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Whiskey144 wrote:
[..] Which bugs the hell out of me, since I personally think that terrain is absolutely essential to wargaming, with very few and small exceptions (it's not strictly necessary for BFG, for example). [..]

That could probably be argued as being a defining characteristic of the gaming type, terrain from both miniature and war.

 warboss wrote:

 Smilodon_UP wrote:
I hazily recall in the version I heard second-hand [..]

I don't recall you posting that but since you obviously did then you're probably my source.

I could've sworn there had been a mention on the regular forums as well, but maybe it was just another version of the story from whomever that was as told by someone else, if not just one or two only semi-serious queries we're remembering.
That or it was something on the big RPG.net thread.

 warboss wrote:
I see your hazy recall and raise you a swiss cheese memory! Maybe you told it earlier by pm over at dp9...

heh, Could be, but of course I can't access PMs anymore even if it was something I hadn't deleted.

I never loaded Skype onto this new PC, and the old Vista laptop I used for a few months the previous Late Winter after my old PC died couldn't handle it, so the last I had IM'ed anyone or looked over old messages was at least an entire year ago.
Which is definitely a long time to recall clearly an apparently offhand conversation held previous to that period.

_
_

Sooo....

Does anybody know if the HG minis would look alright when set up next to, say, Dropzone Commander?

I mean, that's honestly the only nice thing I can think of to say about DP9/HG, is that they do have some fantastic looking models (even if some of the really good ones don't even really fit the initial setting *cough* Drake *cough*). Not very many, TBH, but there's a few.

They look fine at least in my limited experience (the UCM jet fighters and the terrain). They're a little bit big but you'd have to bust out a ruler to really notice IMO.

I'm assuming those are newer-gen models than what I have, and wow, you weren't kidding when you said that the newer minis have a bigger size difference with bigger arms. Wow.

Wow better or wow worse? I was a fan of the change back when they started redesigning the stuff during the original blitz days. They seem to have backtracked a bit on that with the renders though and it worries me a bit. I like the exaggerated size differences and thought the old stuff was too fiddly.

All my stuff is the "blitz" era minis as I was unhappy with the company when they invalidated both my rafm scale minis and all my RPG books within two years of coming out with the game's first printing. I didn't buy any tactical stuff and missed out on that era (luckily). The old rafm stuff is a bit of a middle ground between the two styles. I'd post a pic of all three side by side but that is exactly why I thanked you for posting your scale pic over in the robotech thread... I haven't found any online that show the differences between the three versions of the same model.

Wow surprised.

All of my stuff is post-RAFM / pre-"Blitz", so I'm guessing it's "Tactical" (orange boxes with hazard stripes on the right edge)?


At the time, I bought the following 2 boxes:
1 General Cadre (Command Jaeger & 4 Jaegers)
1 Strike Cadre (Command Jaeger, 2 Black Mambas & 2 Jaegers)


In the RRT v HG picture, the Gears in the picture are (L2R):
- Black Mamba
- Jaeger
- Black Mamba
In theory, they are all in the same scale.


Thinking back, I distinctly remember how HG was really unfriendly to the collector, requiring 1 GP Cadre for every non-GP Cadre. I would have much preferred a variety pack, but I wasn't about to buy 2 more GP boxes of boring Jaegers on top of the Support (with the big Cobras) and Recon Cadres (completion!) I was actually interested in. Comparatively speaking, GW's approach of playing unbound is much friendlier to the casual customer - buy what you like and play it. Anyhow, the GP tax was just too high, and I just stopped.

Also, looking at the models on round bases, it's amazing just terrible those hexes are. I mean awful. Rebasing on larger round bases makes all the difference. I think maybe convert this to a Red v Blue skirmish with a Command, 3 Jaegers & 1 BM per side. That might be fun, since they minis are apparently worthless from a selling POV.

 warboss wrote:
They look fine at least in my limited experience (the UCM jet fighters and the terrain). They're a little bit big but you'd have to bust out a ruler to really notice IMO.

Warboss, Forgive my ignorance here.

Are those Southern Militia on Warmachine Style Round Bases? (Medium size I think?)

That looks rather awesome!

Also, what are those long gun artillery types in the back there?

No worries. Yeah, they're Southern models (or technically Southern Republic subfaction). I planned on using alot of cobras (the bigger fire support guys) which hang over the hex bases massively so I decided to use circular lipped bases. I think they are from warmachine or malifaux. The ones with artillery guns are support cobras with the chainguns converted to being held by both hands (using the bits that should go on the arty on the back). If you want close up pics, I've got them in my blog thread linked below.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/360703.page

Those Cobras with the giant guns are pretty cool, to be sure!

I figured that the size difference would be more of a "get a ruler" rather than, say, the difference between 10/12 and 28mm models.

Truthfully though, I don't really expect to actually play HG for the foreseeable future. They just have some excellent models (like the aforementioned Drake, as well as the HHT-90) that I particularly like and wouldn't mind collecting.

It also reminds me that my preferred Bandai Gundam line is the 1/144 Real Grades, so seeing the comparison of an MS and some of the HG stuff would be kind of funny.

A 1/144 Gundam kit stands roughly 5" tall, so it would be roughly 4x as large as a Gear.

Oh I didn't mean the hard numbers, I just meant that I'd find it amusing to have some of the HG stuff stand next to some of my 1/144 Gundams.

Oh, it'd be very amusing, to be sure.

That reminds me that I should someday get around to building dioramas blending my 1/35 Gasaraki models with 1/35 modern armor. I think my Shindens would look great next to a Leopard 2A7.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Oh, it'd be very amusing, to be sure.

That reminds me that I should someday get around to building dioramas blending my 1/35 Gasaraki models with 1/35 modern armor. I think my Shindens would look great next to a Leopard 2A7.

You Lucky . I've been trying to find those Gasaraki Models!

Did you know they made a game for them? Modular card system too.

I did not know there was a game that went with the models. I'll have to dig to see where mine are at - if I have an unbuilt one, I'll gladly sell it to you.

.

Ok, this was asked for elsewhere, but this is a better place to put it, so here it is.

Comparison pic time:

Blitz Jäger vs. Tac Jäger:


You can see they tweaked a lot the proportions forthe Blitz minis with this one, compared with the Tac ones.

Blitz Jäger vs. Tac Jäger vs. RAFM Armored Hunter (It was the one I had on hand):


Blitz Jäger vs. Tac. Jäger vs. Robotech Tomahawk Destroid:


RAFM Armored Hunter vs. Robotech Tomahawk Destroid:


And as I remember someone asking for it... 1/144 showdown with a Real Grade RX-78 Gundam Prrototype:

Thank you. The new Jaeger is better proportioned, and the gun almost certainly less bendy / breakable. But it's a pity they shrank the model by at least 10%.

 Albertorius wrote:
Ok, this was asked for elsewhere, but this is a better place to put it, so here it is.

Comparison pic time:

Blitz Jäger vs. Tac Jäger:


You can see they tweaked a lot the proportions forthe Blitz minis with this one, compared with the Tac ones.

Blitz Jäger vs. Tac Jäger vs. RAFM Armored Hunter (It was the one I had on hand):

Thanks for posting the pics. I have to say from that angle it doesn't look like much of a difference between tac and blitz. At first glance, I also though the rafm one was a tact grizzly! Was the tac head attached one piece to the torso?

JohnHwangDD wrote:Thank you. The new Jaeger is better proportioned, and the gun almost certainly less bendy / breakable. But it's a pity they shrank the model by at least 10%.

Part of it might just be the pose: the old tac minis were completely upright, whereas the new Blitz minis have a wider range of poses (although the later tac ones had some of that, too).

As to the proportions, the Blitz minis were designed to be more faithful to Ghislain Barbe's original concepts, and the tac era minis were designed to follow closely the technical illustrations made for the tech manual and gear catalogs (which would probably be much more "realistic", but certainly less stilized).

warboss wrote:Thanks for posting the pics. I have to say from that angle it doesn't look like much of a difference between tac and blitz. At first glance, I also though the rafm one was a tact grizzly! Was the tac head attached one piece to the torso?

A tac Grizzly is quite a bit smaller than that, I'll try to snag a pic next weekend.

And more comparison pics!:

A couple of Rattlesnakes and a VF-1. The Rattlesnake is basically a Jäger with a variant head and different payload (also some defects, but who's counting). As you can see, changing the pose of the mini can give the illusion of it being bigger.

Rattlesnake against an VF-1

With the same kind of base, you can see there's a very noticeable difference in size.

Rattlesnake vs. Mamba (speciafically, Razorfang Black Mamba) vs. VF-1


Here you can see the size difference between the regular trooper and the elite model.

RF BM vs. VF-1


Rattlesnake vs. Basilisk (old southern light trooper/recon Gear), Asp (cheap Jäger substitute for militias and infantry support), Desert Viper (Heavy trooper/broken ground FS unit):




And the same three units vs. a VF-1:




Hopefully this will give a general idea of the sizes involved. I didn't have any Iguana or Cobra at hand at the moment, but if anyone cares I can do some pics next weekend.

You're awesome for posting those. I'm a terrible judge of minis' sizes, so that is a super useful reference.

I could see the gears being used as EBSIS mecha on the tabletop versus the RDF stuff... you know... assuming they hadn't abandoned the former completely and the latter as a term.

Man, the heads just get sillier and sillier...

Firebreak wrote:You're awesome for posting those. I'm a terrible judge of minis' sizes, so that is a super useful reference.

Glad to be of any help

warboss wrote:I could see the gears being used as EBSIS mecha on the tabletop versus the RDF stuff... you know... assuming they hadn't abandoned the former completely and the latter as a term.

Well, at the very least the scale change would mean there should be a lot more space in the torso for the pilot, so... ^_^

JohnHwangDD wrote:Man, the heads just get sillier and sillier...

Part of it is due to the "head in head" design most Gears have. Another part of it is, of course, VOTOMS.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
At the time, I bought the following 2 boxes:
1 General Cadre (Command Jaeger & 4 Jaegers)
1 Strike Cadre (Command Jaeger, 2 Black Mambas & 2 Jaegers)

I would have much preferred a variety pack, but I wasn't about to buy 2 more GP boxes of boring Jaegers on top of the Support (with the big Cobras) and Recon Cadres (completion!) I was actually interested in.

That might be fun, since they minis are apparently worthless from a selling POV.

I have a second line on a couple OOP Cadres, including the Support Cadre that I was originally interested in.

What's a fair price for a Cadre?

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
At the time, I bought the following 2 boxes:
1 General Cadre (Command Jaeger & 4 Jaegers)
1 Strike Cadre (Command Jaeger, 2 Black Mambas & 2 Jaegers)

I would have much preferred a variety pack, but I wasn't about to buy 2 more GP boxes of boring Jaegers on top of the Support (with the big Cobras) and Recon Cadres (completion!) I was actually interested in.

That might be fun, since they minis are apparently worthless from a selling POV.

I have a second line on a couple OOP Cadres, including the Support Cadre that I was originally interested in.

What's a fair price for a Cadre?

Blitz era FS cadres seem to go for a bit more than 40 bucks on ebay nowadays. FS ones should be the most expensive ones, due to having some of the biggest Gears (other Blitz cadres would cost about 30 bucks on ebay). Old tac edition ones should probably go for a lot less than that...

Those GP boxes were a terrible buy. I'm still not sure what the thought was of making the default GP squad all the same figures. Boring to look at, nor useful from a rules perspective. And if you played South, one got a box of five minis in all the different Cadres anyway, but only needed four to play, and every box set came with Jagers, so I ended up with more Jagers than I wanted anyway.

ferrous wrote:
Those GP boxes were a terrible buy. I'm still not sure what the thought was of making the default GP squad all the same figures. Boring to look at, nor useful from a rules perspective. And if you played South, one got a box of five minis in all the different Cadres anyway, but only needed four to play, and every box set came with Jagers, so I ended up with more Jagers than I wanted anyway.

I ended up with three squads for my southern army due to applying some common sense thinking ("core" units must be important somehow someway in the game as compared to others, right? Otherwise why would they be named that!) and was very disappointed. I kept 10 Jagers and sold another 6 (had a freebie one to sweeten the squad pot) and I still have way too many. IMO, the issue wasn't that the five minis were the same basic chassis but rather that every chassis of that type was largely useless. You could almost always do the same role much better with something that was likely a 5tv upgrade or if you wanted to go for numbers you were better off going with another model for a tv reduction. That was, of course, if you decided to keep using the GP squad which actively penalized you due to lower priority/commandpoints/support points. At least previously, you had the benefit of needing less objectives to win with your gimped, less elite force (lower PL, lower objective total) but they got rid of that with FM for some stupid reason and turned it into a tie breaker iirc. WTF? The "benefit" to taking overpriced and underperforming chassis that don't excel at anything with lower global army benefits is to win an exact tie that you're very unlikely to get because the other side has better models with better stats and better weapons along with better deployment options and rerolls at the cost of 1-2 crappy models worth of TV.

In a nutshell, john, don't bother selling your gp squad at the moment until the final rules come out. Supposedly the uselessness of certain "stock" models is being addressed (I can't comment with any certainty on the last couple of rules revisions regarding whether that is actually true) so you're more likely to get a decent amount instead of a pittance if you wait. Of course, if you wait, the plastics will be out and possibly cheaper (I don't recall if they said that the cost of HG entry would be addressed with plastics or not or if they'd just keep them within $5 of the current metal price). It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I would suggest though checking the swap shop, ebay, and bartertown to see if anyone is selling standard weapons in the current blitz sized to offer with the models. The old tiny tac weapons look much worse IMO and simply using the current ones helps modernize the models alot.

Albertorius wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
What's a fair price for a Cadre?

Blitz era FS cadres seem to go for a bit more than 40 bucks on ebay nowadays. FS ones should be the most expensive ones, due to having some of the biggest Gears (other Blitz cadres would cost about 30 bucks on ebay). Old tac edition ones should probably go for a lot less than that...

Thanks for the info. I wasn't sure just how cheap "cheap" was.
____

ferrous wrote:Those GP boxes were a terrible buy. I'm still not sure what the thought was of making the default GP squad all the same figures. Boring to look at, nor useful from a rules perspective. And if you played South, one got a box of five minis in all the different Cadres anyway, but only needed four to play, and every box set came with Jagers, so I ended up with more Jagers than I wanted anyway.

5 models is OK for a box, but the 5th model of each GP box should have been something other than yet another Jaeger.
____

warboss wrote:I kept 10 Jagers and sold another 6 (had a freebie one to sweeten the squad pot) and I still have way too many. IMO, the issue wasn't that the five minis were the same basic chassis but rather that every chassis of that type was largely useless.
WTF? The "benefit" to taking overpriced and underperforming chassis that don't excel at anything with lower global army benefits is to win an exact tie that you're very unlikely to get because the other side has better models with better stats and better weapons along with better deployment options and rerolls at the cost of 1-2 crappy models worth of TV.

In a nutshell, john, don't bother selling your gp squad at the moment until the final rules come out. Supposedly the uselessness of certain "stock" models is being addressed (I can't comment with any certainty on the last couple of rules revisions regarding whether that is actually true) so you're more likely to get a decent amount instead of a pittance if you wait.

Of course, if you wait, the plastics will be out and possibly cheaper

The old tiny tac weapons look much worse IMO and simply using the current ones helps modernize the models alot.

In other words, GPs are about 30% overpriced, so a -25% points reduction across the board would make them acceptable.

Got it. Maybe they'll be "fixed". Maybe.

The way the production plastics look, I'm just not interested.

If all the weapons "match", it should be OK, even though the new weapons look much better.

 Albertorius wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:Thank you. The new Jäeger is better proportioned, and the gun almost certainly less bendy / breakable. But it's a pity they shrank the model by at least 10%.

Part of it might just be the pose: the old tac minis were completely upright, whereas the new Blitz minis have a wider range of poses (although the later tac ones had some of that, too).
As to the proportions, the Blitz minis were designed to be more faithful to Ghislain Barbe's original concepts, and the tac era minis were designed to follow closely the technical illustrations made for the tech manual and gear catalogs (which would probably be much more "realistic", but certainly less stylized).

[..] Hopefully this will give a general idea of the sizes involved. I didn't have any Iguana or Cobra at hand at the moment, but if anyone cares I can do some pics next weekend.

After assembling so many, which subset of miniatures (Tac or HGB!) do you think were easier to assemble and then paint, if not modify into another variant?

And which do you think have held up the best during actual play over the years?

_
_

 Smilodon_UP wrote:

After assembling so many, which subset of miniatures (Tac or HGB!) do you think were easier to assemble and then paint, if not modify into another variant?

And which do you think have held up the best during actual play over the years?

Hm... well, it's not that easy to say.

BTW: I have just realized I didn't answer warboss >_>. Usually the Tac minis had separate heads.

For one thing, Tac scale minis were usually made up of much less pieces, so in that regard they tended to be easier to assemble, particularly in the case of certain models, like the Bear/Den Mother/Mad Dog (the Blitz version looks better, particularly the Mad Dog, but.... bloody hell, it's a million parts!).

Then there's also the fact that casting quality has been very, very inconsistent in all this years, although usually the casting of the old Tac minis have been better IME. In the case of Blitz minis, I've seen it all, from nearly flawless casts (a minority) to almost unuseable legs attached to blobs of extra metal (also a minority), with everything in the middle. Most of the time the minis suffered from minor (and sometimes not so minor) problems, particularly of mould alignment. That makes them a bit harder to work with.

The original Blitz minis were very nice to work with, and had nice and thick pegs (mainly arm ones) that made them very sturdy after assembly. Current Blitz minis have changed that to round "ballistic cloth" type of links, which IMHO make the minis look much worse (they look much more like giant gorillas) and also makes pinning much more needed. It improves poseability, though. Somewhat (Read: not enough in my mind to justify the change).

And then there's the weapons, which are kind of a mixed bag; In Tac, the Gears usually had their main weapons cast directly into the arms, which of course made them particularly sturdy. Unfortunately, the rest of the weapons had attachment points that were flimsy at best and non existent at worst.

In the case of the Blitz minis, it's basically the other way around: hand weapons without any kind of attachment point whatsoever, ala GW, but in metal (which is less than ideal unless you pin it), put much improved hardpoints for the rest of the weapons, specially in the case of rocket packs.

All in all, I'd say that the best to work and play with would be the original Blitz range, IMHO.