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Okay, so I think we can all agree hands down that the Men at Arms are bad. The arms are long, the details are soft, and the swords are too big (according to SS, I haven't started building any yet or even compared sizes). So what's to stop us from throwing them in the garbage, accepting our losses, or contacting Mantic for replacements after receiving them? And why in God's name did this sorry bastard (me) buy a further 80 off of somebody at KS BOGO prices after having the first group in hand and a rank already built up? Well, I believe they're fixable. Not only are they fixable, but painted properly, they aint half bad (Except the arms. God, the arms!!). So, the point of this thread is to go through fixes. I'll be attaching pictures throughout the process, and I hope others who have attempted (and hopefully succeeeded) at making them better will show off their ideas too, so that these cheap minis aren't our red-headed step children of minis, but are instead a good and passible unit on the table. To start, a picture of bare plastic with the spear arm fixed. Now, the monkey arms suck. They're too long. Are they badly detailed? Not so much, just way too long-in the bicep area. See where I'm going with this? I cut out the cloth that separates the elbow guard from the chain mail atop the shoulder. Having done this, the arm looks perfectly normal in size. I don't need to adjust the forearm at all, as the fist to the elbow should be slightly longer than the elbow to shoulder. The size should also be appropriate where greenstuff doesn't need to be used to fill in any gaps. I didn't touch the arm for the shield-that's way too much work, as it requires a full resculpt, and I want this to be fairly easy for people to fix. Chopping the bicep took 2 minutes. I'll be adding a painted image of him later (tonight, I hope).

And here's an image of that same exact model painted up. Except his base. I'm gonna fill that in later. With a decent paint job and that gorilla bicep fixed, he's definitely passable on the tabletop. Washes are a must on these guys though-some GW stuff it's possible to get away without them, as there is enough detail to show off, but these guys require a wash, big time. As you can see though, it's definitely tabletop quality now.

Unforunately, more work than that is required, the elbow still reaches the waistline (according to correct anatomy, it should lie just above the navel, you can check this on yourself!).

And then, the wrist should be in-line with the groin with the outstretch palm no more than halfway down the thigh.

The mitten lego hands are pretty bad, too. And the gauntlets are extremely chunky, and the entire right arm melts into the shield.

And the posing on the arms is terrible.

Whoever sculpted these just plain hasn't done life drawing and has zero sense of proportion or human anatomy, there are some very basic rules and it's not hard to check that you've done them right.

with that in mind, my prefered solution is to trash the arms, and source alternatives.

Currently eyeing up historicals to use. First thought was fireforge games, but a little investigation indicates that the arms are a touch too small and the heads a touch too big. Perry miniatures seem like a better fit.

I photshopped up a (properly scaled, to the millimetre) pic of perry and fireforge men-at-arms to play around with... IMO the Perry kit seems like the better fit, it's built to work with pavises so the mantic shields should work quite well.

Mantic body, fireforge arms/head:



Mantic body, perry arms/head:



If anyone owns both of these kits, I'd massively appreciate seeing what the arms look like on the men-at-arms bodies, even just a quickly blu-tacked together cameraphone snap would be awesome.

I do wish they gave us more arms to work with, but that picture I have the arm is off by about a half millimeter...which definitely bears up to tabletop quality. The problem here is that we are viewing this model in a vacuum-he's all alone. Put him in with 39 other guys, and they'll look uniform and probably pretty good. That's a long way off though, as I'm not a fast painter at all. I had him done fairly quickly, but got distracted by Injustice and took too long to finish him. Lol

I certainly won't disagree on the shield arm-that thing's just plain awful. Thankfully, it's only visible from one angle, so you can largely ignore it (or try to).

I dunno, a bad mini is a bad mini even in large groups if the posing is off.. a unit of hamfisted, sticky-out arm high elf spearmen still look terrible to my eyes.

Interestingly, the metal crossbow arms look absolutely fine and have no scale issues whatsoever.

The one really good part of the MAA kit is the spears and shields, I'll definitely be trying to hang on to those, as well as the torso to keep some fantasy style to the models.

I've definitely changed my mind on fireforge after that photoshop job, simply because the arms look a little on the small size, heads aren't quite what I'd want and the perry kit offers poses like the 2-handed spear arms which opens up some chances to make a properly nice-looking unit with the front rank having lowered spears with the big shields spiked into the ground on their bases.

The fact that I have to put work into them to make them table top acceptable sucks. I can't/won't deny it. I'm just saying this makes them workable, and usable. And I think I mentioned in the N&R thread that the crossbow arms were fine too. It's why I want 20 more of them. haha

Sorry... but I have to agree. (If I didn't have to agree then I wouldn't be sorry... )

I am painting mine up to use as city watch for Pathfinder, mostly - they will be fielded by the dozen, and cut down by the dozen when the game permits.

I actually like their faces, and weapons, and shields. But the proportions.... Oi!

I agree that Perry historicals are the best way to go for replacements.

The Auld Grump

I keep flip-flopping with these minis, my opinions keep changing between:

"maybe they'll be okay with conversion"

to:

"maybe they'll be okay with replacement bitz"

to:

"hmm, that'll cost money and I'll be throwing good money after bad"

to:

"I'm sick of looking at these and I'm gonna throw them in the drawer and try to forget they exist".

I think you might be on to something with the arms, although removing some extra material from the bicep might be needed, pretty much all of the cloth rather than just some of it. And then with the arms it varies.. some have too much bicep, others have too much forearms, and they all need different cuts I think.

Which then leaves the problem of the giant feth-off great big lego mitten right hand. The left hands on these (holding the shield) are quite small and in-scale, not so much with the right hands though.

I'll feel pretty bad about buying a whole kit just to get some decent hands for these, so I might go with my original gut feeling and buy some eccentric miniatures sprues.

 scarletsquig wrote:
I
I'll feel pretty bad about buying a whole kit just to get some decent hands for these, so I might go with my original gut feeling and buy some eccentric miniatures sprues.

You do know Hoardobits has fireforge bits right? You can just get the arms/heads you want without having to buy the whole kit.

I just moved so I can't post up pictures right now, but I have tried both GW and Perry arms on the MAA bodies. The Perry arms are, by my eye, a tiny bit too short, and a little thin to look good on the MAA. The GW arms are the best so far. I have lots of extras from the GW Empire militia boxed set (one of the great plastic box sets in the hobby imo), but they are all a bit too irregular in style and armament to make any sort of a cohesive unit. I have also modeled up a barbarian monk type guy using MAA bodies, WGF orc arms, and a WGF viking head. The arms are properly long, have the lego hands so you can use the original weapons, and can be found for pretty good prices from bits sellers. Some of the posing on them is weird, and there are really no good left arms, and the arms are bare, so it isn't really a civilized look, but I like the end result. I will try to get pictures up sometime in the next month.

Unfortunately I don't have any of the Fireforge stuff, which I am hoping will be the solution since if they are at least as long as the Perry arms but thicker, I think they will be passable. That being said, my desire to do anything with these figures is rapidly approaching zero. After I sat down to see how the Perry arms looked on them, I just ended up working on Perry stuff after a couple minutes of "AAAGGGH, these are the worst arms" and wondering why on earth the MAA ever saw the light of day in their current form.

Every time I look at the arms I am just blown back by how bad the proportions are. Honestly, I don't think I will even bother doing anything with my MAA. My hobby time is far too valuable and rare to spend fiddling around with such atrocious miniatures. If I didn't want the spears to convert WGF hoplites into wood elves, I would send them back to Mantic and ask for a refund. Even the detailing on the spears is pretty bad. Those leather wraps or whatever on the spears will disappear with a single layer of primer.

Well just bought a set of 10 of these guys from ebay, gonna try my hand at fixing them, I might even try building some compatible bits for both the arms, heads and weapons if anyone's interested.

No promises of course, I,ve still got about 11 custom tyranid sculpts and other stuff to finish off, but I'll give it a shot.

Okay got my M@A in the mail, already started to give them a look over, a few obvious points spring to mind about these:

1 - Those arms, dear lord, no point in trying to fix these, I just going to outright replace them.
2 - The shield is too large and the "wings" are just intrusive to posing.
3 - The shield arm is integrated with the shield and lacks detail, going to have to make these separate.
4 - The arms need to be about 25-30% smaller in bulk and a lot shorter to be correct.
5 - Faces are really flat and they also have no chin guard on their helmet.
6 - Heads have nowhere to slot in? I found this just weird, I can't make a gorgot/neck guard to help this.
7 - Feather on the helmet just looks odd, gonna remove.
8 - Handle on the sword is too short, sword as a whole too big, needs to be replaced.
9 - Overall height isn't to bad, they're a little taller than most of my other miniatures, but its workable
10 - Arc in the back also isn't as bad as I thought, again workable.
11 - More variety in parts is a real must for these guys, nothing fancy, just a few extra arms and say two more heads

That's my list, anyone got anything else to add?

Lets make it a nice round thirteen. :p

12. Posing is terrible on the arms and some of the legs making them really hard to rank up.
13. Undercuts obliterate detail on the chainmail on some of the legs.

14. The chainmail in general looks terrible

I honestly don't see any way of really rescuing them and don't think any of the results would deserve the time needed. I'd just accept that they're gonna look terrible and replace them out with something else. Gripping beasts vikings might be a really good substitute.

Personally, I like the bodies and I don't mind the heads. It's the shield arms lack of detail and the length of the sword arm that cause me the most concern. Sword fixes are easy enough, when I get to those. I'm not even mildly concerned about those. I'm not trying to forgive them their error-the arms really are sculpted badly, and those should have never seen the light of day. Even scrapping them and doing them in metal (as the metal crossbows arms are perfectly fine) would have been, even though a lot of people don't like the hybrids. I think they're preferable in this case.

 scarletsquig wrote:
I keep flip-flopping with these minis, my opinions keep changing between:

"maybe they'll be okay with conversion"

to:

"maybe they'll be okay with replacement bitz"

to:

"hmm, that'll cost money and I'll be throwing good money after bad"

to:

"I'm sick of looking at these and I'm gonna throw them in the drawer and try to forget they exist".

I think you might be on to something with the arms, although removing some extra material from the bicep might be needed, pretty much all of the cloth rather than just some of it. And then with the arms it varies.. some have too much bicep, others have too much forearms, and they all need different cuts I think.

Which then leaves the problem of the giant feth-off great big lego mitten right hand. The left hands on these (holding the shield) are quite small and in-scale, not so much with the right hands though.

I'll feel pretty bad about buying a whole kit just to get some decent hands for these, so I might go with my original gut feeling and buy some eccentric miniatures sprues.

The problem with Timetowaste's mini's arm is actually the shoulder. Cut off the overhang and glue the MaA arms slightly higher (so that they seem to have slightly big or padded shoulders) and the arms should line up well enough. So, I'd say the work that needs to be done is: 1) cut off everything between the chainmail and the elbow guard, 2) Cut off shoulder "straps", 3) if you are using one of the (two?) long forearm arms, cut out a section before the wrist.

For the mitts and shield arms, perhaps the outside of the mitts can be painted like armor to look like a good punching gauntlet? The shield arms... I don't know. Paint them like they are entirely armored and black-line in some details?

I'm considering dremelling the shield shoulder off and resculpting it. I was aiming for easy fixes to help people do it, but a new shoulder with a pin to poke chain in might not hurt.

Instead of sculpting a billion shields, just get some from a bits seller.
f'instance, Hoard O Bits sells the Deus Vult Foot Sergeants shields, 48 of them for $8.09.

Sorry Doug, I probably could have typed that better: I'm going to dremel off the shoulder that is attached the shield (shield will stay undamaged) and I'll pop down a blob of greenstuff in a shoulder-y shape, then poke holes to make it look like amateur chainmail sculpt. The arm will be smaller, and will have more shoulder detail.

ah, that makes way more sense

Here is the technique I am using to fix up my Men at Arms:

I use clippers for almost every cut in an effort to make the "fix" as quick and easy as possible. You can tell from my photos that I did not spend a lot of time cleaning up the cuts after I made them. I will probably just use a heavy brush of liquid greenstuff on any gaps or rough areas since the models aren't exactly crusted in fine detail. You might notice a lot of glue marks and mess on my minis, which were also a result of my cavalier attitude towards these minis. Your results would probably vary for the better.

1. First, I cut out a section from the biceps of each right arm, although A2 and A4 are probably acceptable if you aren't too picky. I make sure the front of the shoulder is longer than the back to prevent be acutely-bent elbows.

2. Clip off the under-arm or arm pit of any model who doesn't want Chicken Tonight, Chicken Tonight. The shoulders should end up looking like space marine arms pre-shoulder pad.

3. I clip off the torsos' shoulder straps. The overhang prevents the arms from attaching properly.

4. I cut away the uneven, rounded shoulder sockets. Seriously, tool-maker, why is the arm attachment point all lumpy?

5. I clip the feathers off the heads.

6. I use the feathers as a brooch or besagew for each Man at Arms, to hide the poorly-defined left shoulder.

7. Clip the helmet top smooth(ish) or else use spare decorative bits on it.

I tried to use parts of the spear shafts to add some detail to the shield arms, but they really didn't look like anything other than random Mentos tubes stuck to the dudes' triceps and wrists, so I stopped doing that.

(sorry for the picture quality.)














What do you think?

Not bad, like the idea for the brooch and taking off the shoulder pads is definitely essential.

I also noticed the uneven shoulder join, even after you take off the shoulder pads the damn things still don't have a flat join to the arms.

You've got some better posing out of them too, which is quite tricky to pull off. They at least look like they're using their shields to ward off blows or arrows rather than trying to fly with them.

I'll have to have another go at these hideous things sometime, my rage at the last attempt has subsided enough for me to be willing to look at them again.

In the second set of pictures, I used their spear blades for swords for a more realistic size. I also added the spikes and loops from the back of the spears to their helmets where the feathers used to be. And the unhelmeted head is from the Elohi angel kit and looks great on the MaA body.

I'm still trying to get the right arms into more natural poses, but it's hard enough to work with them as they are. Still, the clipping process is very quick, so I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. In fact, I quite enjoy fixing these guys. I... I might have to get more of them...

I have been assembling a bunch of mantic undead for the past while. It's hard to believe those M@A come from the same company! Anyone know who is the 'final say' on QA at mantic?

 Da Boss wrote:
Anyone know who is the 'final say' on QA at mantic?

Whichever unskilled, disinterested, underpaid Chinese worker happens to be manning the tooling machine that day.

If you're really lucky their supervisor won't come along and tell them to cut corners/ deliberately do a crap job to save time/money.

Often the minis get sent straight from the sculptor for tooling without mantic seeing the minis until that is done.

Anybody had a go with the fireforge arms and heads yet? Scarletsquig, do you have any of the Eccentric miniatures heads? I would love to see how they look on either the MAA or the paladins (I don't like the paladin heads at all). If they look really good, I may bother, but all my MAA are currently slated as gifts for nephews, and people under the age of 10 who are learning to paint.

BTW, I just can't believe that Mantic have absolutely no control over the product they release. That is bonkers. Even the dumbest chinese company on earth would respond to the threat of "No, that sprue is unacceptable and we will take all our future business elsewhere if you don't fix it." Money talks, and so does future money.

Contracts talk. The factory made their money and Mantic didn't have a backout clause for either the goblins or men at arms (I can kind of forgive them for the goblins but not the M@As). Mantic do have a backout clause going forward.

Jeez that sucks for Mantic but it is a "rookie" mistake I suppose.

They look OK to me, not great but acceptable enough for me but then again, I have very low expectations of Mantic - my primary driver for Fantasy armies is price and generally speaking, they win on that score. The actual aesthetics don't really factor into my appreciation, hell, I have a Mantic elf army! Mainly because my painting skill makes no difference to making a model better or worse.

 Gallahad wrote:
BTW, I just can't believe that Mantic have absolutely no control over the product they release. That is bonkers. Even the dumbest chinese company on earth would respond to the threat of "No, that sprue is unacceptable and we will take all our future business elsewhere if you don't fix it." Money talks, and so does future money.

If you're a huge plastics company making several million kids toys or widgets or whatever per day for massive companies, losing the future business of a small fish customer with high demands is no big deal, the threat wouldn't hold any water.

They just plain don't care and you won't get good quality without western supervision or strict contracts. This is the standard model for a lot of Chinese companies. Not all, just some. WGF are probably the only exception that exists, hence why they got booked up very quickly.