Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Forgive me if this is the wrong section. If it is, could a mod please move it?

What ever happen to all the diversity among the models, like back in the RT era of 40k? I've been on ebay trying to find as many of them as I can for my chaos army, and they just look so much better. There is very little uniformity to them, and at least for chaos, it feels like chaos. But you look at all of the models we have today and unless you look at them all close up, there isn't very much difference between two different models of a similar sort. Sure we have 7 head choices or so, and a few body choices, but they all look the same in the grand scheme of things.

I understand it's easier for the artists and the production lines and all of that, but why cant there be a little less uniformity going on.

Even in second edition looks unique to each, I wish GW would do more like them again, or recycle some older model types into plastic kits, update them a little and let us have them.

What about you guys? What do you prefer, the older looking models or the recent?

I prefer the new stuff, but I like consistency, proper proportions (in comparison to the older stuff) and sharp detail. I dumped a lot of Rogue Trader minis whenever replacements came out of better quality.

But I understand where you're coming from; the old stuff owed a lot to Brian Froud and John Blanche and Ian Livingston, where creativity was encouraged over uniformity.

I still have a lot of RT models in my 40k armies.

My IG has a platoon of the original plastic Imperial Army troopers (with shoulderfired lascannons).

My SM has a couple of squads of RT vintage monoposed beakies (metals) and a couple of squads of the RTB001 plastic multiparters.

My eldar has a bunch of the original eldar warriors (pre-guardian days) and the first-run guardians (metal bodies/plastic arms) and dreads and war walkers.

I trawl the 2nd hand stuff at tourneys looking for more of it. When a newer model is released, it's quite common to find the older stuff relegated to the sale bench - and some crazy bargains can be got.

This is good to know, unfortunately, I"m relatively new at this and still in the process of building my army/learning the rules. and haven't had a go at tourneys yet.

I hate old models. Honestly, I don't understand how anyone can truly think they look better, they are nothing short of revolting, if a newer, much better, plastic model is available, why use older ones?

Willhellm wrote:This is good to know, unfortunately, I"m relatively new at this and still in the process of building my army/learning the rules. and haven't had a go at tourneys yet.

You don't have to go to tourneys; but going to a tournament is often a good reason to visit a store that's an hour or more's drive away from your home- a long drive isn't a big deal if you're spending the whole day there playing games. The main thing is that if you like older models, it's worth checking stores you haven't been to before, and going through bargain bins and dusty shelves. Smaller stores, mixed hobby stores, and shops which mostly sell comics but have a limited miniature selection are also often good candidates to have old stock lying around.

I like different aspects of all of the models, and some of the old ones were honestly, MEH. They were a baseline idea put to metal, and at the time, they were honestly one of maybe about a MILLION companies.

You have to look at this conversation from the aspect of the, uh.. whats the word.. context? Perception/vs reality? I think it's one of those words,( Someone else help me out pls)

When I started gaming, GW's products were pretty much additional material to play D and D with. They were a top notch Mini's producer that made about five or ten different additional games minis, and being a D and D player at the time, you had maybe three or four other companies to turn to for guys. This was around 78-80 timeframe, If I recall, ( I've lost a bunch of brain cells on this matter, and history milage may very) Ral Partha, Grenader, RAFM, and one or two other companies, that I can't remember's name. GW at the time was cranking out Judge dreadd, Dr Who, cthuhlu guys and a bunch of other stuff that in time eventually bled into the D and D guy market. At the time, mini's were friggin "AWSOME" in that the guys that originally came out for D and D were like a couple of first run mini's based on pictures from the books. We thought they were like top drawer stuff, and that was pretty much where we began with mini's, and aside from guys who were Historical players, or geneneralized model builders ( army, scifi, etc) had any idea on what was really going on behind the scenes.

My local store was called the Dragon's Lair, it was originally located in Davenport Iowa, and I used to go in there time in and out and was pretty much a Mecca, ( or as much of one as you can find in Iowa) for all things gaming. Board games, SciFi, Fantasy, etc.etc.etc. This was at the time when the market was flooded with product, and everyone who was anyone was cranking out games. As the year's unfolded, ( the glory days of gaming, so to speak) we started seeing more and more of those crazy looking Citidal mini's that were cleaner and more character filled then the usual stuff that was flooding the market.

An example that I can give you is to take one of the pictures of the old school Citidal mini's, and compaire it to some of the other companies products that I'd mentioned. In as much as My situation, the D and D minis from Grenader were a step below what was cranked out by Citidal, and when we started seeing the old school Hogshead Fantasy, then up and coming Warhammer Fantasy Battles eventually started to coming into it's own. ( Before this, the large scale mini's market belonged to of all people Milton Bradley. In my area, we had Battlemasters, and then the games that eventually turned into Space Hulk, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and 40K boxed sets.) They all were being cranked out by Milton Bradly.

This was probibly around the same time as Avalon Hill's run, and the other war games days, but pretty much MB was THE game company to mainstream gaming, where you could go down to Yonkers, K mart, Target, and Green's ( or whatever your store was) and pick up toys, games and stuff. There were other games in terms of miniatures war games, and other mass produced game boxes with full to the gills minis for the game, but nothing that came out was compared to MB's precursure to GW's flagship games.

They eventually merged the mini's lines, and then started diverting from D and D guys to strictly GW's lines, and in the time or so right before the mass produced boxed sets of 30 or 20 guys, they had the couple of obligatory guys that made you go "WTF" when you saw them.

Tim Prow, was one of my particuar favorites, in the Ork and Grot lines, and eventually with the advent of the Freebooter book, they had me right by the gills.
Long story short, These guys were the only thing we had.
Compaired to what we see today, the old guys had character, but honesty ? Compaired to what we have today, they are garbage.

A caviot off of that to add is also that Rogue Trader was a completly different game. And the times dictated different needs for the mini's too.

We still needed the newest lickies and chewies, but the reasoning was because we actually really truly NEEDED them. They didn't have but maybe a hundred or so mini's that you needed to play the game with, and the company encouraged you to build and come up with your ownstuff for the games. That was both SCI-FI, and the Fantasy game.

Along with encourageing you, the miniatures game directly had an impact on the RPG. You "Needed" the guys to play with. Especially when you started running the moduals that started poping up. Drachenfelds, Murder of the Riech, etc. they pretty mcuh encouraged miniatures encounters.

A walk down memory lane, but I feel that it is important to put your question into perspective, and bring it into Context for those that haven't heard the timeline before. If you have, I hope I didn't bore you, if you other readers could, I once again stress that this is from my small part of the world, and very small part it was, so go ahead and add in your two cents.


Guys with more knowledge then I can probibly add in or clean up my "Official" timeline, but mine is mine. I lived this, so this is how I remember it.

I think it's one of those nostalgia things - if you started gaming (as I did) with the RT minis, they may hold a special place in your heart as the minis that got you into the game...

Slinky wrote:I think it's one of those nostalgia things - if you started gaming (as I did) with the RT minis, they may hold a special place in your heart as the minis that got you into the game...

+1. Though I do find a lot of those minis are (now) not so hot, there are specific parts of the range back then that have a special place.

Willhellm wrote:...What ever happen to all the diversity among the models, like back in the RT era of 40k? I've been on ebay trying to find as many of them as I can for my chaos army, and they just look so much better. There is very little uniformity to them, and at least for chaos, it feels like chaos. But you look at all of the models we have today and unless you look at them all close up, there isn't very much difference between two different models of a similar sort. Sure we have 7 head choices or so, and a few body choices, but they all look the same in the grand scheme of things....

In the past they relied on metal now they rely on plastic. In moving to plastic and demanding the miniatures have intercompatible components severly limits the variation. In plastic you could build an army using multiple copies of a single box set building 50+ different minis; when the models were only metal GW instead had to make a large number of individual metal models. One imposes generic aesthetics the other insists upon variety.

Don't know, maybe it's just me but I have been gaming since RT days and I can quite categorically say that I don't even think a comparison can be made between then and now. It's like night and day. Some of the RT era sculpts really look like they were hacked out of play-dough by an over-exuberant 2 year old. We really are spoiled today both in terms of sculpting quality and the versatility of plastic kits. The technology has come on in leaps and bounds.

There are some I've got soft spots for, like the old Marine Librarian holding the scroll, or the original Land Raider, but most of them are crap by today's standards.

That's very true, the technology has moved on so much, and the sculptors skills have developed along with it. In terms of overall aesthetic, you have to say a 95% of the new stuff is better, if one is to disregard nostalgia.

If any comparison can made favourably towards the older RT stuff, it's as has been said they had a lot more of a clean slate to work with in terms of concept. Some of the old Chaos Marines (based on the Slaves to Darkness books and the like) were mind-blowing, proper Moorcock-esque weirdness (in fact, true 'chaos') which IMO is a hundred times better than the modern conception we have now of 'chaos' (marines with more spikes on) shaking their fists angrily. You really couldn't understand those old models, and that was something I found frightening but also immensely appealing!

There were plenty of good figures sculpted in the old days, and plenty of crap as well. GW used to put out more models each year back then.

People are forgetting (or don't know about) the large numbers of character figures, licensed figures and so on, mostly fantasy, that GW used to make.

Some of their old sets were ace.

I generally approve of the modern models over RT, but I have to say, the old RT/2nd ed. Noise Marines were truly badass. Someone had been watching his GWAR videos...

Modern models are generally far better sculpted, more detailed, better designed, and more proportional. However, RT and 2nd ed models have a place in my heart, and I love using them. Just last week I used a force of purely RT-2nd ed Crimson Fists against a friend's Tau army. It was a lot of fun, and nice to see such diversity on the table.

The older models are often more characterful. Chaos had loads of different metal champions, they covered pages in the catalogue. There were some really weird mutations in there, every one unique. Now you get a handful of champions and special characters and they all just skulls and spikes. Now a lot of chaos armies look uniform, a 'mutation' today is a tentacle, under RT it was a face in the stomach, two heads, tails, scaly skin, eye stalks, claws, hooves, animal faces...

I find that the only really stand out armies now are those that have been very heavily converted, most are obviously sourced from the same figures so that many use the same space marine commander figure or chaos lord figure. They are generic and uniform. Maybe that's what people want now because GW push for the big games and the kids can't cope with metal stuff or figures that all need to be individually painted rather then generically in blocks.

Look at the plastic chaos space marines. They all look roughly the same, of there's a few different bits but they're just space marines with more pointy bits. Is that what chaos is now? Now look at the RT chaos Marines, they are warped and every one an individual. Rather than being Marines in black/gold armour and hairy bits sticking out of their heads, they are really lost to chaos.

Now...


Then...



And there's pages of them.

http://www.solegends.com/citcat911/c2106chaosrenegades.htm
http://www.solegends.com/citcat911/c2107chaosrenegades.htm
http://www.solegends.com/citcat911/c2109chaosrenegadeheavie.htm
http://www.solegends.com/citcat911/c2110chaosmarines.htm

All different. Now they just give you a box of bits to stick together and pretend that moving the arms around or putting on a tentacle counts as 'variation' before spraying them into some homogeneous black and gold mass.

It's with good reason there's a strong second hand market for these. You people saying they were all poorly sculpted rubbish, you don't know what you're talking about. They had soul and character and were gorgeous. Now it's just s--t.

I too was around when Citadel miniatures first started showing up in the hobby stores. As was mentioned earlier, they raised the bar over what other companies were offering at the time.
I still like their older sculpts though. Back then Citadel figures were more of a caricature of their subject than an attempt at grimdark like we see in todays figures. WHFB was meant to be a fun beer & pretzels game then and the figures went right along with that. But the games have changed over the years.

You can see this for yourself at www.solegends.com
Just browse through the early citadel catalouge pages.

Howard A Treesong wrote:You people saying they were all poorly sculpted rubbish, you don't know what you're talking about. They had soul and character and were gorgeous. Now it's just s--t.

I really like a number of the RT era models, have a couple in every army. I think the issues and opinions with them being "poor" come partially from the poorer casting quality and the fact they contained lead allowing them to more easily deform. The strongest advantage to doing so many minis was it allowed their sculptors to take risks and make creative modeling choices. I think a number of these model have questionable posing and composition, but there are some real gems in the RT era. I think the real distinction between the quality of sculpting now and then, is just that there are generally fewer bad models relative to the number of good models... consistency has improved and today poor models mostlly come up when a new sculptor comes in.

Thanks Howard for all the pictures of the old renegades. That's definitely a real help. And I agree completely about the uniformity, you said it a lot better than I did in the first post.

starhawks1 wrote:I hate old models. Honestly, I don't understand how anyone can truly think they look better, they are nothing short of revolting, if a newer, much better, plastic model is available, why use older ones?

One good reason is to not be like everyone else. Why would I want to be a part of the herd? If my opponent thinks they're revolting, all the better. His nausea gives me the upper hand. Plus, my Guardsmen and Squats are literally older than most of my opponents, why should I care what they think?

Ahhh....Squats (Sniff), how I miss thee!

I dont like the old models. I think they take 40k and throw it into the large bin of "cheesy 80's sci-fi" stuff. I got into 40k because of the look at the atmosphere that the world has. If I had seen the RT models instead of the current plastic ones, I must say I would have ignored it and never considered it again.

I have a mix of them in my Salamanders, I got a whole bunch of them through some bits trades with a friend because he could not strip the paint the previous owner had put on the minis, so I am lucky enough to have veteran sergeants that are actually older than the new marines, and I like that.

Noise Marines never looked better than they did in the 80s.



Not my model, I found this image through google. I always wanted one of these because later Noise Marines just didn't do it for me, especially the current type.

Howard A Treesong wrote:It's with good reason there's a strong second hand market for these. You people saying they were all poorly sculpted rubbish, you don't know what you're talking about. They had soul and character and were gorgeous. Now it's just s--t.

Maybe we don't know what we're talking about. Then again, maybe you just have a nigh-offensively strong bias, due to personal history and the resultant emotional attachment and/or personal aesthetic preference.

Sure, some of the current kits can be a bit bland without a smattering of conversion, but they're downright sexy by comparison. What you call "characterful," I call "goofy, awkwardly posed, and horribly proportioned." The variety afforded by such a large number of individual models is mitigated by the fact that many are solid metal castings. With troops in any significant number, you'll end up converting just as heavily as with plastic kits to keep each model unique, since you have less flexibility (if any) in the pose.

I'd love a few random, goofy, characterful orks to spice up my army, but I'll convert them - there's no way in hell I'd pick up old models to get them. Yes, they had expressions beyond "Waaagh!" but that usually amounted to a universal "hunched over gun" pose and a face that looked like like a collagen-laden grandmother smirking with all the off-putting intensity of a pedophile watching the local schoolyard.

Basically, I'm all for variety, and old models certainly offered that in their singles. The thing is, you can get just as much variety by putting in about the same amount of work nowadays, with the added benefit of base models for conversion that don't look like boiled ass with a dash of creepy and/or goofy. If you want to pretend that one era is objectively better than the other, the current models are going trample the old ones. It's exclusively a matter of personal preference and mine rests 98% with later models.

You of course are free from all emotional bias and attachment due to personal history.

Tons of the modern models are ridiculously proportioned.

ITT people have different aesthetic preferences...

One man's meat is another's poison and so forth...

That is quite true of course.

Even so, lots of the modern figures are very mis-proportioned in terms of their scale relation to actual human bodies.

This can be a valid aesthetic choice, of course, but it is still objectively true.

Agamemnon2 wrote:
One good reason is to not be like everyone else. Why would I want to be a part of the herd? If my opponent thinks they're revolting, all the better. His nausea gives me the upper hand. Plus, my Guardsmen and Squats are literally older than most of my opponents, why should I care what they think?

+1.

I don't build an army for my opponent - I build it for myself, with models that appeal to ME.
Like Aga, many of my minis are older than my opponents (hell, many are older than the local GW employees).

I put it this way. MANY younger people like Twilight and Justin Bieber. This does not necessarily make either good. Just because you loathe older models also doesn't make your viewpoint the right one for anyone but you (except it might possibly mark you as a delusional teenager).