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the new multi part death guard have come out, yet from the looks of the sprues they are still combined torsos-legs

This seems to be a trend with everything new (understandable to a point with boxed sets and starter packs for beginners) but when Khan, and now even standard-ish troops are all mono pose or limited in scope it is very disappointing
are we likely to see this forever from now on?

FW on the other hand with the at ease DKOK are wonderfully posed and have impressed me the most this year, not just static so aside from the lowerd production cost why are GW doing this?

for someone who converts everything to attempt and try to give dynamic realistic poses or just so i never have to face a mirror army id never buy Khan because of the pose he is in (/opinion swing an imaginary axe while running and try ending as outstretched as Khans arm is at that height and angle)

have there been any new models with the old approach of two toros halfs, seperate legs, head arms etc where every part is poseable and full not smooth on one side?


to counter point this, there could be some argument that you can achieve a deeper level of product detail and intricacy on the models themselves, otherwise you have to spend time printing detail in areas that may/may not be hidden
and i assume many just build by numbers

The new models don't seem to be the way you're portrtaying them. Looking at the Primaris Intercessors and Reivers, the torsos and legs are fixed, but you've got a free option when it comes to heads and arms. The torsos and legs appear to be done the way they are to produce just the sort of "realistic poses" you're looking for, in that the torso armour plates twist as the torso rotates.

Presumably the Death Guard will be the same.

i understand what you mean, that the models can be detailed with the armour plates twisting and thus achieves a realistic approach compared to older individual parts that have no correlation to each other

but this restricts;
where you can have the head looking,
what the arms are doing and the position theyre in
whether the marine is swinging his weapon, taking aim, etc would all affect the tilt of the body and angle
you wouldnt have your feet and torso pointing right if your looking dead left, if your swinging a chainsword your body would be tilted one way or the other

i suppose its more about restriction that improving, if the torso and legs are already posed a certain way, the head and arms have to follow

i guess its an argument of modular parts and individualism over increased detail and GW doing most of the building for you the payoff being segments interact

I certainly hope not. But indications from recent releases suggest monopose may be the way forward for large detailed releases i.e. DG and Primaris.

The only experience I have with this is the Kharadron arkanaut and I don’t mind too much since there is lots of arm options and head options for variety. Now if the DG are monopose like failcast Kroot hounds we have a problem.

Good points here. I will say while more restrictive than what we're used to, the recent 40k releases are les monopose than the handful of AoS minis I have. Really turned me off to them. Compared to some of those the primaris ones aren't too bad.

As mentioned above i can see it being more of a trend, simply because it facilitates higher detail, alongside more complex and cohesive appearing minis.

Those death guard wouldn't look anywhere near as good with clear defined gaps between torso and legs, you'd have to remove any elements that span the verticality of the mini.

Would you prefer more parts to a model with less detail/visual impact, or a more grand design image and complex minis with restrictive poses? I'm sure there's a line to be struck but it'll take a few goes before they reach it.

While i do love monoposing i hope they restric it to bog standard troops only, but if AoS is the guide line, they wont.

heros should be flexipose as they are natural fokus points.

Death guard I can understand; most of them have details that would be impossible to achieve without preset poses.

However there's little reason to do so with Intercessors as they have clearly-defined joints that can hide such gaps with ease. I get the feeling this is yet another step taken to minimize 3rd party sellers, but it's kinda short sighted and ultimately will not work (third party bitzmakers will simply find other ways to make bitz for them).

I really hope this trend ends soon, as ultimately it's a lose-lose for everyone involved (why bother with the expensive monoposed Death Guard or Intercessor kits when Dark Imperium exists and people are breaking them down all the time?)

it does depend on what you get out of miniatures

no matter the detail id hate to play a game where i face someone where both of our models are posed the same, just different paint schemes

id take less detail and more parts,as this allows more conversion, more use out of the minis

When i collected lost and dammed i mixed, skaven, humans, orks, empire, skeletons, undead and chaos marauders
just to make the cultists (cant remember what they were called, mutants?),
Compare the level of choice if everything is already built and just waiting for you to glue the correct arms in place to fit the poise and direction of the mini

conversly, there are those that would just prefer more detail, and maybe even eventually buy fully pre-built
as armour can interact, pieces can span from the torso and other areas, and ultimatley money is spent on what you see of the mini, not trying to cover every possible angle!

For HQ units this is the biggest offense to me, the 'center point' of your army and what you embody as your commander, looks like the other 12000 peoples maybe mines blue yours red, but effectivley its not your choice but the person who desgined it.

Let's compare the old Chaos Marine kit with the new Primaris Marines from Dark Imperium. I use the CSM kit because I've built so many of them and am most familiar with it.

You had two pieces, back and front, for the torso. Legs were pretty much one pose, with a variety of different styles, some with different spikes or trim. Then you had two arms, two shoulder pads, the backpack, and the head and gun.

The Intercessors were two pieces, usually front and back, that would have the entire torso and legs. There were two pieces that would make up the gun and arm all in one, then there's the backpack and head. With a tiny bit of trimming, the head could be posed any way you like.

The old Chaos Marines always had this wide split-leg stance and really, there was only one pose.

In 5 of the Intercessors, there are different stances, from walking forward with different legs forward, turning, or standing at attention. Even though all of the legs were the same exact armor, the pose of them was much more natural and varied than the old Chaos Marine kit.

Even though you had a lot more control over how you put the pieces together in the old Chaos Marine kit, the poses ended up... pretty much all the same. Guns might point at different angles and heads might look in different directions, but because of the way the legs worked, there wasn't a lot you could do without a lot of modding.

The new Intercessors, however, all look different and much more dynamic. Not just more dynamic, but more natural as well. The same goes for the the new Death Guard models! The old Plague Marine kit had the same problem as the old Chaos Marine kit. Static poses. Even though the sculpts were varied, the poses were stiff and unnatural.

Now, we have a force that looks like it's truly moving forward.

That said, the main concern with these mono-pose models is that if you get two kits (let's say two Blightlord Terminator kits), you're going to see some very samey models. It's a bit ridiculous to think that two Blightlords would have the exact same mutations, but if you stick two of the insect carapace looking guys next to each other without any weapon swaps, they look real samey real fast.

Two Dark Imperium sets facing off against each other are going to look exactly the same. There are tons of the Gravis Captain around the world, all with the same exact pose. Every Noxious Blightbringer, every Biologis Putrifier, all of these models have very little option for customization to make the model truly YOURS. Sure, you can convert, but different people have different skill levels of that.

It all comes down to what you prefer. Do you prefer more customization, or do you prefer higher quality, more dynamic models?

I'm kinda salty because I'm a conversion freak; I love mingling and mangling models on my workbench.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
While i do love monoposing i hope they restric it to bog standard troops only, but if AoS is the guide line, they wont.

heros should be flexipose as they are natural fokus points.

Sorry, but I think this is bass ackwards.

Why multipose the odd character which likely only features once in a list, when multiples would still only require a few conversions, and be content with monopose line troops which will far likely feature multiple times in every list?

For lowly grunts: I prefer customization. I don't mind if my Ork Boy numer 76 has a slightly awkard pose in his arms or legs, but if I have only 5-10 poses for models where I need 100 of them, It is gonna become old very fast.

For elite models and HQ's: I prefer a more limited possability for more natural and good looking poses. But at the same time, to compensate for that, I like to have tons of customization even if the poses are fixed, like the BlightKings kit. The Blightlords are a cool kit, but they should have much more bits for customization, so even if the legs and part of the torsos are always the same, with heads, torsos and arms, I can still built many different looking elite-units.
For the HQ's I understand more restrain in customization, but personally I don't like models with 0 options. If they are special characters, ok sure, but generic HQ's should always same some bitzs for variety and weapon options.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
While i do love monoposing i hope they restric it to bog standard troops only, but if AoS is the guide line, they wont.

heros should be flexipose as they are natural fokus points.

Sorry, but I think this is bass ackwards.

Why multipose the odd character which likely only features once in a list, when multiples would still only require a few conversions, and be content with monopose line troops which will far likely feature multiple times in every list?

I'm gonna get blasted for this most likely, but speaking for myself as I'm embarking upon building my Guardsmen en masse...

I'd be okay with multipose characters because you can devote a bit more time to building them without feeling burnt out.
The basic infantry or units you might have in large quantities are a bit friendlier in monopose, as you can assembly line things a bit without feeling too burnt out.

I get irritated building more than 10 Cadians at a time. I've broken everything up into squads at this point, all in ziploc bags with the parts needed inside.

I can see some merit in an easy to build option for armies that field a large number of infantry, but I think that should be an option, not the only choice. So you'd maybe buy one Cadian multi pose kit and then a couple packs of easy build monopose to bulk them out, but for things like the Death Guard? Nah.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I can see some merit in an easy to build option for armies that field a large number of infantry, but I think that should be an option, not the only choice. So you'd maybe buy one Cadian multi pose kit and then a couple packs of easy build monopose to bulk them out, but for things like the Death Guard? Nah.

I think, personally, that with regards to the Death Guard the kit that is getting released is fairly nice. They seem to have a good selection of stuff to choose from and it looks like some of the parts can be placed on not just a single body but multiples of them. I feel like stuff of that nature goes a long way when you have these kinds of monopose models. I definitely have noticed that with regards to my Eternal Guard/Wildwood Rangers in that the kit despite being monopose actually has more room for unique or interesting poses compared to the multipart Glade Guard.

The big downside for Death Guard is the 7 models for $50 though.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
I wouldn't mind the demi-monopose grunt kits if 40k didn't require you to buy so damned many of them. A skirmish game with monopose plastics? 100% okay. Malifaux does the same thing. Yet 40k requires dozens of miniatures and so the repeat poses will be much more noticeable. Right now it's not so much of a problem since they're doing it with sort of elite armies but I would hate it if they did this with, say, a remake of the Ork boyz kit.

Can I throw a small suggestion your way?

Try doing slight variations with the color palette you're working with in these kinds of circumstances. It actually can make a huge difference. Same goes for minor things like putting grenades or pouches in different spots or using different heads/helmets where you're able to.

I wouldn't mind the demi-monopose grunt kits if 40k didn't require you to buy so damned many of them. A skirmish game with monopose plastics? 100% okay. Malifaux does the same thing. Yet 40k requires dozens of miniatures and so the repeat poses will be much more noticeable. Right now it's not so much of a problem since they're doing it with sort of elite armies but I would hate it if they did this with, say, a remake of the Ork boyz kit.

Let's not kid ourselves here.

The classic multipose model is really 4 sculpts of each body piece that can be combined into minor variations of the "taking a poop standing up" pose with little rotation really possible in the belt and shoulder joints before it starts looking unnatural. Most of the time, an army of 10 different monopose sculpts will usually look more diverse than an army of "multi-part" sculpts that are really just the same model looking slightly more to the left or slightly more to the right.

That depends on the density of models you have. The human eye is trained to look for patterns and even if you only have 4 true variations on the same object, just assembling them in a different way can bring much more variety than 10 completely different, but pre-posed, models.

like people said, in small scale games it wouldn't be an issue. but if you're running 30-100 of the models and there's only 5-7 identical copies among them, it's gonna start being noticable.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Let's not kid ourselves here.

The classic multipose model is really 4 sculpts of each body piece that can be combined into minor variations of the "taking a poop standing up" pose with little rotation really possible in the belt and shoulder joints before it starts looking unnatural. Most of the time, an army of 10 different monopose sculpts will usually look more diverse than an army of "multi-part" sculpts that are really just the same model looking slightly more to the left or slightly more to the right.

Death Watch aren't posed like that and those minor differences can be everything. As said, the human brain is wired to look for patterns.

I am finding that I really prefer the Death Guard just the way they are, in terms of joints and poses. As has been mentioned above, multipart kits with separate legs and torsos really only have one pose with a degree of rotation at the waist, shoulders and neck. The Plague Marines have much more interesting poses than you could create without some pretty severe conversion work if they had separate legs and torsos. Even out of the DI Plague Marines you have 7 distinct leg poses, and every single one of the miniatures can easily be altered to allow for the same kind of freedom in posing arms and heads that you would have with any other multipart kit (maybe with the exception of the champion). I am in the middle of converting 4 sets of DI Plague Marines, and they can be made to look completely different from the stock variation with just some subtle alterations, all while keeping the distinct lumbering gait of the Death Guard. Throw in the fact that you can change chest plates in the new Plague Marine kit and it won't be hard to create many models that have their own character, even though every 1/14 might have a repeating leg pose.

I am probably in the minority here but I say fuse the legs and torsos as much as possible if it allows for more dynamic poses. I'm a fan.

What I'm not a fan of is the dearth of weapon options in the Death Guard kits. One of each weapon just is not enough, and if you want to equip your squads like a sane person you are forced to kitbash or buy inane amounts of multiples in order to do so. Fuse the legs and torsos; use the space that frees up to give us more weapons!