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Yea, Dungeon Saga was a massive letdown, in a long line of dungeon crawler massive letdowns (going well beyond Mantic's purview)

Is this the one?

IS IT?

EoD Preview

What an utterly worthless video

Thanks for the pics

Oof, those are some soft details and thick weapons.

I mean, they are "OK". Maybe it's the nostalgia, but the ancient GW multipart skeletons from the late 90's/early 2000's, with the Tomb King add-ons are STILL better skeletons than those.

yea, those are a solid ok at best for me

They look awesome to me, especially the horsey-dudes. There’s also a pseudo-khopesh close combat weapon option shown on Facebook that looks better than the spears or the bows.


I’ll probably make a handful for fantasy tussles, but the majority are getting cut up to fit onto WGA Egyptians or someone chanmailed for use in Sci Fi gaming. The helmets are hopefully large enough for the skull faces to pass as faceplates, otherwise I’ll have to Face/Off.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
What an utterly worthless video

Thanks for the pics

He was trying to demonstrate how they looked from across the table view.
So critical.

more pics:




Army & Mega Army:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
What an utterly worthless video

Agreed, they could introduce them so much better. As to minis they are definitely not the best skellies out there but they are great for what they are made for = rank&file games. Having all the options is even better. Now give me the updated medieval ones (aka not Vampire Counts ones)!

The actual skulls on those look pretty rubbish.

Other than that, I'm most thoroughly whelmed. Far from the worst skellies I've seen but they're not exactly good. The 'Notshubati' would be pretty decent if it weren't for whatever weirdness is going on in the unarmoured sections.

Mantic should just buy the rights to one of the many $10 3d print patreons that have much better sculptors than Mantic.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Mantic should just buy the rights to one of the many $10 3d print patreons that have much better sculptors than Mantic.

Agree. The details on these is about on par with their original elves and skeletons. Not looking for GW level of over detailing things but these don’t make me want to buy

Thanks for reposting the pics, I can't be bothered to watch any of these videos that game companies put out to "hype up" their releases / meet the demands of social media algorithms.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Mantic should just buy the rights to one of the many $10 3d print patreons that have much better sculptors than Mantic.

In Mantic's defense, I think it's admirable that these EoD look different from the dozens of not-Tomb Kings 3D sculpts on the market at this point (thanks to the heavy use of cloth and non-GW armor). I'm not going to argue they're better than the 3D offerings, which run the gamut of delightfully simpler (One Print Rules) to deliciously overwrought (Arch Villain Games), but it's still relevant to provide traditionally produced not-Egyptian Undead as of June 2022. And I suppose when it comes to just buying one of the several not-TK 3D lines out and producing them, it does seem important that the EOD look like the other Mantic minis, as hamfisted as they can be at times.

Overall? These seem fine and I'm happy to see another KOW line expand significantly. I'm hoping rumors of chariots is true, those are badly needed on the market in general, and a bit rough to 3D print if you don't have a large bed printer (doing 1 chariot at a time on my Mars is a drag).

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Mantic should just buy the rights to one of the many $10 3d print patreons that have much better sculptors than Mantic.

and hoping that every Mantic costumer has a 3D printer at home?
or that people are willing to pay resin prices for basic infantry?

not like you can just take any 3d design and make it into plastic models

No, I'm just saying there's literally hundreds of better sculptors in this hobby but Mantic clearly can't afford to commission anyone who's already making a middle class wage on Patreon, so we're getting sprues designed on Fiverr apparently.

well, who of those on Patreon that is better designs plastic models?

just because someone makes 3D files to print with resin does not mean they are better designers and can make better looking HIPS models

as far as I know Mantic has the same commissioned designer for alle models, so the one who makes the Resin Salamanders also makes the plastic stuff

and there the limitation is not the design but the process as you have to find the middle ground between too complicated and time consuming to assemble and looks very good (and the main complain you read nowadays is that they the older models too complicated to build)

just going to a designer who makes files for a printer (and usually only 1 type of printer) and assume the HIPS models will look identical is a waste of money and time

 kodos wrote:
well, who of those on Patreon that is better designs plastic models?

just because someone makes 3D files to print with resin does not mean they are better designers and can make better looking HIPS models

Yup, this in a nutshell. The actual pool of sculptors with experience in sculpting for plastic is fairly small, and I suspect that as a result most of them will be in active employment rather than lurking on Patreon.


These look fine to me. My one big issue with them was that the drapery looks a bit off... but going by the unpainted models in the video, at least some of that would seem to be from the painting rather than the sculpts.

for my liking there is too much drapery/fabric/cloth on the models
I can see why the horses are as they are, compared to the old pure bone undead horses from GW and that people complain about the Enforcer legs, doing it that way makes handling them much easier (those are still gaming models)

Overall I like them, a less colourful paint scheme should work really well here like white or black fabric instead of the blue

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I mean, they are "OK". Maybe it's the nostalgia, but the ancient GW multipart skeletons from the late 90's/early 2000's, with the Tomb King add-ons are STILL better skeletons than those.

On a personal note, I've been collecting undead for 20 years now. Those old, bow legged skeletons are still rock solid models, if outdated.

The wargames Atlantic skeletons are a definite step up in detail with a change of theme. They are also thick enough to withstand wargaming, and being naked are easy to change theme by using different shields.

Oathmark skellies remind me of the skeleton horde box GW made before the bow legged skeletons we've both mentioned. Very thin models, prone to breakage.

Warlord games/ wargames factory are also similarly thin and breakable.

The new soulblight skeletons from GW are great, but the Femur's snap easily during assembly.

Mantic's intial skeletons/revenants are a 7/10 detail wise. They unfortunately suffer from odd details (like the army of darkness grinning skulls) and are not as adaptable due to integrated shields and a mass amount of cloth.

If the new EoD are better than the old skeletons I'll eat my hat though. The old skeletons were tooled by Renendra and are (or were, when i built 300 of them) crisp. Mantic's new plastics have had a tendency to be soft on detail, and especially towards the left and right sides of the torso/legs. This is most noticeable on the newer stormforged orcs.

These are just... 2000s era quality. They aren't distinctly bad per say, but they are 15 years out of date. The prices will need to be really dam good to seriously move these.

it is also noticable on the Warpath Marauders

the chinese manufactorer combined with a solid body (legs+torso) does not work well on chunky models, while the Halflings look fine
so I don't expect the same problem with the EoD as those are thinner

But in the long run, Mantic need to get their production back to Europe

 kodos wrote:
it is also noticable on the Warpath Marauders

the chinese manufactorer combined with a solid body (legs+torso) does not work well on chunky models, while the Halflings look fine
so I don't expect the same problem with the EoD as those are thinner

But in the long run, Mantic need to get their production back to Europe

Its not the fact that the manufacturer is in china. Wargames atlantic produced plenty of sets when they had their manufacturing in china last year, and they are all fine.

Its this specific manufacturer, and potentially one of a few problem vectors: Bad engineering or bad sculpting (always a potential, although I doubt a sculptor would leave the sides of the torso's so softly detailed.) would likely be the culprit.

I meant their current manufactorer in china, as far as I know, they had different ones over time and each one with different problems and this one now does not get chunky models right

and also WGA tries to move out from China, for different reasons but still
doing away from China would solve some problems, one being able to react faster (or at all) to such problems without a large delay

WGA has the advantage that they can wait for a specific kit to be done right, if they would release a boxed set with rules and having 1 faction ready while the other one sees a 6 months delay because of bad engineering it would look different

 kodos wrote:
I meant their current manufactorer in china, as far as I know, they had different ones over time and each one with different problems and this one now does not get chunky models right

and also WGA tries to move out from China, for different reasons but still
doing away from China would solve some problems, one being able to react faster (or at all) to such problems without a large delay

WGA has the advantage that they can wait for a specific kit to be done right, if they would release a boxed set with rules and having 1 faction ready while the other one sees a 6 months delay because of bad engineering it would look different

Point taken.

I've always loved tomb king looks and the more Egyptian themed undead.

Sadly these are already looking dated to me, they have a weird lack of crisp detail and any character to make me latch onto them.

Honestly with their armour and cloth I would of prefered them as normal humans

Hard to make out much from the pics, since there aren't closeups or sprue pics.

Cavalry look great. I think a different paint scheme than primary blue would help, along with some variation in the colour of the metal.

Looking at the distribution of minis in army set vs. mega army it looks like the cavalry will be a separate kit rather than combined like the halflings were.

From what I understand, this is one of Mantic's best-selling armies (even with the old minis) so it makes sense that they've gone back to it with hard plastics. It's nice to see an older mini line getting the attention.

If the sides of the torso are an issue it's probably an indication that the person sculpting wasn't paying enough attention to the needs of the mould maker in making sure that when the figure was cut there were no overhangs that would stick in the mould

and the person doing the cutting the file for mould making didn't talk to the sculptor after doing so and fudged the edges to make them work in the mould

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
If the sides of the torso are an issue it's probably an indication that the person sculpting wasn't paying enough attention to the needs of the mould maker in making sure that when the figure was cut there were no overhangs that would stick in the mould

and the person doing the cutting the file for mould making didn't talk to the sculptor after doing so and fudged the edges to make them work in the mould

Exactly. There should have been at least two review and revision processes before tooling occurred.

 McDougall Designs wrote:

Exactly. There should have been at least two review and revision processes before tooling occurred.

Those words aren't in Mantic's vocabulary. Time and again it's pretty obvious they just send the first concept to production withoutr a second thought. They do with minis what GW does with rules.