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"They may be serviceable" isn't likely to end up used in advertising...

Mantic Basilians: Guaranteed not to impregnate your dog!

 warboss wrote:
I can't tell if you're joking about your name or if you're serious... if it's the latter, congratulations! If it's the former, you need to type bazinga! after your posts.

I edited my OP with the source but here it is for ya (mine is post #5) http://forum.manticblog.com/showthread.php?3148-New-magic-artefacts%21&highlight=brew+truesight

 Alpharius wrote:
1E AD&D Race/Heights:

I've always loved the Half Orc photobomb in that illustration.

"Hai Guyz! Anyone need an Assassin/Cleric?"



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 pretre wrote:

 Cyporiean wrote:
So As Tall/Taller:
-4th Edition
-Forgotten Realms
-Pathfinder
-Warcraft
-Warhammer
-Dragon's Age
-Lord of the Rings
-Marvel Comics

Shorter:
-D&D1-3
-Mantic

4th had shorter elves as well.
Only NE in Warcraft are taller, HE are shorter.
First Dragon Age, elves were a head shorter.

And, you know, our original contention was D&D. The granddaddy of RPGs.

You forgot Santa's elves. And most of mythology.

Time for a "how tall are elves?" sub forum I think. The people have spoken!

 plastictrees wrote:
Time for a "how tall are elves?" sub forum I think. The people have spoken!

They are twice as tall as half of them. Debate over!

Oh, and the new Ironwatch is out if anyone wants some fanzine reading material: https://ironwatch.wordpress.com/

Really good issue this month with a huge unit-by-unit KoW Orc tactics article, painting showcase, LED lighting tutorial, KoW scenario and Warpath fiction.

Was asked (on the mantic forums) to take a few pics of the basilean plastics, not even sure if this is what the guys there wanted yet but hey, might as well throw it up here, too.
Will probably get a pic or two of the elf cav stuff tomorrow if anyone is specifically interested - just say so. (or anything else for that matter, I think I have most everything from the KS lying around).

So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?

I think the knights on foot look alright, but I can't tell in those pictures. And the pictures of the females continue to accentuate their giant pop-eye forearms. Ugh.

 frozenwastes wrote:
So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?

I'm confused, while we haven't seen the elf cav yet, for everything in that shot we've already had official Mantic pics of for a while now.

I don't recall Mantic posting component pics of any of the Basilians. There's moderately sized completed and painted pictures, but as far as the first impression with the actual model in the box, there's very little. I remember they used to send Beasts of War some sprues to look at under their close cam or something, but that's about it.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I don't recall Mantic posting component pics of any of the Basilians.

Ah, true, they haven't posted component pics just straightened, completed, and painted shots. But amonst many of the larger companies (GW, Warlord) getting component shots is hit or miss at best. Try figuring out what metal bits exactly come in Warlords hybrid kits for example.

True. The reason I think it's more of an issue with Mantic is that their heavy use of hard vinyl means they have more bending and more of a shiney surface that doesn't photograph well. There's simply more potential for the first pics of their stuff to give a bad first impression.

It's possible that everyone who's had a negative experience of any of the Basilian release because of these pictures is wrong. It's possible that the figures actually are nicer than these pictures are making them look.

I'm not sure Warlord is having a similar issue. People get their stuff, build it and that's that. There's an occasional blog or youtube channel that might post an unboxing, but that's about it. Mantic has created a following of people who want to know what the miniatures *really* look like.

 frozenwastes wrote:
So Mantic could take their plastics, hot water-cold water treat them to straighten everything and get some good lighting and present them, but instead they're letting people's first impression be this?

I think the knights on foot look alright, but I can't tell in those pictures. And the pictures of the females continue to accentuate their giant pop-eye forearms. Ugh.

Yeah, but at this point I'd say most regular forum-goers have, between PP, reaper, mantic, CMoN andsoforth, heard/read pretty much what the limitations of photographing these models are.
Basically these are there to show the components the models come in and answer a few questions about what will work and what won't.
The look of the model, well, by now the sharpness of Mantics restics is understood widely enough that I didn't think this would matter all *that* much anymore. besides, ever photographed regular 'styrene components that way? doesn't exactly turn out all that great either if your lighting isn't entirely up to snuff (which mine isn't, I'm not digging out all my lamps etc. etc. for a few component count shots...) so I figure most forum users will have seem what user pics tend to do to models.

I can attest to the detail being easily sharp enough to paint pretty much as in the painted pictures shown. Granted, IMO it still isn't helping the sisters all that much but then again I never liked this concept anyway.

Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy. Still, I think in the end I paid like a nickel per model in this KS and have gotten two excellent armies and about 30 awesome games of KoW in, so when all is said and done and even if I trade away my Basileans, man, this KS definitely had the most value for the money than any other I've done.

 judgedoug wrote:
Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy.

That's precisely how it looks 'in the flesh', yeah. Sisters are a bit of a writeoff; paladins are solid, good even and the MaA don't look anywhere near as bad as those initial pics make them out to be. It's not razorsharp but from what I've seen it's easily good enough to take a solid paintjob without issues, and certainly leagues beyond the goblins. If the DZ plastics are another leap like that (or even just a slight improvement!) they won't attract the least bit of (valid) complaining anymore once people have them in hand.

 Bolognesus wrote:

 judgedoug wrote:
Well, the sisters still look goofy but the paladins and knights look to be sexy.

That's precisely how it looks 'in the flesh', yeah. Sisters are a bit of a writeoff; paladins are solid, good even and the MaA don't look anywhere near as bad as those initial pics make them out to be. It's not razorsharp but from what I've seen it's easily good enough to take a solid paintjob without issues, and certainly leagues beyond the goblins. If the DZ plastics are another leap like that (or even just a slight improvement!) they won't attract the least bit of (valid) complaining anymore once people have them in hand.

If Mantic uses another third rate plastic company then they will probably be mediocre. They need to go back to Renedra, to SK Engineering, to Wargames Factory, to whomever AREN'T the goblin and men at arms sprue manufacturers. The problem isn't whether the plastics are "good enough" (I was able to make 200 plastic goblins work for my goblin army, as they're "good enough", but people aren't scrambling to buy them), but whether they're just plain "good". Most people won't buy crap! If Deadzone plastics are "good enough" then people won't have the urge to open their wallets, they'll just say "meh" and move on or watch a game and wish the plastics were good. If the plastics are "good" (or even "great") then people will whip out their dollars and want to buy them, especially at Mantic's very reasonable price points.

Mantic needs to stop accepting "good enough" and go back to the "good"/'great" from their first few years. I think the success of the KoW Kickstarter was too much for them; reports are they overspent anyway (by like 20k or more!)... notice Deadzone's stretch goals were much further apart than Kings of War - I think so they built in extra padding for better sculpts and tools. Perhaps the Kings of War KS they just couldn't afford to do resculpts, retools, etc. There's been rumblings of another KoW KS in a year or so to focus on the Abyssals (Abyssal Dwarves, Twilight Kin, Abyssal/Chaos army) and they better do some hard plastic sprues of "great" quality for those. They'd fly off the shelves.

Another KoW KS for the abyssal side? My wallet just ran away, sobbing in a corner. Why would you cause it pain like that?! It never did anything to you.

Yeah, abyssals would be sweet- if they did them well. That's a big IF, though

Tides, I assume you'll want to piggyback? Lol.

Also, still hoping somebody wants me to take their goblins off their hands. Otherwise I may just end up buying a box to see how they are.

I think you misunderstand - the MaA are in a totally different league from the goblins. 'Good enough' is not a phrase I'd ever use for the goblins even though, indeed, they can be made to work well enough. The MaA tooling is pretty solid. Little soft here and there but not extremely.
It's the sculpts you can take issue with (boorish heads, strange arms, mediocre chainmail) but since the renders we've seen for the enforcers are good that's nothing to worry about.
Sharper is always nice but those enforcer renders, tooled at current MaA tooling standards, would be good. Period. Tooling quality would no longer get in the way of final paintjob quality, I'd estimate.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Actually I'm going to take back a bit of what I just said - the MaA have some downsides which weren't obvious to me before I started building them. Generally, I think those will be largely obsured by either the weapons or the quiver for the crossbow bits, but not entirely. Not sure how much the all-plastics will leave these issues (mostly down the sides of the thighs, lack of detail/smudging) visible under the weapons; the crossbowmen however look to work out AOK after putting the quivers on.
...Which is fine for me since I was primarily planning to use them as such but I'm taking back what I said about the quality being close to AOK. there's a few definite issues in tooling which need fixing before doing the DZ plastics.
Curious to see what will happen there.

Got my pile of men-at-arms:

- Tooling is great. No issues there, other than the number of pieces for some parts, specifically the more dynamically-posed bodies need 2-3 pieces to avoid detail loss in hard plastic.

- Pretty sure the tooling is still done in China, judging by the fact that the sprue comes in the same pre-packaged plastics as the restic parts and goblins.

- Spears are great, shafts aren't too thick.

- Heads *all* have moustaches sculpted on (look very very closely at the detail and you can see where they begin and end). Golem painted them wrong which is why the official pics look terrible.

- Sculpting is mediocre, particularly the cloth which is very poorly done. Leg proportions are the worst, and the arms vary.. some are fine, there's a couple that look weird. Not as bad as the nuns, mind.

- They are 35mm heroic scale miniatures in a truescale 28mm line. Using the stock minis will look almost as bad as using GW elf spearmen in a mantic elf army.

- Swords are 3 times larger than other infantry swords in the KoW mini range (elves, undead), and larger than the 2-handed paladin swords.

- The spears and swords don't fit all that well in the hands.


I'm going to convert mine rather than replacing them with alternate bitz/models. I'll go into more detail about the process later and post some pics, but early results are promising and around 5-10 minutes of conversion work gets you a very nice looking mini.

To summarize the steps I'm taking with them:

- Remove 5mm of height from the middle of the miniature... cut it in half in the middle of the belt then remove more material from the top of the legs (the thighs are out of proportion anyway, so filing them down works really well). Glue back together.
- Clip off the shoulder pads, cut down the top of the mini quite a bit.
- Completely clip off and file down the baggy cloth sticking out on the backs of the minis (it looks like a backpack or something).
- Clip/ file off the helmet rim to reduce the mass of the heads.
- Use the spear heads as swords.. attach them to the sword handle and it works perfectly for proper true-scale swords!

So, in short, my review of the minis would be "terrible if you're looking to buy them to use in a basilean army without conversion work" but "really great if you are willing to spend a little time on them fixing the scale issues".

I would rank the kit as "about as good as the mantic dwarves".. in that you need to put some work into them if you want to get them looking good and fitting in with the other minis in the army.

I need to have a better look at the sisters, but so far I'm liking the cavalry minis a lot more than the infantry.

Paladins, Knights, Angels, Lion rider etc. everything else in the army is top-notch. Panther chariot is surprisingly cool, the chassis has a great design.

I'm happy with everything else from the kickstarter too, with the exception of the trolls. The brocks, elf cav, and fleabags are lovely, they did a great job of the cavalry.

So the minis are out of proportion with the rest of the line, are poorly sculpted, and only fit in if you take 5 - 10 minutes per miniature to make them serviceable.

And you compare them to Mantic's Dwarfs... one of the more derided/polarizing kits to be produced.

Think I'll pass.

 scarletsquig wrote:
I'm going to convert mine rather than replacing them with alternate bitz/models. I'll go into more detail about the process later and post some pics, but early results are promising and around 5-10 minutes of conversion work gets you a very nice looking mini.

To summarize the steps I'm taking with them:

- Remove 5mm of height from the middle of the miniature... cut it in half in the middle of the belt then remove more material from the top of the legs (the thighs are out of proportion anyway, so filing them down works really well). Glue back together.
- Clip off the shoulder pads, cut down the top of the mini quite a bit.
- Completely clip off and file down the baggy cloth sticking out on the backs of the minis (it looks like a backpack or something).
- Clip/ file off the helmet rim to reduce the mass of the heads.
- Use the spear heads as swords.. attach them to the sword handle and it works perfectly for proper true-scale swords!

So, in short, my review of the minis would be "terrible if you're looking to buy them to use in a basilean army without conversion work" but "really great if you are willing to spend a little time on them fixing the scale issues".

So compared to the Perry miniatures, you're paying 40% more for the privilege of spending two to four hours per regiment on tedious repair work?

Imma gonna disagree with you both here.

First off: No SS, the tooling is not entirely up to spec. It's certainly serviceable but it can stand improving a bit.

OTOH: I'd love them to be at the level of perry minis but TBH, it's a different kettle entirely. Those perry minis have a substantially different look and for a fantasy army, I at least prefer the *concept* of the MaA vastly. the execution let's them down a bit but still, I'd take the MaA.
The perrys are better for historical purposes than the MaA are for fantasy, but the MaA still beat the perry stuff at fantasy use IMO.


Will say I'm not a fan of any of the sisters, though. Didn't like the concept all that much and with the problems in execution (arms, mostly) I really don't think I'll even bother with them in any way.

@Alex: Basically, yes, although 20% more is more accurate (40x perry mercs = £20, 40x Mantic M@A = £25).

The advantage is getting a more fantasy-styled miniature rather than a historical human, if that's important to you (it is to me, anyway).

If not, perry mercenaries kit is the better option to have minis that are in scale with the paladins and the rest of the Basilean line. It comes with pikes, crossbows and swords etc. so the equipment options are covered too. Maybe wait for the foot knights kit if you want something more armored and aren't in any hurry.

Naturally, having paid for vast quantities of the things in advance factors into my decision to stick with them and kitbash rather buying something else. It's a real stretch to find serious reasons to recommend them... wanting them to use in a GW army could be another reason since they will scale great with GW models. Border princes army, dogs of war or whatever would be a perfect fit.

@Bolog: Agree on room for improvement, but the sculpts are so bad in this case, it makes it tougher to judge the tooling (which is at least, way better than the goblins)... stuff like the horrible detail loss on the sides of the more dynamic bodies is a sculpting error moreso than a tooling one, a professional 3d designer is able to sculpt with undercut limitations in mind, GW produce some pretty amazing stuff in hard plastic precisely because they handle this sculptor/tooling interaction well. Undercuts could ruin the Deadzone sculpts if there aren't enough separate components on the sprue to eliminate them, or they weren't kept in mind during sculpting.

@Scarlet and Bolognesus,

I don't know if I got different sprues than you guys did or what, but my MAA sprues are awful. They are easily the worst miniatures in my pile of plastic, and I have box after box of the old Wargames Factory Numidians, Germans, Zulus, etc. The plastic reminded me a lot of the old MB Battlemasters box, but with inferior tooling.

I guess it is hard to tell whether it is a tooling problem or a sculpting problem with them, many of the "and faaaaaaaade to mush" parts are likely just bad posing decisions, but I guess I just hope that some of the lack of detail is tooling fails.

The arms are awful. They are all of different sizes, have awful detail, and are universally too long. I guess the MAA and sisters are cut from the same stock or something. I glued some old GW militia crossbow arms and spare Perry heads on some of mine, and the arms and heads look great! It mostly made me sad that this is what Mantic is willing to sell these days compared to their old dwarf, skeleton, ghoul, zombie, and skeleton sprues.

Why would Mantic even sell something like the MAA? I would like to point out that both Wargames Factory/Dreamforge (their new stuff is great) and Kingdom Death and Wyrd get their tooling done in China, and somehow they manage to come up with beautiful high impact polystyrene miniatures. For that matter, I understand that Renedra has some long backlog (why they haven't expanded already is beyond my comprehension), but it isn't like they knew they would need these last month, and surely even if they doubled their one time costs to use Renedra it would pay off in the long run to have a product that is worth money? I honestly wouldn't pay even 10 cents a piece for more of the MAA...well maybe 10 cents a piece for the spears or swords if I ever need more...which is unlikely.

Ugh, it just makes me sad to see. Well, I am off to try to scrounge up some Mantic Dwarves for a crazy conversion idea...but I sure won't be buying anything sight unseen from Mantic again. If I had pledged for Dreadball I would be seriously sad right now.

Hearing these horror stories about the men at arms sprue is giving me a real bad feeling about the deadzone plastics. I originally bought some of the goblin plastics which have remained on the sprues do to their shodyness. I was willing to risk the plastics for dz because im sure id heard somewhere that they knew what had gone wrong and had travelled to china to sort out the problem.

I really hope that my fears are unfounded but have Mantic said anything to address these concerns over the sprue's quality?

Anyone want to trade some Perry Mercenaries for my Mantic MAA plastics?

Oh man - I got home from work with a big ole box waiting for me.

It's funny - even though I know I'll be selling almost all of it now (since the Basileans area flop for me). It still feels like Christmas anticipating opening it.

Got a call. My wife's KS pledge arrived today. We'll be picking it up tomorrow night. Hopefully mine will be there by then as well.