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I actually still have a ton of the plastic High Elf spearmen from then, as I love the sculpting(infinitely superior to the current hamfist high elf spearmen - look at those older plastic HE archers you posted, their hands are reasonable!). I think I have 2 regiments of metal high elf spearmen and 1 30-man regiment of the plastics... and roughly 100 metal archers, hah.


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 Azazelx wrote:

Well, bearing in mind that many of the Plastic Brettonian and Empire kits are just oversized/heroic scale Perry historicals, I don't see a huge deal overall. If that's your own aesthetic, then fine - and I can appreciate the shields.

Are they? The difference is that Perry plastic kits are exquisitely detailed and high quality. The plastic Bretonnian and Empire soldiers kits are some of the ugliest and worst designed plastic soldiers on the market. While Mantic's men-at-arms are certainly inferior to most of Perry, Fireforge, Warlord kits, they are orders of magnitude better than GW's monkey-faced shoesless Empire shitsoldiers and that laughable construct-your-own-dirty-peasant-action-figure Bretonnian set.

You're confusing concepts that you don't like with sculpt quality.
The brettonian peasants are well designed and have a lot of detail, a whack of bits and some of the most characterful and delicate faces that GW has produced in plastic.
I haven't picked up any of the new Empire soldiers so I want comment too much other than to say that shoelessness isn't a quality issue, it's a design choice.

Workmanlike paint jobs aren't rescuing the MaAs, but there's only so much paint can do when your design brief is something like "your uncle wearing a five year olds knight costume, but not in a wacky way, he thinks he looks awesome" and then hiring a sculptor that isn't in love with his work.

 plastictrees wrote:
You're confusing concepts that you don't like with sculpt quality.
The brettonian peasants are well designed and have a lot of detail, a whack of bits and some of the most characterful and delicate faces that GW has produced in plastic.
I haven't picked up any of the new Empire soldiers so I want comment too much other than to say that shoelessness isn't a quality issue, it's a design choice.

Workmanlike paint jobs aren't rescuing the MaAs, but there's only so much paint can do when your design brief is something like "your uncle wearing a five year olds knight costume, but not in a wacky way, he thinks he looks awesome" and then hiring a sculptor that isn't in love with his work.

Yes, I agree! the Bretonnian peasants are well designed plastic clip together toy figures with delightful cartoon character faces. They are the exact opposite of the brilliant Perry Bretonnian sculpts that came before them. One design aesthetic was: "Hey Perry brothers, make really well sculpted fantasy-based medieval French figures that will be sought-after long after we discontinue the figures even though no one plays the army anymore", and the other was "totally ignore our previous designs and make some toys based on the King Arthur and the Knights of Justice cartoon from 1992". Now, the King Arthur and the Knights of Justice cartoon certainly has it's fans, just as the plastic Brets have their fans. I can't for the life of me figure out WHY.

For some reason I actually own some of the plastics Brets. I also own shedloads of Perry and Warlord plastics (AWI, Napoleonics, ECW, WW2, etc) and _all design choices aside_, the GW plastic Brets - like most of their infantry kits - are inferior to everyone else's. It's blown my mind that so many of GW's basic infantry are pretty crap. My billions of points of Empire has mostly 4th ed metal infantry and Perry-designed 5th/6th plastic infantry; my ginormous HE army has hundreds of metal oop archers and spearmen because the HE hamfist plastic infantry blows; and there's not a damn thing I can do for my 300 Tomb Kings skeletons.... everyone else in the army ('cept good ol' Meatball Head Liche Priest) looks leagues better than those plastic skeletons :( Every other plastic infantry manufacturer on the market makes better plastic infantry - quality and design - except for maybe Eccentric, and that is just a guy in his garage.

Even if Mantic's Men at Arms figures turn out to be mediocre (which looks like there's a good chance of that), that still makes them basically the best generic plastic fantasy 28mm soldiers on the market. Which now makes me wonder why no one has just designed a good plastic 28mm fantasy human kit. There's no real competition.

^ They all think that no-one will buy it because historicals exist.

Mantic themselves held off of making the human army for a very long time for this reason, they assumed everyone wanted to buy historicals instead.

I'll do a little review of the M@A's (along with the rest of the KS stuff) when I receive it. Really hoping it'll be better than I expect in a lot of areas... the tooling quality on the sprues has to be the #1 concern after the infamous chinese goblins.

No sprue pics so far makes me nervous considering they ship in 2 weeks. Mantic never posted an official sprue pic of the goblins either, despite every other hard plastic release before that point getting one.

 judgedoug wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:

Well, bearing in mind that many of the Plastic Brettonian and Empire kits are just oversized/heroic scale Perry historicals, I don't see a huge deal overall. If that's your own aesthetic, then fine - and I can appreciate the shields.

Are they? The difference is that Perry plastic kits are exquisitely detailed and high quality. The plastic Bretonnian and Empire soldiers kits are some of the ugliest and worst designed plastic soldiers on the market. While Mantic's men-at-arms are certainly inferior to most of Perry, Fireforge, Warlord kits, they are orders of magnitude better than GW's monkey-faced shoesless Empire shitsoldiers and that laughable construct-your-own-dirty-peasant-action-figure Bretonnian set.

I'll admit that it's entirely possible that I have the older plastics of Empire and Bret, as I picked them up quite awhile ago. Having said that. the designs are based on historicals and have been for decades, despite nominally being "fantasy" figures - with the capital-F-fantasy element being much more pronounced with character models and oddball units like flagellants.

 Azazelx wrote:

I'll admit that it's entirely possible that I have the older plastics of Empire and Bret, as I picked them up quite awhile ago. Having said that. the designs are based on historicals and have been for decades, despite nominally being "fantasy" figures - with the capital-F-fantasy element being much more pronounced with character models and oddball units like flagellants.

ahh yeah, the plastic multipose Empire soldiers from 5th/6th were sculpted by the Perry's. they're still actively used by historical wargamers for some certain periods (esp Italian medieval/ren)
I am talking about the newest 7th/8th Empire plastics and the last plastic Bret kits.

Looks like the last of the kickstarter ships soon. Yay!

Does anyone here happen to have a Mantic forum account? if so could you please post the pictures of the Men at Arms plastic sprue from the thread below. (I'd post them myself, but my newly created Mantic account doesn't have access to view images yet...)
http://forum.manticblog.com/showthread.php?5242-Basileans-just-arrived

The first impressions from that thread don't sound to promising, when even Scarletsquig calls something produced by Mantic 'Poor' it really has me concerned about the quality of the miniatures.

Actually I think they're not as bad as these blown-up shots make them look initially. remember you're viewing them at about 300-400% magnification on an average monitor; while I'm not entirely happy and think it could have been better the chainmail is my only real issue with them (and we all know how little that tends to matter when base, dry, wash, dry is how you paint it anyway...)

SS had really, really high hopes for these so that might have coloured his opinion, too - besides, he's certainly not one of the usual fan-choir suspects on the mantic boards.

Very disappointed. It's a fair price for fair-quality fantasy infantry, but it could have been so much better. The real kicker is when you compare the Mantic sprue above to the Perry Men at arms sprue which is from a set that is actually less expensive per-miniature with far more options:


It's a stark contrast (and that's only showing one of the two sprue types in the set!) and pretty bleak for Mantic. More pics and comparisons here http://www.reviewingwargames.com/wargamereviews/perrywotr.html
Now the Perry brothers are legend and their WotR figs aren't technically fantasy, but I still scoff at the idea of paying more for less figs that aren't as nice and have less options.

I am so glad I changed my choice from Basilean's to Ogres. Would have been better if I hadn't of pledged at all though I think.

I am a big supporter of Mantic, but they really have slumped badly. If this is the quality of plastic they get back from China, even if they have great 3d sculpts from their designers they will be in poor shape when they are finally cast.

Mantic's sprues are indeed disappointingly bare. When they finally do make a plastic sprue like this - one with so much potential they really need to learn to go all out. (Both sculpting-wise and cramming the suckers full of bits/bobs to make the most of it).

At first I saw the perry sprue and I was like "awesome!" and then I scrolled up to the previous posts.

Yikes. That's disappointing.
Watching Manticore releases has been a real roller coaster lately. The KoW stuff really doesn't seem to have lived up to its potential. Those early greens following the KS were very encouraging.
On the flip side the latest dreadball pics and the deadzone sculpts are pretty solid.

I'll do a review once I have my 200+ men-at-arms in-hand, but it's not looking good. Roughly on a par with the goblins it seems, only this time, the tooling looks to be better, but the sculpting looks to be a lot worse.

The chainmail is just plain lazy. Anyone who has a mantic skeleton sprue can see what properly-done chainmail looks like, each link is sculpted, the detail is extremely fine and it looks amazing.

On these models it's just a bunch of circles in neat rows and columns, without any attempt to sculpt links or without even bothering to alternate rows... this basic "poke holes in a flat surface" technique is what people did back in the 80s when they wanted to sculpt chainmail, it's a bit shocking to still see it still used on a sculpt from a modern company paying thousands for plastic tooling.

About the heads... I'm wondering if they are supposed to have mouthpieces/ masks on and the official models were painted incorrectly?

Like this:



I can't think of any other possible way for the giant lips and mouth area to make sense. Surely it has to be a mask?

If they are supposed to have mouthpiece mask, that'd be okay, and would look pretty awesome I think! Would give them a nice crazy religious cult look.

Mantic's painters have screwed up royally when painting minis before (corporation boots painted as if they were skinny turnup jeans) so it is a very real possibility that the heads aren't that bad and the painting made the models look worse.

If anyone with the minis in-hand can let me know what you think on that point that'd be great, I still have no idea if I'll need to replace the heads or not.

I think I'll be fine with using the models, they'll look alright in large blocks etc. I mainly bought them as gaming pieces so from that perspective I'm fine with them.

Then again, I'm happy to buy the mantic goblins for bulk horde purposes (they're not that bad, the sculpts are great but the tooling is a bit "mushy" which really lets them down)... they're a bizarre case where the hybrid metals are much better minis than the plastics (and the same price, too!).

As they are at the moment the only way it seems to salvage these miniatures is to use alternative heads, find some better hands, replace the legs and torso with Perry Miniatures figures, and you should be good. And also perhaps the arms and feet.

Even the shields don't make much sense. I know they wanted to have people putting spears over the top through the part missing in them, but they really should have had a slot through the side. They're impractical if you're using them with swords, or spears anywhere other than through the top.

The Mantic undead rule. They need to go back to how they had things done previously. They're only hurting their own brand by releasing these miniatures as they are.

Those really are rather disappointing. I note that they still haven't shown the elf/dark elf riders. Not encouraging.

Those really do look disappointing (sadly)

I hope it's not a foreshadowing of things to come with the hard plastic for Deadzone (I presume they'll be using the same manufacturer)

 scarletsquig wrote:
About the heads... I'm wondering if they are supposed to have mouthpieces/ masks on and the official models were painted incorrectly?

I think it's meant to be a beard and moustache.

Yeah, those are abysmal. I've said for a long time it would be foolish for Mantic to waste tens of thousands of dollars failing to beat the Perrys at their own game, but even if you're willing to pay extra for Mantic, these are rather blobby.

Disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising. It comes back to that quality control thing I keep bringing up.

I'll wait to hold judgment until mine are in hand. But, if they are as bad as people are suggesting, Mantic will be getting an email with a request to replace them with a different set of models.

I'm always surprised when Mantic drops the ball like this - but it is getting to the point when I'm surprised when they DON'T drop the ball like this.

Not good.

maybe I'm totally insane, but did everyone else forget that they're standing on 15mm circles? the models are tiny. the "mushiness" looks pretty much the same as these mantic skeletons i'm holding in my hands.

Anything described as "mushiness" can't be good...

That said, I'm not in for those and am happy with the golems I'm getting that timetowaste added on for me. And I had to basically put a lock on my wallet not to buy some ogres. So... they just seem to be hit and miss.

As plastictrees noted, the new Dreadball stuff mostly looks really good. I think with Mantic I just wouldn't feel safe going in big for a large variety of their sculpts, as they seem to incentivize doing in their kickstarters, since some of them are bound to be misses.

But picking and choosing after you see some of it sculpted can result in some pretty good minis for the price, imo.

Yeah. I had backed this thinking their stuff would be up to par with their Undead plastics, as well as some of their Warpath stuff, and had really high hopes based on the concept artwork, but most of that has been thrown out the window, and I am going to try to recover my losses by selling the Ogres I chose. I am hoping this happens, otherwise I spent $250 on this when I had so many other, better kickstarters I could have chosen.

They need to go back to the drawing board with their miniatures and learn that quantity and cheap does not equal good. Hell, the Basilean Men at Arms are more expensive than Perry miniatures and no where near as good.

The only really excellent figures to come from this have been the Obsidian Golems and the hero on the Lion. Most of the others are going to take a fair bit of work to get looking good.

I don't think I will back their projects in the future. I am going to check how the Deadzone kickstarter turns out, because after how the new plastics look, if the same happens to the Enforcers and other plastic troops, people are going to be livid.

Well, if my Basileans come in mushy and looking like crap (I'm gonna detach a single one and paint it up), I'll email Mantic, let them know I'm not satisfied, and ask for a switch of equal value to my ogres. But I won't do that until they come in and I see how they look. I wait to reserve judgment, but I won't lie that I'm a bit nervous at the moment. Here's hoping things work out well.

they look pretty ass-tacular but I know how tiny Mantic models are (most assume they are normal heroic 32mm or whatevs, nope, they're small as hell). thankfully i'm just getting the freebies from the pledge, so if they suck, then no problem. regardless, bad cell phone flash shots are not a way to judge a model; a primed, ink washed size comparison shot would be way more helpful.

but this highlights again Mantic's incredible disconnect with the community at large...

these are the FIRST pictures we've seen of them. the FIRST.

Mantic should have released nice high quality shots of the sprue so that we could judge them properly.

we STILL haven't seen the elf knights. maybe they're brilliant? who the feth knows.


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it's unbelievable how they are running this company yet fail to make even the most rudimentary decisions... like, guys, i love you Mantic, really i do, but if you keep punching yourself in the nuts, it's your own damn fault.

Serious question - are they doing the insular-disconnected thing? As in only listening to the feedback of the superfans that live on their own forums and writing off the rest of the internet as "haters" and "noise"?

Because despite hosting the most negative and shameful thread on the internet, most of us here on Dakka are pretty objective when we talk about the quality of sculpts, regardless of the producers.


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Yeah, if the first public photos of the Elf knights are going to be taken by KS backers at this stage, I'm not holding my breath for any kind of quality. (We know it's a pretty safe bet that Winterdyne has the models, probably finished as well.) The reused "we didn't have time to take photos as they went to the casters" lie/excuse is pretty insulting as well.

Not even that,

the folk on their forums have also been asking for pictures etc (and being surprised when nothing is shown)

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Well, if my Basileans come in mushy and looking like crap (I'm gonna detach a single one and paint it up), I'll email Mantic, let them know I'm not satisfied, and ask for a switch of equal value to my ogres. But I won't do that until they come in and I see how they look. I wait to reserve judgment, but I won't lie that I'm a bit nervous at the moment. Here's hoping things work out well.

Enjoy a 50$ return shipping for that exchange/refund!