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

I have a bunch of historical minis I'd love to trade for more MaA, but no Perry Mercenaries. I do have a sprue or two of WotR I would be willing to send to you for an equivalent number of Mantic minis, but the shipping would probably be more expensive than a new box of minis for both of us.


-------------------

Anyway, now for my review of the box...so far.
Bullets!

-The ogre hero looks pretty good.
-The troll looks worse in real life than online. Much, much worse. Mold lines and poor casting on the face make it look like a child's first attempt at clay. The bird's eye viewing angle makes their legs look like chicken drumsticks.
-Elf palace guard looks amazing. I will definitely buy a box of them.
-The mummy's sword is comically short and "girthy". Reminds me of an unrelated video I saw on the internet...
-Brock rider has some great parts. I think it will look good assembled. I'll probably buy more of them.
-The Gargoyles look pretty good, but I suspect they will look even better if I just leave out the bodies and glue their heads directly to the Lovecraftian wings-and-tail monsters.


Thoughts on the Basileans:

-The nuns are extremely tiny. WGF amazon arms might be too large for them, but if not, then they are saved.
-The Paladin Humans look very nice, but tiny. I think their heads are smaller than Perry minis' heads.
-The Angels look fantastic. They might be the best models in the bunch. Their heads are the same size as the MaA heads, but larger than any other human's head. Still, they are too small for the body. Perhaps the artist was inspired by very tall basketball players, but in miniature form the effect is not "he looks tall" but rather, the angel looks like a pinhead.

-The Men at Arms sprue...Oh boy, the Men at Arms...

First of all, the tooling of the legs, chainmail and faces remind me of WGF's "melty" Romans. The knees on two of the bodies (A1 and A4) look like the old Warzone plastics, where the manufacturers just decided to forget the idea of even pretending to care about undercuts--the top half of the armored pads just T-1000 into the boots and possibly turn the leg into some kind of stabbing weapon. It wouldn't have been so bad if they just made both legs that way, but no, there's a perfectly good left knee staring you in the face and daring you to say something. Also, A1's right shin bones must be 30% longer than his left shin bones. In fact, all the models' shoulders line up in height due to the fact that the bodies with bent knees have noticeably longer legs. Salvador Dali must have inspired Mantic with his painting, "Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament Knights Kneeling Wait Crap Wait Crap Crap Forget It".

I don't think Scarlet is correct about the mustaches. A3 doesn't appear to have one, but I do believe he is impersonating Don Corleone. A1 has more of a "soul 'stache" under his lip. Fortunately, I think GW heads will work in a pinch. (I haven't checked yet.) A1, A3 and especially A4 would also work if you painted them silver or black or something, because they work as some kind of mask.

The arms are both terrible and fairly easy to fix. The proportions are all over the place, but the large elbow pad will make it fairly easy to clip off small slices of the upper arms fairly easily. A1 may defy rescuing. Once again, GW's generous abundance of spares will save the day, I suspect. I really, really wish Mantic had thrown in a spare head and a couple of spare arms per sprue. The lego hands look worse than I thought they would. It looks like someone sculpted the fingers in clay anticipating a metal model, because they are thick and doughy. The shield arms are mostly mercifully hidden behind their shields... mostly.

The spears and swords are fantastic. 10 out of 10. ( I don't want to be too shameful in my negativity.)

The size is my favorite part. These are some big, 80's action movie motortruckers.

All in all, I'm fairly happy with my MaA for the price I paid and for what I plan to do with them using my extensive bit box. I would not recommend them to anyone who takes things like quality and detail seriously.

I came to do a quick review of my box too - but Bob here beat me to it - so I'll just add some stray thoughts.

- One of my metal heroes was broken - thanks whoever threw them all in one bag! Sorting what went with what was a pain too.

- I'm pretty pleased with the orc chariot/goblin mincer - I didn't know these shared the same base - but they're pretty nice.

- I like the trolls less (for the reasons Bob has mentioned) than I thought I would based on the internet pics. However I like the Werewolves and Abyssal golems more. All are tinier than I was expecting too. Werewolves will be swimming on 40mm bases.

- I had some stray Ogre parts and extra bases in my boxes.

- Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.

- Angel heroes look awesome, glad I don't have to put them together.

- Wasn't expecting the KS exclusive undead minis (BSB & dog handler) to be restic.

- Ogres turned out the best overall IMO.

- Took me like 2.5 hours to sort through it all! Intimidating!

- Pretty much all of my order is "for sale" if anyone is interested feel free to PM to negotiate. Lotta Basilieans + most of the misc.

Of 264 minis - I'm keeping ~8. The chariot/Mincer - 6 of the trolls. (down from 9 - though I'm debating selling all of the trolls). *sigh*

Schmapdi wrote:
- Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.

The dogs go with the male and female Basilean wizards (standing up for the female, other one for the male IIRC). I too am confused about the antlers though, they look like the belong to the Green Lady who wasn't part of the deal, though the illustration of the male Basilean wizard does have fairly prominent antlers on his chest - I haven't rechecked the model since I spotted that though.

Stray ogre should be because you had mispacked Ogre Shooters in your 2nd shipment I think.

Edited for wrong race!

 Baragash wrote:

Schmapdi wrote:
- Does anyone know which heroes the dogs go with? And which one has the antlers? I was thinking the antlers went with the female elf mage(?) but I see no holes on her head for them.

The dogs go with the male and female elf mages (standing up for the female, other one for the male IIRC). I too am confused about the antlers though, they look like the belong to the Green Lady who wasn't part of the deal, though the illustration of the male elf mage does have fairly prominent antlers on his chest - I haven't rechecked the model since I spotted that though.

Stray ogre should be because you had mispacked Ogre Shooters in your 2nd shipment I think.

Hmm - the human mage does have 2 little holes on his chest. I can't imagine they'd put antlers there - but strangers things have happened I suppose. Like me getting the stray Ogre body despite only getting one shipment, and not ordering any ogre shooters!

the human mage is where the antlers are supposed to go. It actually looks AOK once you've glued them on - makes him a bit more naturey, I suppose.
Wouldn't have missed them for a second though

As for the extra ogre body, well you've certainly got more than the requisite number of weapons to build three ogres in your free set (they come with enough arms to build 6-7 ogres) and two extra heads so that's a free extra ogre for you.
Don't really see the problem.

Really, given the costs of plastic casting it was probably cheaper just to drop one in each and every box they sent out rather than actually check where they had to put one and where not to (and risk extra shipping costs and man-hours to fix mistakes).

between my reshipped (first got lost to the mail-gods) second shipment and my third shipment I have eight extra bodies. No complaints from me though - extra bases are easy to come by.

Wow, seeing the reports of how folks packages are coming is pretty eye opening.

Before the Baselian pics started arriving I was briefly disappointed that I missed the KoW kickstarter. Now I'm really glad I bought a batch of metal historical humans instead. Even the worst of my historicals (Old Glory Halberdiers) are more consistent and better looking than the Men at Arms!

Also makes me quite glad that Mantic allows non-mantic figures in their tournaments. I hope to play my human army in a KoW tournament someday, but not if it means buying miniatures from a line as uneven -and sometimes shoddy- as the Baesilians.

Absolutely nothing about the MaA suggests that they are ready for primetime, especially when you figure that they are coming from a company with as much experience as Mantic.

There's just no excuse.

generally speaking your historical humans would most likely proxy for a kingdoms of men list (featured in the main book) rather than basileans. Just sayin'

When I break down my pledges, this is what I love:

Fleabag riders
Orc Chariots & Fight Wagons
Mincers
Dark Knights
Stormwind Cavalry
Palace Guard
Elohi
Brock Riders
Ogres
Paladin Knights
Paladins
Gargoyles
Immortal Guard

the rest are meh and I can pass on them.

when I think about it, my initial pledges netted me _hundreds_ of pre-existing Kings of War models. our initial pledges and models were already a substantial savings over retail prices. it started my Orc army and my Goblin army. since then Kings of War has become my favorite ruleset, with dozens and dozens of games played.

and now with all these free models arriving, it's like super mega Christmas. i feel that i've already gotten tons of value from my pledge (this and Mierce are the best KSers i've backed, out of the 26 i've backed). even though I could care less about half of the free stretch goal models I got... the rest are great and are going into and expanding the armies I've been playing with since the first KS shipment, or, in the case of the Dark Knights, starting new ones for me.

^ I've been pretty happy with it too, I should also mention that the basilean legacy book is really awesome for the £10 price tag on it.. worth buying just to read the extensive background and get the new magic items and magic rules, even if you're not interested in the three army lists.

I was reading through it last night and was impressed, a much, much better book than kings and legends which isn't all that great (supplement dedicated to special characters, basically).

I snapped some pics of my first attempt at a men-at-arms conversion... it's not perfect and I'll take a little more material off the lower chest next time (and carve out the undercut between the right shoulder and the shield), but I'm happy with the end result, it's a good model that I'm happy to use as part of my basilean army.

Shown with a sister legs/torso (which is really tall itself) to show off exactly why using the stock minis is not an option if you bought the models to use with a basilean army, they're like 7-foot giants when compared with the restic minis in the line.

And the sword is as tall as a regular mantic mini on its own... GW scaling at play.



And from the side, to better show off the height difference and some of the carving-off I did at the back:



A major issue with the kit is the posing on the arms.. most of them are sticking out at crazy right angles to the body (as you can see in the stock build.. that wasn't me posing them that way to be obtuse, the join is flat and that's the only way you can glue them on).

So, you pretty much have to angle off the upper arms just to make them so they're not flailing around everywhere in ridiculous poses.

In fact, I probably need to cut the arms down a little too, but this is trickier since the left arm is moulded on to the shield. I probably won't bother.

In all fairness Squig thats actually a pretty decent conversion, its especially noticeable from the side, your conversion a least sorts out the curve on the guys back, the original looks like he's trying to do a "booty pop". The
height is also a great improvement (seriously why are they so tall?), the only other thing that still needs improvement is those arms, both the positioning and the scaling. Out of question how long are these conversions
taking per model and whats your overall opinion on the details of these miniatures?, they look a little doughy to me, the sister looks pretty crisp at least.

So, the biggest fix is cutting part of the torso out, SS? Easy enough, though a bit time consuming. Mine still hasn't come in, despite having a ton of Basilean stuff. Is the Basilean legacy going to hit DL options? Or hard copy only?

I would say that is a pretty good fix you have done there Scarlet. I still think that I will use some Empire heads I have lying around (from the greatswords and pistoliers probably) and possibly weapons too, those swords are just too big. I cannot believe the curve of the back on the standard figure without your conversion, it just looks weird and was an angle/issue we have not previously seen. This kit could have been so much more, bit of a shame really.

@Rolt: The details are fine, don't forget those pics are about twice the size of the minis IRL.

The shinier and darker plastic doesn't photograph as well as the light grey restic does either,so the pics earlier in this thread with the ink wash are a better guide to what the details are like.

On the whole it's good, stuff like the raised detail on the spear shafts must be around a third of a mm deep, extremely fine detailing there.

I really think that the mushy parts like the cloth are down to to the 3d "poke it around in zbrush until it looks passable" sculpting more than anything else.

Chainmail isn't as bad as I thought it would be either.

Of course, there's detail loss on the sides and horrible undercuts, which is something mantic could have easily avoided by making the legs 2-part and the shield separate from the left arm.

Even that doesn't necessarily mean bad tooling... mantic could have said "how about we do seperate legs, torso and shield" and the toolmaker could have come back and said "yes, but that'll be an extra £10k", which would have stretched their budget too far.

Bean-counting is the eternal flaw with Mantic, which has led them to making mistakes with their hard plastics even when they were using Renedra.

With Kickstarter being a potentially infinite source of seed capital, there's no need to keep cutting corners. Just straight up say:

1. "This is our new kickstarter for X army. It's going to be 100% hard plastic, and super-affordable, and all of the sculpts will be gorgeous".
2. "Here are massively hi-res, multiple angle pics of all the 3-up sculpts/ 3d component renders for the first three units in advance so you can see they're not crap, or tell us to fix them if they are".
3. "For every $100k of funding, we'll make a new hard plastic kit with all the bells and whistles".
4. "Our shipping estimate is an estimate, if it takes longer it is because we need more time to ensure that the product is high quality".
5. "Have at it, backers!"

They'd knock kickstarter flat if they only took that approach instead of their current "rush as much stuff on to the market as quickly as possible and see what sticks" approach.

I think out of all the wargaming companies, Mantic is most likely to replicate the same success that Reaper Bones had, if it can start taking quality control, and scale/style consistency seriously.

I'm looking forward to the rumoured next Kickstarter for KoW, which is supposed to be "Nature and Abyssal armies" + "large monsters" from what Ronnie has been saying. It sounds like it might arrive early on next year, before warpath or anything else.

@Thraxas: Yeah, the "leaning backwards" thing is odd, so I clipped/filed down the cloth on the back and glued the head on further forward to fix that.

I kept picturing the stock mini as doing this (fruity obnoxious meme warning ):

So, the biggest fix is cutting part of the torso out, SS?

Yep, remove 5mm of material straight from the middle, obliterate most of the belt and a good chunk of the top of the legs, then glue together.

In addition, I clipped down the back, cut off the shoulder pads at the top (which get in the way of posing the arms properly anyway), filedall of that down, glued the head in a lower, further forward position and trimmed off the helmet rim.

Took about 10 minutes with good tools (saw, clippers, file), I can probably get that down to 5 minutes with an assembly line process and a dremel would speed things up even more.

I won't be using any of the swords, will be cutting the spear heads off, gluing them to the sword handles to use as swords.

I plan on being quite conservative with my posing on the spears (I loved the 4th edition empire monopose plastics, a unit of 50 looked awesome) and using the more dynamic bodies for the swordsmen.

Scary meme!

I think that is the approach to take with the next Kickstarter. The original 10 man Skeleton sprue, and even the 10 man Revenant sprue with its duplicate parts are great for me. Easy to assemble, with a good variety of options, the MAA are so far away from that. If they could do core troops funded at 100k per stretch (maybe 75k?) for the main fantasy archetypes then the money would roll in. The issue is they have plenty of the options covered already, just not at the quality that most people want.

^ Yeah, that would be great, although I think they're on to the right idea with one KS per army.. simply because it will add value for backers.. 100% of their freebies will be stuff that they want, as opposed to a scattered selection from various different armies.

On a tangent, the Nature army list is really cool. There are unicorns.

 scarletsquig wrote:



And from the side, to better show off the height difference and some of the carving-off I did at the back:

Wow, you did an amazing salvage job. That simple conversion turned a trainwreck into exactly what people want... a simple, good looking rank and file.

I honestly don't understand how you were supposed to rank those dudes up with the silly chicken wing arm pose from the stock model. Will people cut the torso out of 40 men? maybe... At least it is an option besides the trash can.

If they would have 'repaired' the model pre-casting, they would have had a better model, happier customers, and used less material for cheaper models. Such a simple fix too.

Clear before and after shots of where you cut would be appreciated please

Agreed, great job, squig! I can't imagine most people will be putting in that effort on each rank and file model, though.

I will be. Have 80 of the suckers coming in.

 scarletsquig wrote:

With Kickstarter being a potentially infinite source of seed capital, there's no need to keep cutting corners. Just straight up say:

1. "This is our new kickstarter for X army. It's going to be 100% hard plastic, and super-affordable, and all of the sculpts will be gorgeous".
2. "Here are massively hi-res, multiple angle pics of all the 3-up sculpts/ 3d component renders for the first three units in advance so you can see they're not crap, or tell us to fix them if they are".
3. "For every $100k of funding, we'll make a new hard plastic kit with all the bells and whistles".
4. "Our shipping estimate is an estimate, if it takes longer it is because we need more time to ensure that the product is high quality".
5. "Have at it, backers!"

Yep, agree with this hole-healthfully not just for Kings of War related stuff but the upcoming Warpath KS, seriously I think just about anybody here would rather wait a bit longer to get truly beautiful models for their army of
choice rather than the "they're okay I guess" models Mantic seem to be pumping out via the kickstaters (not that some haven't been nice), plus it would allow Mantic to truly fill-out every army one at a time with all the good
stuff, tanks, monsters, fantasy beasties and all manner of bits and bobs. I guess the only downsides to this idea is that certain armies could wait a long time to get their KS (so no plastic veer-myn for me any time soon )
and the KS spam this forum's gonna get.

Yeah someone needs to suggest this to Mantic on the forums, personal email etc, you never know they might take it on board.

Incidentally on a slightly different note, does anyone know if Mantic accept open submissions for sculptors? Just asking out of random curiosity.


Enjoy.

 Bolognesus wrote:
generally speaking your historical humans would most likely proxy for a kingdoms of men list (featured in the main book) rather than basileans. Just sayin'

That's a good point. I was looking at mixing the two, but at this point I'm not married to one or the other. I'll probably be most or all KoM though just based on the makeup of the miniatures.

This will better illustrate why I am so down on the Mantic Men at Arms. Here's a selection of historical figures:



These are a variety of companies, and all of the sculpts are at least 6 years old or older. The figures on the far left are Old Glory. They are probably the oldest sculpts (well oer 10 years) and are considered by many to be on the lower end of average (or worse) in terms of quality and sculpt. Even they are better detailed, proportioned and posed than the Mantic MaA, and for those with an Old Glory Army membership, they're almost as cheap.

What possible excuse can there be for making new plastic figures that aren't even as good as average sculpts from a decade ago?

And yeah Squig, a pic with the proper cut lines would be amazing!

Here is what i have done with my Men at arms:



The scale thing is a bit weird. They seem perfectly in scale with Mantic Mummies and Dwarfs (and thus Abyssal Dwarfs) but tower over the other Basileans and Elves, and a bit taller than the Orcs. This picture shows how well they scale with gw plastics though, so if you have a big bits box I think you can get some decent troops out of them.

(Apologies if this is not quite news/or rumours but it seems to fit best here).

Thraxas.

Nope, thraxas, this thread is perfect, as the concerns over MaAs are heavy here.

The more of the models that have come from their kickstarter I see the happier I am I resisted. Have to be honest in that I also held out on models for the Deadzone kickstarter in the first wave so I can wait and see what most look like before putting down cash.

@scarlet squig.
Mantic could do far worse than hire you as their advisor, you' ve actually made those troops look reasonable

Why somebody in their offices couldnt have just said 'erm guys these figures look a bit sh*t' before releasing them unto the world.
Im a big fan of the mantic undead and orcs but they seem to be heading backwards in terms of quality recently. Hopefully dz will be an exception.

Has Mantic ever explained how and why they have released so many obviously terrible models?

 Eilif wrote:
What possible excuse can there be for making new plastic figures that aren't even as good as average sculpts from a decade ago?

That's simple: Why spend extra money on high quality sculpts when the models are already sold and paid

...sets watch.

It's not a horrible argument (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of cashon mantic stuff). However, I do believe it's suggesting significantly more... malice (for want of a better term), than mantic is due.

Combining 10's of 1000's of pounds of loss that the KoW kickstarter made, with a tight deadline and ultimately serviceable sculpts (though, I'll admit, rather crap), could very well have simply resulted in some meetings where, conscious of the loss, Mantic decided not to throw good money after bad, do what they can under budget, and (yes, wishlisting), learn their lessons for their next big plastic release...

I imagine the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle.