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Noticed the following in the Blood Angels thread in N&R:



The most enormous DRAGON we've ever made!

Holy cow ! Those models are expensive, I mean they're cool but not £120 cool...

Now I must say though, Smaug does really tickle my fancy even if it is really expensive...

The rumours put Smaug at £300ish, about £180 more than I would happily pay, and probably in finecast too.

Depending on the savings I can from 3rd Party sellers, I'm almost tempted by Thorin, as it's a great figure. I REALLY don't need another Bilbo, especially not one that bad (might just be the paintjob). Had Thorin, Balin and Dwalin been in one set for £20-25, it would already be it's way to me, along with the rest of the Erebor army I'm on the edge of pulling the trigger on (I just need to find a good price on Thrain/Thror)

Yeah I hear you, £300 would have to be one damn good model hence why it's peaked my interests in it. Though I am waiting to see pictures first.

I am tempted to get Balin as Balin is my favourite dwarf in the films

And some more, rather painful, rumours:

From natfka - salt required, obviously, but the timing is about right:

Smaug 1 miniature online only $490
Bard the Bowman with Windlance 1 miniature $40
Lake-Town Militia Captain 1 miniature $20
Lake-Town Militia Swordsmen 3 miniatures $25
Lake-town Militia Bowmen 3 miniatures $25
Lake-Town Militia Spearmen 3 miniatures $25

 Paradigm wrote:
And some more, rather painful, rumours:

From natfka - salt required, obviously, but the timing is about right:

Smaug 1 miniature online only $490
Bard the Bowman with Windlance 1 miniature $40
Lake-Town Militia Captain 1 miniature $20
Lake-Town Militia Swordsmen 3 miniatures $25
Lake-town Militia Bowmen 3 miniatures $25
Lake-Town Militia Spearmen 3 miniatures $25

That smaug better be stellar for $490

My thoughts exactly. It's the one character I always wanted in not-so-mini form, and I was prepared to pay more than I knew it would actually be worth to get it. But there is simply no way I could ever afford that. I mean, that price gets me a new guitar, an Xbox One, a new computer, and in the long run, I know I'd get more use from pretty much anything else I could ever do with that money.

I really think GW have lost the plot if they think they can produce a model worth that, even if it is a great scuplt.

I do believe for that kind of price the gold has to be real gold....

People have been posting photos of all the blood angels in this issue, but not Smaug., as far as i can tell. Does anyone that actually gives a gak about the Hobbit have a copy of the issue yet and can they post up some images?

If someone had a pic, it would have been posted.

 Paradigm wrote:
I REALLY don't need another Bilbo, especially not one that bad (might just be the paintjob).

The problem with true scale hobbits is that you can't really tell how good they are when they have paint on them. A good paint job can make them look better than they actually might be and a bad paint job can make the most awesome sculpt look terrible. I have some LOTR Hobbits that I thought looked pretty bad in pictures, nothing like the actors but then seeing the raw metal sculpts in my hands my mind was blown how much the tiny little faces did actually look like the actors.

Finecast Laketown militia. Oh dear...

Smaug will be unjustifiably expensive, as everything seems to be nowadays. Don't get your hopes up is all I say really. It's a shame to be reduced to such cynicism but GW really are starting get through these shovels now. Australians complain about prices, but by the end of the year I expect GW to have dug right through the Earth with the way they're going!

Wolf wrote:I do believe for that kind of price the gold has to be real gold....

Feth it, for £300, I want a real living dragon to scale!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
I REALLY don't need another Bilbo, especially not one that bad (might just be the paintjob).

The problem with true scale hobbits is that you can't really tell how good they are when they have paint on them. A good paint job can make them look better than they actually might be and a bad paint job can make the most awesome sculpt look terrible. I have some LOTR Hobbits that I thought looked pretty bad in pictures, nothing like the actors but then seeing the raw metal sculpts in my hands my mind was blown how much the tiny little faces did actually look like the actors.

That is a very good point. Even on some of the larger minis there has been a good sculpt marred by a poor paintjob, one of the reasons I wish they still showed unpainted pics.

If smaug was to scale and had been sculpted by Trish Carden from forgeworld it might be worth the $490 they are charging for it.

She has done some amazing work with monsters for forgeworld and at the scale it would need to be it could be one amazing piece. Since im expecting this to be a giant ball of finecast and done by the gw team(which isnt bad but not optimal) its nowhere near worth $490.

The biggest problem with gw and the new lotr stuff is they are going cheap on it and overcharging really trying to sell it purely on the ip of tolkein alone. Their is no real incentive besides the love of the ip to buy it. If they had just went out and did plastic boxes for all of this, kept the moulds for years and kept supporting it, they will get their money. sadly gw is simply about the quick buck and without any care to its customers. I would have a dozen lotr armies if it wasnt such a burdon to buy them.

Though not official, this version of Smaug is easier on wallet, slightly, and still a nice chunk of resin:
http://www.geenemodels.com/dragon-kit/



Still out of my budget, but a little cheaper.

i can see the benefit of only doing blisters for alot of units, lotr/ hobbit is a skirmish game, i dont own the rulebook but i assume they have the warband rules? in which case if you are playing a single warband game, you can have a mix warband of cavelry and foot, during my collecting of lotr alot of minis of mine went unused as i was playing small warbands and only wanted 2 of the 6 knights on horses,
this isnt warhammer, large games are boggy with skirmish rules
btw that dragon is masing and huge in comparison to the pic ive seen on beasts of war

Well, most LotR games use minimum of 20 models a side, usually going up to 60-odd before the game really gets slow, so there are some serious issues when you have troops that are basically Goblin-cheap (Laketown militia) in a 3-for-15 Finecast blister. Considering that you're paying 4x as much compared to say, 12 Warriors of Minas Tirith, for a warband of 12 (of which you'll likely want multiples) you can see the problem...

If the game was more like Infinity or Deadzone and capped at a dozen minis a side it could be just about bearable, but typical LotR armies will have 3-4 times as many minis.

On the subject of Smaug size, I actually think that, as well as the boring pose, the GW Smaug is actually a bit on the small size; it's hard to judge without seeing the two together, but the one above looks to be more in scale.

Mentioned in the Blood Angels thread in N&R:

http://astropate.blogspot.de/2014/12/white-dwarf-46-shield-of-baal.html

Pics of Azog, Lieutenant of Sauron; Bolg, Castellan of Mount Gundabad and Bard the Bowman, Girion's Heir. Also makes mention of a 32 page The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies sourcebook ($8 US, online only or as a free PDF download from www.games-workshop.com).

Bolg and Azog:


Bard


Pretty uninspired if I'm honest; Azog is lacking his awesome armour and sword arm, and Bard has a terrible paintjob. Free supplement PDF is cool, though, now they just need to make the DoS stuff free.

It's funny, I really hate how Bolt looks in the film, but that on-foot version I think is among the better/best releases for this film so far.

The new releases are really... meh. The new models are really lacking the wow factor, which is a real shame. It kinda makes me sad.

The Azog looks arlight but his posture and position looks really static, I think Bolg is much more impressive though has more of a presence about him !

Oh Bard, Bard, Bard. What a pity, terrible model I think the mounted one especially !

I actually quite like Azog and Bolg. Not sure if I'll get them though.

Is bard the bowman really not carrying a bow at all?

Why would he carry a bow ? That makes too much sense

Ahhh, I wish I could go back and buy a box of 20 figures for $20.00, I would of bought lots more!

It really pains me to say this, but I don't care how great the models look, they are not really worth the price they are asking.

 ejazzyjeff wrote:
Ahhh, I wish I could go back and buy a box of 20 figures for $20.00, I would of bought lots more!

It really pains me to say this, but I don't care how great the models look, they are not really worth the price they are asking.

exactly how i feel about it. Those elf calvary are are 150% the cost of already over priced terminators

 namiel wrote:
I think its just easier and much much cheaper for GW to produce them in finecast. They dont expect to sell much of anything so the cheaper they can go while filling the obligation they have to the IP they will

That is pretty much what the Denver GW guy told me, the plastics wouldnt be worth it for the company, even though we the customer prefer it, as for new releases, sadly folks, think we got the last :(

 Da Boss wrote:
Is bard the bowman really not carrying a bow at all?

Its true to the film. His bow is destroyed and he only uses a sword after Laketown.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Is bard the bowman really not carrying a bow at all?

Its true to the film. His bow is destroyed and he only uses a sword after Laketown.

It's more the fact he's still called Bard The Bowman. In fact, that's something that really annoys me about most of these BotFA profiles. Why do we need 'Balin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor', when it could just be 'Balin, Champion of Erebor'? I know, stupid thing to be annoyed by, but it does bug me.

On a side note, the GW guy I spoke to today reckoned there might be more stuff for BotFA coming in a few months... But then he also suggested I send off my fan-made BotFA supplement to GW for ideas, so I shan't set too much store by it... He must have been new

I do hope there will be more stuff, mainly because i can't be bothered to convert dwarf Ramriders!

Imagine sending off the fan made supplement, it wouldn't get past the first hurdle: being the opposite of what fans want! This guy sounds pretty cool though, at least he takes an interest in the Hobbit instead of trying to move you on. Out of interest what store is this?

Captain Galenus wrote:
I do hope there will be more stuff, mainly because i can't be bothered to convert dwarf Ramriders!

Agreed. Although while Time=Money, I'm not sure what quantity of time the conversions would have to take to match the GW pricing.

Imagine sending off the fan made supplement, it wouldn't get past the first hurdle: being the opposite of what fans want! This guy sounds pretty cool though, at least he takes an interest in the Hobbit instead of trying to move you on. Out of interest what store is this?

This was the Norwich store, which, while I don't get there that often, seems to be one of the better ones around. The staff aren't exactly pushy and there's usually a couple of them around (so less waiting time, and one can be on kid-control duty while the other works), and it looks to have a good bit more gaming space than many these days. It's not a bad store, all things told, and if it wasn't an hour's bus ride away I'd happily go there a lot more regularly.