can see they're not crap, or tell us to fix them if they are".
3. "For every $100k of funding, we'll make a new hard plastic kit with all the bells and whistles".
4. "Our shipping estimate is an estimate, if it takes longer it is because we need more time to ensure that the product is high quality".
5. "Have at it, backers!"
Yep, agree with this hole-healthfully not just for Kings of War related stuff but the upcoming Warpath KS, seriously I think just about anybody here would rather wait a bit longer to get truly beautiful models for their army of
choice rather than the "they're okay I guess" models Mantic seem to be pumping out via the kickstaters (not that some haven't been nice), plus it would allow Mantic to truly fill-out every army one at a time with all the good
stuff, tanks, monsters, fantasy beasties and all manner of bits and bobs. I guess the only downsides to this idea is that certain armies could wait a long time to get their KS (so no plastic veer-myn for me any time soon )
and the KS spam this forum's gonna get.
Yeah someone needs to suggest this to Mantic on the forums, personal email etc, you never know they might take it on board.
Incidentally on a slightly different note, does anyone know if Mantic accept open submissions for sculptors? Just asking out of random curiosity.
Bolognesus wrote: generally speaking your historical humans would most likely proxy for a kingdoms of men list (featured in the main book) rather than basileans. Just sayin'
That's a good point. I was looking at mixing the two, but at this point I'm not married to one or the other. I'll probably be most or all KoM though just based on the makeup of the miniatures.
This will better illustrate why I am so down on the Mantic Men at Arms. Here's a selection of historical figures:
These are a variety of companies, and all of the sculpts are at least 6 years old or older. The figures on the far left are Old Glory. They are probably the oldest sculpts (well oer 10 years) and are considered by many to be on the lower end of average (or worse) in terms of quality and sculpt. Even they are better detailed, proportioned and posed than the Mantic MaA, and for those with an Old Glory Army membership, they're almost as cheap.
What possible excuse can there be for making new plastic figures that aren't even as good as average sculpts from a decade ago?
The scale thing is a bit weird. They seem perfectly in scale with Mantic Mummies and Dwarfs (and thus Abyssal Dwarfs) but tower over the other Basileans and Elves, and a bit taller than the Orcs. This picture shows how well they scale with gw plastics though, so if you have a big bits box I think you can get some decent troops out of them.
(Apologies if this is not quite news/or rumours but it seems to fit best here).
The more of the models that have come from their kickstarter I see the happier I am I resisted. Have to be honest in that I also held out on models for the Deadzone kickstarter in the first wave so I can wait and see what most look like before putting down cash.
@scarlet squig.
Mantic could do far worse than hire you as their advisor, you' ve actually made those troops look reasonable
Why somebody in their offices couldnt have just said 'erm guys these figures look a bit sh*t' before releasing them unto the world.
Im a big fan of the mantic undead and orcs but they seem to be heading backwards in terms of quality recently. Hopefully dz will be an exception.
It's not a horrible argument (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of cashon mantic stuff). However, I do believe it's suggesting significantly more... malice (for want of a better term), than mantic is due.
Combining 10's of 1000's of pounds of loss that the KoW kickstarter made, with a tight deadline and ultimately serviceable sculpts (though, I'll admit, rather crap), could very well have simply resulted in some meetings where, conscious of the loss, Mantic decided not to throw good money after bad, do what they can under budget, and (yes, wishlisting), learn their lessons for their next big plastic release...
I imagine the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Has Mantic ever explained how and why they have released so many obviously terrible models?
i'm assuming its all part of some extreme drinking game
to stay on topic, my box arrived today, gonna crack it open later tonight....hopefully nothing was smashed when the postman strongarmed it into the box and half flattened it
People keep talking about how Mantic "lost" money on the Kickstarter. Well.. I guess it depends on how you look at it.
Even if they put in $20k of their own money, They still did get $320k (I subtracted 10% for KS/Amazon fees) from the campaign, so another way to look at it is that they got $340k worth of production for only $20k. - And barely any of that new product has been released yet, so it's not really "lost money". It just means they had to invest their own money in their own product development as well, rather than it being 100% subsidised by crowdfunding.
I mean, in the "olden days" companies had to raise their own money, or how bigger companies still produce their own companies without Kickstarter. We don't hear about how Games Workshop has "lost" money on their Centurian sprues or how FFG is currently in the red on their Blockade Runner for X-Wing...
Compel wrote: It's not a horrible argument (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of cashon mantic stuff). However, I do believe it's suggesting significantly more... malice (for want of a better term), than mantic is due.
Combining 10's of 1000's of pounds of loss that the KoW kickstarter made, with a tight deadline and ultimately serviceable sculpts (though, I'll admit, rather crap), could very well have simply resulted in some meetings where, conscious of the loss, Mantic decided not to throw good money after bad, do what they can under budget, and (yes, wishlisting), learn their lessons for their next big plastic release...
I imagine the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle.
It's pretty much this.
The budgets that Mantic did on the fly during the KoW Kickstarter were wrong. They didn't take a lot of things into account, such as multiple shipments, that really ate into the funds quickly. Ronnie's stated publicly that multiple deliveries in particular was a huge, huge chunk that they didn't account for, thinking that it would just be one.
The KoW Kickstarter ended up costing a lot more than they received and Mantic are a small company with small pockets. They don't have a huge amount of capital to use, hence the reliance on Kickstarters to fund new lines. My understanding is that they did top up the KS amount quite significantly but it was still not enough to deliver all the models in the best quality on time. They had a choice of Meet Schedule, Quality Models, All The Models - pick two. And missing the schedule probably wouldn't have been a month or two, maybe 6-12 months.
I'm sure you've noticed that Mantics other kickstarters have been far less generous in their stretch goals and timelines since Mantic did learn from their mistakes. They've also hired a dedicated artist and sculptor which should go a long way to making sure that future sculpts are up to par. The Dreadball minis have generally been solid (casting issues not withstanding), and the Deadzone minis are looking excellent.
The issues with the Men At Arms plastics seem to be problems with the sculpting rather than the tooling. The difference between the weapons (presumably made using CAD) are light years ahead of the bodies which were traditionally sculpted and scanned in. General theories are that the 3D scanning equipment wasn't up to the task, and a relatively inexperienced 3D sculptor attempted to correct things such as chainmail without success. From what we've seen of the Deadzone plastic terrain so far, it looks like the tooling is absolutely top notch.
The issues with the Men At Arms plastics seem to be problems with the sculpting rather than the tooling. The difference between the weapons (presumably made using CAD) are light years ahead of the bodies which were traditionally sculpted and scanned in. General theories are that the 3D scanning equipment wasn't up to the task, and a relatively inexperienced 3D sculptor attempted to correct things such as chainmail without success. From what we've seen of the Deadzone plastic terrain so far, it looks like the tooling is absolutely top notch.
This was brought up quite a while back (in this thread maybe? when there were WIP shots of the men at arms). Remy sculpted the Men At Arms at 1-up and not 3-up. These were scanned in and hand-corrected, but obviously not enough to save them (only enough to make them slightly better than the goblins). If Mantic is going to pantagraph models for plastics, they need to do the traditional 3-up method and skip this 1-up scanning. Thankfully the Deadzone stuff is all 100% CAD so there's no bad 1-up pantagraphing.
I did think of a use for my craptastic men at arms, though. Since the Basilean list has a bolt thrower, and the plastic Confrontation Lion don't have one, I can get a cheap bolt thrower or two from somewhere and use my men at arms as lowly crewmen!
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Has Mantic ever explained how and why they have released so many obviously terrible models?
I like the rules for the game, the models are what keeps me from getting deeper into the game.
Use other models My Orc army is mostly Mantic (with Mierce trolls and Wyvern), my Goblin army is mostly Mantic (with RBG characters and Mierce giant), but my Basilean army is plastic Confrontation Lion, my Twilight Kin army is Gamezone and Mierce Khthones, and my special Helsvakt Horde (orc/human combo list) is RBG Helsvakt and Mierce Fomoraic Tarvax, Sronax, and other big beasties.
One of my favorite aspects of KoW - other than the sweet rules - is the ability to go far more buckwild with units and infantry than I ever could with Warhammer due to the unit/element basing.
They were finished off and posed as digital sculpts (the posing is terrible).
The tooling or to be more specific the division of the components is to blame for a lot of issues with them, though... the left arm pretty much melts into the shield in a giant blob, something which easily could have been avoided using seperate shields. Same goes for the dynamic torsos, separate legs would have allowed the side detail to be retained. Amateur mistakes, really. Seperate shoulder pads would actually be a good idea on the deadzone enforcers... not just for the 40k crowd, but to get some good detail on the sides.
Slide-core tooling could also have been utilised to fix the problem (it is actually used on the men-at-arms too... the base disks are hollow for some unknown reason).
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judgedoug wrote: I can get a cheap bolt thrower or two from somewhere
Compel wrote: It's not a horrible argument (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of cashon mantic stuff). However, I do believe it's suggesting significantly more... malice (for want of a better term), than mantic is due.
Combining 10's of 1000's of pounds of loss that the KoW kickstarter made, with a tight deadline and ultimately serviceable sculpts (though, I'll admit, rather crap), could very well have simply resulted in some meetings where, conscious of the loss, Mantic decided not to throw good money after bad, do what they can under budget, and (yes, wishlisting), learn their lessons for their next big plastic release...
I imagine the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle.
It's pretty much this.
The budgets that Mantic did on the fly during the KoW Kickstarter were wrong. They didn't take a lot of things into account, such as multiple shipments, that really ate into the funds quickly. Ronnie's stated publicly that multiple deliveries in particular was a huge, huge chunk that they didn't account for, thinking that it would just be one.
The KoW Kickstarter ended up costing a lot more than they received and Mantic are a small company with small pockets. They don't have a huge amount of capital to use, hence the reliance on Kickstarters to fund new lines. My understanding is that they did top up the KS amount quite significantly but it was still not enough to deliver all the models in the best quality on time. They had a choice of Meet Schedule, Quality Models, All The Models - pick two. And missing the schedule probably wouldn't have been a month or two, maybe 6-12 months.
I'm sure you've noticed that Mantics other kickstarters have been far less generous in their stretch goals and timelines since Mantic did learn from their mistakes. They've also hired a dedicated artist and sculptor which should go a long way to making sure that future sculpts are up to par. The Dreadball minis have generally been solid (casting issues not withstanding), and the Deadzone minis are looking excellent.
The issues with the Men At Arms plastics seem to be problems with the sculpting rather than the tooling. The difference between the weapons (presumably made using CAD) are light years ahead of the bodies which were traditionally sculpted and scanned in. General theories are that the 3D scanning equipment wasn't up to the task, and a relatively inexperienced 3D sculptor attempted to correct things such as chainmail without success. From what we've seen of the Deadzone plastic terrain so far, it looks like the tooling is absolutely top notch.
This still makes no sense to me. Surely the biggest cost is making masters, tooling and casting? How much could they possibly have saved by send turds to be processed than solid sculpts? Especially when you consider that this wasn't a one time order fulfillment, it was establishing at least one core kit in their fantasy line.
Welp, my wife's stuff is here. Mine is still in transit.
Just starting to do an inventory, and I see that the figures are still being torn off the sprues rather than clipped, so damaged parts are still a go!
Going by the packing slip, it looks like they forgot a shirtload of stuff. I guess I'll be emailing Stewart later tonight, then...
It also looks like the "shiny & signed" thing given to backers who said it was ok for them to hold the previous delivery for 2 months or whatever it was so they could save a pile on postage turned out to be a postcard signed by Ronnie. Wow.
I've gotten a bunch of replacements for the gargoyles in my second shipment - one in three to one in two (depending on how forgiving you are) were damaged. replacements weren't much better (but of course now I have the promised number of 'undamaged' gargoyles anyway).
I complained to let them know I think it's just stupid how they handle 'at-risk' injection points like that, but now I've looked at them again I'll probably be taking a bit of greenstuff to that offending area on the 'damaged' models - it's not at all hard to fix (actually it's trivial: insert blob of greenstuff, smooth over, ???, profit!) so the issue isn't half as bad as on some of the earlier mantic restics (and for that matter, privateer plastics) I've gotten - the DB season one stuff risked losing detail here and there where injection points were torn off. Not so much the case here; this is just a minor annoyance.
Still, if you have damaged gargoyles (and even out of five I'm reasonably certain you will) just let them know. Really, I like mantic a bunch but this one should just be a bit of a lesson to them.
It's been adressed on nigh-on every miniature I have seen (and I have *everything* from this KS, and most of it quite a few times too!) except the gargoyles.
In their defence there isn't really a better place to put the vents but yes, a few snips wouldn't go amiss. OTOH, they're the *one* exception I've really seen in this KS.
So no. Major, major advances have been made since season one of DB (which in itself was quite doable as well IMO, though far from perfect) with one single exception.
And in their defence, fixing the damage here is, while not entirely trivial, certainly quite doable without significant sculpting skills.
Azazelx wrote: Welp, my wife's stuff is here. Mine is still in transit.
Just starting to do an inventory, and I see that the figures are still being torn off the sprues rather than clipped, so damaged parts are still a go!
Going by the packing slip, it looks like they forgot a shirtload of stuff. I guess I'll be emailing Stewart later tonight, then...
It also looks like the "shiny & signed" thing given to backers who said it was ok for them to hold the previous delivery for 2 months or whatever it was so they could save a pile on postage turned out to be a postcard signed by Ronnie. Wow.
Update later.
Almost mid-inventory update.
There's a fair few extra models in the box. So far 5 Brock riders, 5 mummies. I'm hoping the correct number of ogres are in here for the army & extras, and the other models aren't a mistake of some kind...
You're supposed to get 10 instead of 5 brocks to make up for the late shipping of gargoyles and immortal guard etc.
extra mummies is peculiar. One baggie of ten or two of five?
Still going through it all. Actually, I paused the KoW stuff to go through a Forge World order that arrived as well. Also, to eat dinner, etc.
The Mummies were all in one bag. 10 of them, with the large heads, large sword arms and shields inside, and another sealed baggie inside that bag with the smaller heads, axes, shortswords and non-shield arms inside.
Haven't opened the thing that looks like a book yet. Going to sleep in a few..
Thanks dude! Forgot about 'em. Now my men at arms have something to do while the Rackham plastics get to fight.
Good ol' Eccentric! Them and Proxie minis are becoming my favorite companies.
Azazelx wrote: Still going through it all. Actually, I paused the KoW stuff to go through a Forge World order that arrived as well. Also, to eat dinner, etc.
The Mummies were all in one bag. 10 of them, with the large heads, large sword arms and shields inside, and another sealed baggie inside that bag with the smaller heads, axes, shortswords and non-shield arms inside.
Haven't opened the thing that looks like a book yet. Going to sleep in a few..
They were probably out of 5man baggies or something like that. Just a mispick, free minis
You do get some weird mis-packs on this kickstarter 3rd shipment. 6 Twilight Kin/Elven Knights/Paladins and Paladin knights for me, sadly for the mounted units I only have horses for 5 each, that said free minis. On the other hand my Immortal Guard are a figure short, 4 rather than 5. The mould lines on some of the pieces are a major pain, as others have noted on this material, but they do seem a fair bit worse than what I got in my 2nd shipment. I have no idea how I am going to clean the gargoyles heads to make them useable, as most lines are dead centre over the models face. I think the monster sized models come out of the resin plastic process a lot better than rank and file.
Then you come to the metal characters which are very well cast, the only issue I foresee is some breakages on parts such as the Twilight Kin foot characters spear and the elf mages staff due to the "softness" of the metal.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Has Mantic ever explained how and why they have released so many obviously terrible models?
I like the rules for the game, the models are what keeps me from getting deeper into the game.
As Doug said, use other models. I'm about to start work on a Twilight Kin army using Citadel and Raging Heroes miniatures. The only Mantic figures so far will be 4 Harpies.
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Thraxas Of Turai wrote: You do get some weird mis-packs on this kickstarter 3rd shipment. 6 Twilight Kin/Elven Knights/Paladins and Paladin knights for me, sadly for the mounted units I only have horses for 5 each, that said free minis. On the other hand my Immortal Guard are a figure short, 4 rather than 5. The mould lines on some of the pieces are a major pain, as others have noted on this material, but they do seem a fair bit worse than what I got in my 2nd shipment. I have no idea how I am going to clean the gargoyles heads to make them useable, as most lines are dead centre over the models face. I think the monster sized models come out of the resin plastic process a lot better than rank and file.
Then you come to the metal characters which are very well cast, the only issue I foresee is some breakages on parts such as the Twilight Kin foot characters spear and the elf mages staff due to the "softness" of the metal.
Female Basilean Angels sculpt has a lot of issues. From my notes:
Samacris (Female Basilean Angel)
Mostly a nice model, sculpt-wise
left hand is atrophied to nothing (part of the sculpt, not a miscast - I think)
those wings (each weighs more than the torso) will never go on and stay on. DERP.
no integral base - so no strength to hold it onto a glued on base, particularly with the weight of those wings.
Wings will need to be entirely replaced, which means the "flaming" wings will not see use. Model will have to be pinned with difficulty to a resin base to keep it upright.
Nice design. Absolutely awful execution, especially for a "gaming" model. Should have been produced in restic or resin.
Having just assembled a few of the Men at Arms out of the box, I found that none of the attachment points seemed to fit well. It seems like no one at Mantic (or anywhere else) printed out any prototypes to make sure all the pieces would fit.
The arm "sockets" are not really flat, and the shoulder straps force one to glue the arms too low onto the torso. The neck socket also doesn't fit the head's stump. The results look something like the old WGF "ball-neck" models, but without the ball...
I'm just continually surprised every time I discover another failure of Mantic to check the quality of their product before sending it off for mass production.
One last thing: How much did it cost Mantic to tool the completely unnecessary sliding core hollows under the MaA's integral bases? Could they have tooled another head or arm option onto the sprue for that amount of money?
Were they going to double the freebie Men at Arms to 10 from the original 5 when they decided to go with proper plastic? Or was the doubling just for BOGOFs?
Ah ok. I thought they were doing it on all of them. No great loss, I guess, as they're just destined for the bits box since they're not exactly useful trade fodder.
OK, I've been a bit negative in this thread recently. But I'm not entirely a bad guy weaned on twitter and bile, so let me share some of the positives about the MaA.
Most importantly, Mantic did something very right with them: they successfully based the MaA look entirely off of the design sketches. I know this is a bit like praising Little Timmy for not biting strangers on the face, but in the current Mantic context I feel it is necessary to provide positive reinforcement for good behavior. The torsos and arms are dressed exactly like the sketch, which means they look fantastic as fantasy soldiers. The heads (well, helmets and facial hair) grab hold of the Mantic aesthetic and own it like a sweaty-toothed madman. The weapons and shields look exactly like the art. If the proportions and sculpting/scanning/whatever had been executed well, this kit would be dynamite.
The poses are a lot of fun. These aren't boring old Perry miniatures. With some work, these will make some very dynamic models.
Mine arrived yesterday, having had a good look and being up at stupid o'clock with nothing much to do here are a few thoughts, I'll go from bad to good as I want end on some positivity
Men At Arms (BOGOF) - Blech! Terrible sculpts in the wrong scale, unforgivable. I'll concede Bob's point about adhering to the concept art, but I thought the initial art (the guy with the space marine shoulderpads - can't find the pic right now) was far more appealing. Regardless, these are real bargain basement stuff.
Mummy (freebie) - badly proportioned and I don't think it fits the rest of the undead (particularly the plastics). Not even sure if it's a mummified human.
Troll (freebie) - an odd one.. individually the parts are well sculpted... but they look like they are from totally different models! Someone suggested the reaper bones troll as a source of replacement legs, frankly I don't think they will cut it! Try the Storm Giant The head too is barely orc sized - that's where mine will probably end up - and to me just does not look convincing on that torso. Having said that, I am somewhat looking forward to the challenge of finding uses for all of it - waste not want not
Gargoyle (freebie) - perfectly acceptable, I agree with whoever suggested upthread that using the wing+tail piece as the basis for some flying ripper-esque creature is more exciting than model itself imho.
Elohi (BOGOF) - head issue aside, pretty good. However I have a bit of buyers remorse as I have no use for them.... maybe some 54mm Inquisitory conversion??
Battle Sisters (freebie) - Arm/weapon issues aside (Mantic should make a slogan around variations of that) better than I expected from the pics, and I somewhat regret swapping away from these in my bogof's. With a bit of work and some better female heads from Hasslefree/statuesque you could have a really nice unit. As it is I think I've a couple of new Escher/Cawdor juves.
Fight Wagon (freebie) - Another perfectly good model I have no immediate use for, but will happily accept.
Brock Rider (freebie) - Pretty cool. The rough patches of fur from the WIP sculpt are still there (surprise surprise) but less noticeable than on the green. Still doesn't look particularly badgery to me, more of a mutated rat or wombat - maybe a good skaven hero mount? Rider is nice too.
Ogre Hero (freebie) - Excellent! I was one of the naysayers about the oversized arms/knock kneed pose but I'm sorry i doubted you Remy, this model is fantastic in the flesh. (As an army however I think there is far too little variety across the range.) I also think it will go very nicely with the reaper bones ogre:
which could be a reasonable source of parted legs if people do want some pose variety.
Paladins and Paladins on horses (BOGOF) - Highly recommended, excellent fantasy sculpts. To be picky I would have liked more variety in the sculpts especially the helms, and more poses would have been nice, but otherwise can't be faulted.
The definition of a mixed bag then! but overall largely better than I was expecting, with some nice surprises. I actually think I'd have been happier if the men at arms simply didn't turn up and deeply wish they weren't a paid for choice -up there for worst $25 I've ever spent- but they qualified me for the freebies at least... see? I told you I would end positive
ps quick question - I have one large square base with the mantic circular hole - who is it for? The gargoyle?
Received my final shipment yesterday. Poor packaging resulted in the metal kits basically ramming the restic pieces around throughout the cross-pond hop and delivering; luckily no real damage except to the box itself which leads to, missing pieces; none of the metal heroes have weapons or heads. The poor packaging and resulting sliding and banging about either resulted in these pieces falling out the gaps in the box or they weren't packed to begin with.
I'll add that I'm missing all the gun-ogres that I was supposed to get and instead received all melee ogres...whatever.
Missing pieces in the restic packages...not surprising and happened in the second shipment as well, resulted in being unable to complete 2 fleabag riders and the chariot.
I found that I hate restic with an abiding passion because it resists my file making it hard to clean mold lines.
Did anyone notice that some of the weapons with hands molded on are reversed? Odd.
Not enough bases for all the models, especially the larger models.
I don't plan on contacting Mantic but won't be sending them another penny of my hobby dollars because they obviously can't be depended upon to even package things properly.
This whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth for the future as they suckered me into deadzone. If it's pursued with the same lackluster attempt at professionalism and everything's in restic like this mess, I'll just burn it in the backyard and send the melted mess back to Mantic.
I've done most of the inventory for my wife's set. Leaving only a shirtload of ogres. A few things missing, including the second set of ogre command bits, so sadly I'm going to have to conatct them. I'll wait till I finish the ogres, and then I'm expecting my own pledge to arrive this week, so I'll be spending another day on inventory. So I'll do any contacting as a combined thing.
I will say that while some of it is as awful as 3 expected, some of it is actually quite good. I'm just glad they let us change out BOGOF selections when it was almost all done, as we really dodged quite a few bullets there. Oh fudge. I just remembers I ordered two undead armies plus a pile of other extra BOGOFs in that final survey. I know they're good figures, but faaark.....
I know what you mean. The trolls in particular are so close to be awesome if not for the weedy legs. I don't have a use for most of the freebies anyway so they'll sit in a drawer...
I'm just wondering, should I be concerned that my final wave hasn't arrived? Is anybody else missing it, or has everybody on here gotten theirs? I posted on the KS page as well, but I see a lot of people in surrounding states have gotten theirs, and I'm a tad bit closer to the UK...postal failure or am I in the last group having wave 3 shipped?
timetowaste85 wrote: I'm just wondering, should I be concerned that my final wave hasn't arrived? Is anybody else missing it, or has everybody on here gotten theirs? I posted on the KS page as well, but I see a lot of people in surrounding states have gotten theirs, and I'm a tad bit closer to the UK...postal failure or am I in the last group having wave 3 shipped?
agnosto wrote: Received my final shipment yesterday. Poor packaging resulted in the metal kits basically ramming the restic pieces around throughout the cross-pond hop and delivering; luckily no real damage except to the box itself which leads to, missing pieces; none of the metal heroes have weapons or heads. The poor packaging and resulting sliding and banging about either resulted in these pieces falling out the gaps in the box or they weren't packed to begin with.
I'll add that I'm missing all the gun-ogres that I was supposed to get and instead received all melee ogres...whatever.
Missing pieces in the restic packages...not surprising and happened in the second shipment as well, resulted in being unable to complete 2 fleabag riders and the chariot.
I'm surprised at the lost metal bits. Not that it was the best packaging ever, but the metal bits were taped into two bubble wrap baggies, and there wasn't much extra room for stuff to move around in the box (layer of foam added to fill space in mine).
A bit of a strange layout within those baggies with the metals with model parts mixed between the two baggies, but I'm pretty sure everything was there for me.
decker_cky wrote: I'm surprised at the lost metal bits. Not that it was the best packaging ever, but the metal bits were taped into two bubble wrap baggies, and there wasn't much extra room for stuff to move around in the box (layer of foam added to fill space in mine).
A bit of a strange layout within those baggies with the metals with model parts mixed between the two baggies, but I'm pretty sure everything was there for me.
Maybe they didn't pack it? There was just one bubble wrap bag in the box and it was pretty much destroyed from them not putting any filler in the box to keep things from banging around. I just assumed that the small bits fell out the vents in the bottom of the box.
At this point, I'm not surprised; they've treated this KS like a bastard step-child from the start and I wish I could go back in time and slap myself for backing it and Deadzone. The (not) fine folks at mantic can take a long walk off of a short pier for all I care anymore.
Got my package through. As I expected I am only (very) disappointed with the M@A, Nuns and the cathorses. I am very pleased with this KS and there Dreadball KS (my main game ATM), also im glad I went in on there Deadzone KS (have played the beta rules alot and its a great game) as well and again Mantic has exceeded my expectations. Glad I stop playing GW and now play mostly Mantic games.
agnosto wrote: Received my final shipment yesterday. Poor packaging resulted in the metal kits basically ramming the restic pieces around throughout the cross-pond hop and delivering; luckily no real damage except to the box itself which leads to, missing pieces; none of the metal heroes have weapons or heads. The poor packaging and resulting sliding and banging about either resulted in these pieces falling out the gaps in the box or they weren't packed to begin with.
I'll add that I'm missing all the gun-ogres that I was supposed to get and instead received all melee ogres...whatever.
Missing pieces in the restic packages...not surprising and happened in the second shipment as well, resulted in being unable to complete 2 fleabag riders and the chariot.
Can someone point me towards a list of what all was supposed to be included in this last wave? I got my shipment, but I am missing all my heroes - but not sure what else I'm missing.
It also depends on what $$ level you were in at. If you can find the KoW Kickstarter thread, Scarlet Squig's OP lists all of the extras that come at the various dollar levels.
Some BOGOF stuff from the final survey missing, but most other things look to be there. And I'm not sure about everybody elses MaAs, but mine are fine: the detail is good, the height is the same as the Paladins...either I got a perfect batch or something went horribly wrong for you guys (or both). I'll put a picture up later, but I compared their size to the sisters, and they're about 1 mm taller in the shoulder area, which is accurate as men are biologically larger than women most of the time, and while both are in the bag right now, I compared to the Paladin legs, and those look accurate too.
Here's a size comparison without arms. The MaA body is the middle one. Now, I'm not a rocket scientist...but it looks to me like my bodies are accurately sized. I have no need to do any cutting. I'm not judging any of you that are unhappy with yours-but I'm just giving the heads up that mine are totally fine.
timetowaste85 wrote: Some BOGOF stuff from the final survey missing, but most other things look to be there. And I'm not sure about everybody elses MaAs, but mine are fine: the detail is good, the height is the same as the Paladins...either I got a perfect batch or something went horribly wrong for you guys (or both). I'll put a picture up later, but I compared their size to the sisters, and they're about 1 mm taller in the shoulder area, which is accurate as men are biologically larger than women most of the time, and while both are in the bag right now, I compared to the Paladin legs, and those look accurate too.
Looking forward to your shots, given how much that info contradicts everyone elses (and my own first hand experience). I hope it's accurate as the giantness of my MaAs is the most of my issue with them.
If you guys want, I'll add pictures of the MaAs when finished as well, but I wanted a rough picture of them standing next to a sister torso/legs and a paladin torso/legs. As you can see from the picture in my previous post, the height of my MaA models is fine. A couple of the hands look a bit odd, and the arms are still long. The heads also have soft detail, but the height looks totally accurate.
That said, HOLY CRAP, that mounted Twilight Kin character is fething HUGE!!
My box arrived at the weekend, taken me a couple of evenings to work throu. Looks like nothing is missing. I love the Ogres (which I pretty much went all out on, thanks to being able to swap out Basilean BOGOs I had pledged for). I also like the Trolls, the Golems, the Gargoyles and the fight wagons.
I have mixed feelings about this KS. On the one hand, the majority of the sculpts produced are sub-par, the Basilean's being the most disappointing. On the other hand, I put the small Basilean army I got up for sale and fingers crossed have already sold it, then I have all the other freebies up for sale also, so I expect to make back a third or more of to what I paid out, so, am essentially getting 2 large KOW armies (Undead and Ogres) for under $200. I guess it worked out well for me but just feels like a massive missed opportunity for Mantic.
I'm happy with all my Basileans so far. I must admit, I was extremely worried about the MaAs, hearing all the horror stories. I hope at least some other people get accurately sized MaAs-it'll be extremely weird if I was the only one who did.
timetowaste85 wrote: Some BOGOF stuff from the final survey missing, but most other things look to be there. And I'm not sure about everybody elses MaAs, but mine are fine: the detail is good, the height is the same as the Paladins...either I got a perfect batch or something went horribly wrong for you guys (or both). I'll put a picture up later, but I compared their size to the sisters, and they're about 1 mm taller in the shoulder area, which is accurate as men are biologically larger than women most of the time, and while both are in the bag right now, I compared to the Paladin legs, and those look accurate too.
Here's a size comparison without arms. The MaA body is the middle one. Now, I'm not a rocket scientist...but it looks to me like my bodies are accurately sized. I have no need to do any cutting. I'm not judging any of you that are unhappy with yours-but I'm just giving the heads up that mine are totally fine.
Assemble the whole model, your opinion will change.
The heads and arms are a large part of the problem...the men-at-arms have *gigantic* arms, weapons and heads, none of which seem to fit properly, or stick out at odd angles; which, combined with their beanpole torso makes things look horribly gangly.
Once you get the build put together and finished, the paladins look a bit midgety next to the MAA, weilding smaller swords in 2 hands while the MAA have giant heads and weild a larger sword in one hand and a massive shield in the other.
I reduced the height mainly to create a stockier, chunkier looking mini rather than a large and gangly one. The arms are still horrendous post-conversion but they don't stick out as much (both literally and figuratively).
timetowaste85 wrote: Some BOGOF stuff from the final survey missing, but most other things look to be there. And I'm not sure about everybody elses MaAs, but mine are fine: the detail is good, the height is the same as the Paladins...either I got a perfect batch or something went horribly wrong for you guys (or both). I'll put a picture up later, but I compared their size to the sisters, and they're about 1 mm taller in the shoulder area, which is accurate as men are biologically larger than women most of the time, and while both are in the bag right now, I compared to the Paladin legs, and those look accurate too.
Here's a size comparison without arms. The MaA body is the middle one. Now, I'm not a rocket scientist...but it looks to me like my bodies are accurately sized. I have no need to do any cutting. I'm not judging any of you that are unhappy with yours-but I'm just giving the heads up that mine are totally fine.
The heads and arms are a large part of the problem...the men-at-arms have *gigantic* arms, weapons and heads, none of which seem to fit properly, or stick out at odd angles; which, combined with their beanpole torso makes things look horribly gangly.
Eh, they have some slightly odd angles, true, but the biggest issue I saw was the height issue, but mine are of fine height. If I cut them as you did, they'd end up shorter than the sisters. I'll be leaving mine set as is.
My conversions are the same height as the sisters torso-to-torso (comparing the two upright bodies), but still taller once the heads are stuck on, and around the same height as the paladins (with their in-scale heads).
Mass is the main difference, the MAA have lots of it, sisters have none. Their thighs can be held in a MAA hand like a stick.
Height isn't everything, mass counts for a lot, that's the primary reason why I converted, to give the models less of a tabletop presence in large units. Toning the height down was just the easiest option without buying new parts. With the height, plus the mass, plus the chicken wing arm poses, plus the Games Workshop "5 foot gangsta bling swords held in one hand" all combined things get very ugly, very quickly, and also become impossible to rank up in regiments.
Another way of doing this would be to replace the heads and arms... you're right about the height and the fact that the torsos aren't too bad when viewed in a vacuum.
The swords add a ton of height too, one of the MAA swords is taller than an entire sister model.
I'd definitely say that replacing the arms and heads might remove the need for converting the torso, but by the time you've bought the bits from another company to do that, you might as well have just bought the historicals to use.
That said if you're fine with the heroic scaling, you'll get on quite well with the miniatures, there's no problem at all with liking them. I quite like the much-maligned Mantic elves due to having a higher tolerance for truescale and no attachment to GW stylings.
Their US $ prices seem to be a bit higher than the conversion rate would suggest. Still, I have a chess board just begging me to pick up the Air and Fire packs.
Yes, it's intended to be. However, if you order over 35 quid ($50 I believe, though it could be $60 or even $75), you get free shipping. Naturally, and especially for something relatively heavy such as a boxed board game, that's relatively expensive to the US so those ordering in any significant quantity from the mantic webstore don't have it all that bad
So, just so I'm not wanting to drag the sci fi thread off topic.
Dwarf Kings Hold, then... Is it something that I could easily take along to my lunchtime board games club? EG, 2 hours max to play, less than 5 minutes of pre-game rules explanation.
I just wanted to post this picture, as it's relevant to the MaAs issues. The arms are definitely long, but they are in scale, height wise. It'll come down to personal discretion, but I have no issue running 2 blocks of 40 of these guys. If anybody has another 40 they are bummed about going in on a BOGOF for, I'll pay you the BOGOF price for them. You can make your $25 back, as I'd like a sword&board unit too.
That is the ugliest plastic model I've seen in 10 years.
I appreciate that the fact that everyone paid 60c mini is mitigating the spontaneous projectile vomiting that should be occurring worldwide as people open these boxes, but dear god.
They may be 'fine' for massed ranks of troops, but there's no reason that they needed to be so absurdly poor. I've been waiting for a multi part plastic 'generic fantasy guy in armor' kit for ever, but I wouldn't touch these if they were free.
Received all of my stuff. There's a hell of a lot of it for what I pledged.
The quality varies a lot, from the really bad Men-At-Arms to the very good metal miniatures. The Ogres are good, but the proportions ruin what would otherwise be very cool figures. I think I will sell them off rather than having to try to take an inordinate amount of time to set them right.
The miniatures which impress me the most are probably the Obsidian Golems. They really did nail the design of them, and I can always use them as K'daai Infernals if I ever get a Chaos Dwarf army together. They're very good.
The Troll legs are as bad as I had thought, and the faces are badly molded as well. I think I might be able to salvage them by putting on different legs and trying to get different heads for them. Time will tell for those ones.
I am missing 3 Ogre Warriors, an Ogre Command Pack and the Mantic Splat Dice, but apart from that everything else is there. Contacted them and should be able to get a swift resolution I would say.
Wow, the arm holding the spear looks like it could touch his ankle if stretched out downwards
Fenriswulf wrote: The miniatures which impress me the most are probably the Obsidian Golems. They really did nail the design of them, and I can always use them as K'daai Infernals if I ever get a Chaos Dwarf army together. They're very good.
That's exactly what I'll be using them for, Fenris!
So, if they do a second KS, are the abyssal models going to be included in it? I'd love to see Mantic's take on Daemon Princes (abyssal whatever's), their lesser daemons, mounted daemons, molochs, etc. I can use my extensive GW Daemon army, but there would be a lot of mix n matching gods there. I'd rather have a uniform look. I can see my pledge for that army being quite extensive: 3 princes, 5-6 heroes, 6 infantry units, 4 moloch units, 3-4 cavalry units, etc. Plus more gargoyles.
To be fair to Mantic I emailed about a complaint about the Men at Arms and asked for an exchange or refund, they got back to me incredibly quickly with an apology and said they were happy to do either. (I'm going to swap, for immortal guard or golems).
Here's the exchange if anyone's curious. I thought it best to give them a detailed breakdown of the kit's many faults, the more negative feedback they hear the better ultimately:
Spoiler:
Hi Stewart, (I was informed you were the best person to email to
resolve this, if not please forward to the relevant person, thanks!)
My Kings of War Kickstarter figures were delivered over the weekend
and I have today had a chance to fully unpack, inspect and assemble
them. I am generally extremely happy with the quality of the figures I
have received - I particularly like the Paladins - but with one
regrettable exception: the hard plastic Men At Arms which are far
below the quality promised and that I have come to expect from Mantic,
and are in my opinion simply unacceptable. I would appreciate a refund
or exhange for products of equivalent value on this portion of my
pledge, as had I been aware of the true quality of these figures I
would never have purchased them.
I am sure you are aware of the deficiencies of these figures by now so
feel free to skip the following review (but please pass this on to
whoever ok'ed these minis!).
- Lack of options: I wanted to model one unit of my figures without
shields, and have a front rank holding their spears two handed in
another. Neither of these are possible since the sprue only has a
combined left arm + shield, with no alternatives included. Only the
barest minimum has been provided. The skeleton and other undead sprues
(released 3 years ago) have tons of options, so when Mantic said the
Basileans would be multipart hard plastic this is the type of kit I
expected.
- Poorly designed: The arms stick out at awkward angles and the arm /
shoulder joints don't work properly, and make the arms sit too low on
the torso. Every figure's arms need to be chopped to fit right,
unwelcome and annoying extra work on large units. The open hands are
oversized and look very unconvincing holding either weapon, again
something you managed to do right 3 years ago with the skeleton
troops.
- Poorly scaled. The weapons, particularly the swords, look like
oversized cosplay props. I appreciate they are fantasy figures but
these are ridiculous - these one handed (since that's the only way you
can make them) swords are bigger than the two handed swords of the
Paladins!
- Poorly sculpted: These models are soft and woefully lacking in sharp
detail. Again side by side with the Mantic undead they look
substandard. Seriously, I have plastic miniatures over 20 years old
that have more detailed definition (Advanced Heroquest Men at arms are
a good comparison - from 1989!). In some places there is simply no
detail at all.
Again I'd like to say I am generally pleased with the rest of my
kickstarter miniatures(and Dreadball for that matter) and these men at
arms are a regrettable lapse. Over the years I have found Mantic's
responses and customer service to be first rate, and again I hope you
can help me in this matter.
Many thanks for your time,
'rosafari'
---------------------------------
Hi 'rosafari'
I'm very sorry to hear that you're not happy with the Men-at-Arms. While they can look fantastic with a little work, I will admit that they are not where we want them to be for various reasons, and we will not be doing another hard plastic sprue until we have sorted each and every one of these issues. Our scenery for Deadzone is hard plastic, and is looking absolutely top notch, but that has none of the difficulties associated with miniatures. I can promise you that we are learning from this and will not make the mistake again.
Anyway, yes, I am happy to give you a refund or exchange - whichever you prefer. Please return them to:
Stewart Gibbs
Mantic Games
Greasley Street
Bulwell
Nottingham
NG6 8NG
UK
Send a copy of this email so that I know what it relates to, and let me know what you'd like instead and I will get it sorted for you.
Apologies again, and happy gaming!
Thanks,
Stewart Gibbs
In other news, I unpacked and assembled some Paladins and was a bit disappointed when I realised the mounted and foot models have the same (four) head sprue. This means I have thirty models with only four different heads between them - granted they are wearing helmets and I have plenty of alts but still. Also a little disappointed when I realised the Elohi have only two different bodies which is a bit weak for a kit sold in threes...
Yeah it looks like the whole two body thing is present in a lot of instances. Trolls, werewolves, Golems. The Brock Riders only have one. I am guessing they didn't have the cash to fund several.
I'm not going to lie, the Men at Arms are definitely NOT fantastic sculpts. They are the weakest of the Basilean group. That said, I have plenty because they will work for regimented troops and the heights are fine. The bodies are dynamic and I like those. The arm joining area is rough and the faces suck. With a flesh wash though, they'll likely be usable. I plan on posting pics when I have a couple done so people can see my non-Mantic paint job as a casual player's work. Hopefully that'll help give a decent show, for good or for ill, for everybody.
that's a classy response from Mantic. I'm guessing it's basically a stock paragraph they have, but good on them for at least owning the quality of the product.
I'm not sayign it's making my confident to buy more mantic sight unseen (oh wait... I pledged deadzone...), but I'm glad they're staying in touch with their customers now.
What they need to learn is to bring in some outside voices before investing in another spure, to avoid this fiasco.
Yeah, it's a good response *but* the thing is (particularly for some kickstarter backers), the same line was used back when the plastic goblins turned out poorly. So there's a little less patience amongst the community this time. If deadzone sprues are crap (and there is certainly some dodgy "I'm sculpting these minis for 40k, not for mantic" stuff going on there even with the renders), that's not going to turn out good at all, especially after everyone paid for restic during the campaign.
IMO, the men-at-arms are worse than the goblins as well. I'd be happy to buy more of the goblins in future (they are really really nice sculpts even if the tooling is a bit soft, and the hybrid metals give them nicely detailed arms for the same price as the plastics), can't say the same for the men-at-arms.
I'm still trying to figure out a fix for the models (my initial conversion was good, but it ended up highlighting and exaggerating the real problem, the arms), chopping up some of the arms at the moment and seeing how it looks. The bulk of the bodies is still an issue, but one that I might be able to sort out with trimming from the top down rather than doing the more complex midsection removal.
Whoever posed them ended up elongating the arms oddly... you have an arm as if it was sculpted at a normal angle initially, then this giant void-of-detail cylinder sticking out to make the arm in a "sticky out" pose. I'm thinking if I can reduce that down, it'll help.
I'll need to obliterate the chainmail detail to do the conversion properly, but that's not as much of a concern when you factor in that the left arms have zero detail anyway due to undercut errors in tooling.
I'm also considering filing down the helms and removing the feathers (which I like, but they add additional bulk to an already gigantic model).
timetowaste85 wrote: I just wanted to post this picture, as it's relevant to the MaAs issues. The arms are definitely long, but they are in scale, height wise. It'll come down to personal discretion, but I have no issue running 2 blocks of 40 of these guys. If anybody has another 40 they are bummed about going in on a BOGOF for, I'll pay you the BOGOF price for them. You can make your $25 back, as I'd like a sword&board unit too.
Holy crap, I've seen miniatures from the 80s that are better than that MaA. My jaw literally dropped in shock. Mantic has gotta get on top of their quality control problems...
I don't have them in hand or anything, but I don't think the pictures make the MAA look all that bad. I think actually a great use for them would be to use them as statues. Someone posted some earlier that were primed white and given a brown wash. It gave them a nice, marble look. Mount them on some pillars and you've got some decent fantasy scenery.
Okay, after several more hours of chopping bits around, my opinion on them is now:
"Feth it, I'll wait for the perry foot knights to come out, buy 120 of those and glue the the MAA spears and shields on them to get the fantasy styling".
The arms and hands are hopeless, and three out of the five heads are hideous, with underbites that would make Beavis and Butthead look like paragons of orthodontistry.
I really tried to get them workable, but it's looking more like 15-20 minutes per figure total once the arms are factored in to fix them up, and I have better things to spend 40 hours of time on.
timetowaste85 wrote: I just wanted to post this picture, as it's relevant to the MaAs issues. The arms are definitely long, but they are in scale, height wise.
I'm sorry, but that statement is flatly wrong. The arms are NOT in scale height wise, lenght wise or any other 'wise' compared to the rest of the figure. If the elbows were bent strait they would dip to below the knees. There are almost no humans with arms that long compared to their height.
I agree that they wouldn't look terrible ranked up, but with other better options, I don't see any reason to bother.
Nice to see that the fig's height is relatively in-scale with the rest of the range though. The smaller female figs that other's have shown, don't bother me as most female's are shorter anyway.
timetowaste85 wrote: I just wanted to post this picture, as it's relevant to the MaAs issues. The arms are definitely long, but they are in scale, height wise.
I'm sorry, but that statement is flatly wrong. The arms are NOT in scale height wise, lenght wise or any other 'wise' compared to the rest of the figure. If the elbows were bent strait they would dip to below the knees. There are almost no humans with arms that long compared to their height.
I agree that they wouldn't look terrible ranked up, but with other better options, I don't see any reason to bother.
Nice to see that the fig's height is relatively in-scale with the rest of the range though. The smaller female figs that other's have shown, don't bother me as most female's are shorter anyway.
Sorry Ellif, I meant the models themselves are in scale, height wise. I also said the arms were long. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Height wise, MaAs are fine. Heads are soft in detail, arms are wicked long.
Sorry Ellif, I meant the models themselves are in scale, height wise. I also said the arms were long. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Height wise, MaAs are fine. Heads are soft in detail, arms are wicked long.
I get it now. Has anyone checked to see if parts from perry or GW would look good on these guys? Maybe the arms would be better sized than the stock versions.
Sorry Ellif, I meant the models themselves are in scale, height wise. I also said the arms were long. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Height wise, MaAs are fine. Heads are soft in detail, arms are wicked long.
I get it now. Has anyone checked to see if parts from perry or GW would look good on these guys? Maybe the arms would be better sized than the stock versions.
Sorry Ellif, I meant the models themselves are in scale, height wise. I also said the arms were long. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Height wise, MaAs are fine. Heads are soft in detail, arms are wicked long.
I get it now. Has anyone checked to see if parts from perry or GW would look good on these guys? Maybe the arms would be better sized than the stock versions.
GW parts on the M@A are on page 56 of this very thread, Empire heads/arms and a HIgh Elf weapon.
I've had a look through the historical options and have decided to pick up some fireforge foot sergeants to replace the arms and heads as cheaply as possible:
Spoiler:
Now that's what a good sprue looks like, and the equipment options are spears, hand weapons, crossbows.. same as the men-at-arms. A single box of those contains enough arms for 36 spears, 36 hand weapon and shield, 24 crossbows which should sort out 100-odd of the mantic minis and let me get the army together without having to convert stuff.
I'll still be using the bases, bodies, shields and spears from the men-at-arms.
Of course, the best option for anyone building a Basilean army for KoW would be to just buy the fireforge guys in the first place, but I've already got over 150 M@A now and might as well do something with the parts of them that are usable.
I've moved on to putting together the paladins and angels which really are lovely miniatures.
The sisters aren't bad either, but the arms don't fit to the point where it's laughable. All of them are really warped. They'll be okay with some hot water bending, but if you were a casual FLGS buyer who wasn't aware of that trick (which is not mentioned anywhere on the packaging), you'd throw them in the bin and never buy mantic again.
That isn't me gluing them together funny or anything, the arms and flail are a single piece (which is a good thing, in theory, works fine on the paladins).
Their Chinese manufacturer is still cutting corners and pulling stuff out of the moulds too quickly, resulting in massive warping.
Crikey that is warped, have not tried to put mine together yet but those arms look nearly an inch off. You are right about some sort of insert, or disclaimer from the box about the "hot water trick" being a necessity to put together a lot of the resin plastic minis. For example if you want the gargoyles to rank up you have to do some hot water bending on the wings, otherwise it just isn't happening. As far as I am aware the older kits I bought in the material never had any such instruction, I shall have to look at the boxes of the newer trolls/Werewolves etc but I doubt they carry any such instructions either.
scarletsquig wrote: I've had a look through the historical options and have decided to pick up some fireforge foot sergeants to replace the arms and heads as cheaply as possible:
Spoiler:
Now that's what a good sprue looks like, and the equipment options are spears, hand weapons, crossbows.. same as the men-at-arms. A single box of those contains enough arms for 36 spears, 36 hand weapon and shield, 24 crossbows which should sort out 100-odd of the mantic minis and let me get the army together without having to convert stuff.
Coincidentally, I just ordered a box of everything from the fireforge range. They really are great kits, all of them. The sergeant footmen are especially good value, but the teutonic and templars do look sexier.
To me, there really is no 'saving' the Men at Arms - they are that bad.
Once again, Mantic's "QA" department really lets them down, as does "Upper Management" who decided to release these things knowing full well how awful they are.
Had a problem where one of my horses was so badly warped that I couldn't do the hot water trick. And boy, did I try. The bodies aren't thin though, and it just wasn't having any modifications. I haven't noticed getting any extra horses, so a quick email was sent out to Mantic for a replacement horse side. Hopefully the rest of my order hadn't gone out and they were able to just stuff it in there.
Yeah, at the closest inspection I have done for the MAA, there really isn't much saving them that doesn't require a hell of a lot of components from another manufacturers kit. In which case, why wouldn't you just buy from them instead?
Some good things were made with this kickstarter. But man, they've got to move away from the beancounter method of sales. It's only going to burn them in the long run.
I feel for those of you who invested heavily in this kickstarter- seems like Mantic really dropped the ball here. Those M@A are shockingly bad. The negative reactions here are really justified.
I liked the majority of the stuff from the KoWKS but the MaA are some if not the worse models I've seen to date. Which makes me slightly concerned as I'm in deep for the Deadzone KS, BUT I've absolutely loved all the Dreadball stuff which alleviates that concerned a tad. It seems they have made more of an effort for there sci-fi/Jake Thorntons games. If they do as well with the Deadzone KS as they have with the Dreadball one I will be a happy man and very happy to drop another load of cash once the Warpath KS hits.
Here's a picture of my first Paladin. They actually sent me 6 in the pack instead of 5, so this one is going to be The Captain. Or whatever other special character I want on foot. The red symbolizes his stature, as the other ones will have reversed coloring on that material: white with a red stripe at the base of it. The purple will stay as is, as I happen to love the look. The men at arms will have a similar paint scheme, and I'll paint one up as soon as I get back from having breakfast at Barnes & Noble.
My MAA will probably just be fodder for my girlfriend to practice techniques on.
I started working on the freebie orcs from round 2 of shipping, and I am disappointed with the amount of extra plastic at the feet. They looked horrible. I cut out the excess but ruined the feet in the process... again, they are mainly fodder.
Da Boss wrote: I feel for those of you who invested heavily in this kickstarter- seems like Mantic really dropped the ball here. Those M@A are shockingly bad. The negative reactions here are really justified.
I spent well over $500 on this Kickstarter and got one of the best return on investments I've had in any Kickstarter. My initial pledges were for the currently existing models - offered at a heavy discount over retail price. Even if there had been no stretch goals, it would have been a great value for the money. My first wave was Kings of War rulebook, a giant Orc army and a giant Goblin army. I painted and assembled them and I've played Kings of War dozens of times, where it quickly became my favorite active miniatures wargame. My 2nd and 3rd shipments all contained the free stuff. I may dislike the trolls, some characters, the men at arms, the sisters, but they were all free. I like the ogres and the other basileans. I love the chariots, fight wagons, mincers, fleabag riders, palace guard, stormwind cavalry, dark knights, brock riders, elohi,immortal guard, gargoyles and others - all, also free. Free free free free free. The only additional money I spent was on some more fleabag riders, the fleabag sniff metal bits, and the metal goblin characters, and they are sweet sculpts.
I sit here and look at the literally hundreds and hundreds of figures I've gotten, I reflect on the awesome ruleset that I started playing because of the Kickstarter... are you kidding? This Kickstarter was a tremendous deal and I am entirely satisfied and happy with it. Could some things have been better? Sure, the men at arms are pretty gak.
But for me personally... no, it was a steal. I feel like I ripped off Mantic with the amount of free stuff I got.
Da Boss wrote: I feel for those of you who invested heavily in this kickstarter- seems like Mantic really dropped the ball here. Those M@A are shockingly bad. The negative reactions here are really justified.
There's a few bad models, a few that some people will hate stylistically, and a whole bunch of good to great models. For much of it, you could switch your order around after the fact to get good models (although the shots they gave of the MaA were misleading, which rightfully should lead to some unhappiness). I ended up with an ogre army and an abyssal dwarf army (along with lots of additional tidbits), and I'm very happy with what I got.
I was kind of forced in going into taking the Ogre Army because that's the only real set of figures I thought I would like to use, and I already had a ton of other Mantic figures from their other lines. I think I can make back my investment if I sell them off, as well as a majority of the freebies.
If you chose Basileans (like I did initially), you're likely to have come out worse out of all this.
I'm glad you are happy with your stuff, but I wouldn't feel the same way if I had invested heavily in the KS. There are only a few models (paladins are one) that I thought were particularly nice, the rest were fairly disappointing. I guess I am not a fan of the cartoony look to a lot of them.
Fenriswulf wrote: I was kind of forced in going into taking the Ogre Army because that's the only real set of figures I thought I would like to use, and I already had a ton of other Mantic figures from their other lines. I think I can make back my investment if I sell them off, as well as a majority of the freebies.
If you chose Basileans (like I did initially), you're likely to have come out worse out of all this.
I heavily went into the Basileans (got the preorder army deal they offered that included the free chariot) and I'm not terribly disappointed. I've even picked up an additional 80 Men At Arms from another backer who didn't want them. So I've got 160 of the bloody guys. I'm planning on doing a bunch up with crossbows, as the crossbow arms are properly sized, so only the heads look a bit goofy. I have 20 crossbows, and would like a further 20, so I'll either need bitz from Mantic (if they sell those individually later) or a friendly pal on here (any offers?). I'm going to end up with 80 with spears, 40 with Sword&Board, and 40 with Crossbows. I won't need any more Men At Arms, for sure, but painting one up now and with washes to fill in the cracks and painting the areas as they're supposed to be, he isn't turning out badly. Pictures up in another hour or so.
Man at Arms, finished except a wash on the boots and gloves, which I forgot. Should be able to get the idea though-they aren't so bad when painted up. Bare plastic...pretty close to hideous. Painted, they'll make really good rank and file.
Other than the gorilla arms those don't look half bad. As a mob of rank and file that get chewed up on the front lines as it is, I don't think I'd be too worried about their proportions. Their job is to hold the line, die, or keep my opponent out of my hair- not look fabulous to the point that every person in the unit stands tall as a man among men..
If I saw a set of those Men at Arms for a reasonable price I might be inclined to pick some up just to paint and fiddle with.
Other than that they wouldn't do a whole lot for me, but then again, I've never played a human army. Ever. I don't see that changing any time soon either.
If (when) Mantic do another Kings of War kickstarter, I hope to see some more exotic races.
If you chose Basileans (like I did initially), you're likely to have come out worse out of all this.
This, unfortunately. But also unfortunately - a lot of the excitement the last week of the KS was about the Basilieans. It was they (imo) that prompted most of the big influx of cash towards the end.
I went in for them big and was pretty disappointed (mostly by the Men at Arms & Sisters - but then that's a good third of the army).
Tons of the other minis I received are quite nice though - they are just for armies I have little to no interest in. The Ogres are great - but I have a full GW Ogre army. The elf riders/palace guard seem very nice - but I don't like elves. The Abyssal golems are cool - but I don't want a hybrid plastic/metal army. Etc, etc, for most of the freebie units I got.
So I don't think the whole KS was a bust. Just a bust if you wanted the Basileans.
I certainly won't be buying into any other Mantic KSs minis unseen though. And I think their reputation will (rightly) take a decent hit from the MaA & Sisters.
Now that's what a good sprue looks like, and the equipment options are spears, hand weapons, crossbows.. same as the men-at-arms. A single box of those contains enough arms for 36 spears, 36 hand weapon and shield, 24 crossbows which should sort out 100-odd of the mantic minis and let me get the army together without having to convert stuff.
I'll still be using the bases, bodies, shields and spears from the men-at-arms.
Not sure if it's too late, but I'd hold off on buying the FF for bits for the MaAs. I've been trying it and it's not working out. At this point I'm wondering if everyone's MaAs are all the same size, as mine are definately bigger than the paladins. Though the FF heads are good fit for the Paladins, as I find the Mantic ones, ironically, too small.
Wow.. I don't think the previous pictures portrayed just how horrible those ape arms and no detail shield shoulders are... Wow... that sculpt overall is about as good (from memory) as the old GW milton bradley not-warhammer fantasy boxed minis I picked up 20 years ago used.
Warboss, that's also a single model. Ranked up, in unit blocks, it won't look bad at all. Even tilted at the right angle on my desk he looks good. Better painted, but yes, they definitely came out as the worst of the KS models. Still very usable though, in large numbers. Actually, if I took the section I painted white out of each arm, they'll be just about the right sized arms. Might do so and post pictures. I think I'm going to start doing a Men At Arms fixings and happiness thread in the Mantic Subforum, as it's not really necessary in the N&R section anymore.
Who are you guys e-mailing about missing stuff in your shipments? I sent them a message through the Kickstarter about some parts I'm missing a week ago, and haven't heard anything back.
I've emailed Stew and Tim. Even when I've emailed Stew, Tim is usually the one who responds. It's taken all of 24 hrs (except weekends) for him to respond to me, tops. I'd say that's pretty quick, when lots of people are having issues. I posted the email address in the Mantic Subforum under customer service-head on over there for a look-sie.
Wow.. I don't think the previous pictures portrayed just how horrible those ape arms and no detail shield shoulders are... Wow... that sculpt overall is about as good (from memory) as the old GW milton bradley not-warhammer fantasy boxed minis I picked up 20 years ago used.
Actually the mantic figs look worse. I've just painted up a batch of the "Battlemasters" figures you're describing. They are monopose and chunky heroic and the detail level is similar. However, the proportions are great, and the sculpts neatly done.
scarletsquig wrote:I've had a look through the historical options and have decided to pick up some fireforge foot sergeants to replace the arms and heads as cheaply as possible:
Spoiler:
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Looking forward to pics of the bits on the mantic figs. I heard that fireforge is on the small side of 28mm, but it's probably going to be better than the arms that come with the MaA figs.
When I stop being lazy (I'm enjoying Injustice on the iPhone, atm), I'll be setting up a thread on ideas for fixing the MaAs. SS, I hope you'll also post your fixes in there as well, so people can see the options to correct theirs and make these things work.
I actually started the Men at Arms thread already, but I have angel head fixes too. I'll post a primed one over there too. Also, I don't really bother with minor mold lines, so if you see them on my models...they're there. It's all good. If they're bad, I remove them. Paladins had some bad excess, my MAA mold lines are minor, and I don't feel like fixing 160 of the flaming bastards.
timetowaste85 wrote: I actually started the Men at Arms thread already, but I have angel head fixes too. I'll post a primed one over there too. Also, I don't really bother with minor mold lines, so if you see them on my models...they're there. It's all good. If they're bad, I remove them. Paladins had some bad excess, my MAA mold lines are minor, and I don't feel like fixing 160 of the flaming bastards.
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