Other Wargames Manufacturers News: Mantic is determined to beat GW at selling something

Meh...

I think more resin-y. I'm saying this after having drilled a hole in the staff recently. Compared to my old plastic models it came away in a different way than it used to on the plastic.

But I'm definitely not an expert.

 

What they claim is plastic is plasti-resin and should be treated as a resin miniature.

 

I've been following the development of an upcoming miniatures game called Sauriana by the aptly-named Fossilpunk Foundry for some time, and now they've finally opened up for business.

Seems like a perfect match for our little neck of the woods here on Lustria Online, eh?

 

In addition to the Skeleton Warriors I showed previously, Norba have announced other iconic Tomb Kings units coming to their next Kickstarter, including Skeleton Horsemen:


Chariots:

And especially impressive Tomb Guard models clad in ornate Egyptian deity helmets:



I wish people luck in painting those impressively-detailed shields!

 

If they are able to get that level of detail in actual plastic with verifiable photo evidence I'll actually buy from them.

That doesn't look possible for crisp conventional casts or resin prints.

 

That's what I was thinking too. Once you shrink those shields down 28mm heroic scale, I can't see them replicating that level of detail on the actual model.

 

I can tell you with pretty fair degree of accuracy that's a level of sharpness that is impossible with current plastic miniatures manufacture.

Especially the pharaoh seated on war barge far left.

 

As a Necromunda player, seeing this come out not long after GW announced the ludicrous price of their Ash Wastes box set has me laughing.

 

Deadzone is more like Kill Team than Necromunda, in that it features the main factions of Mantic's Warpath universe rather than hive gangs, and I do think Mantic's starter sets have got a bit more expensive over the years, but you are right in that they still give out infinitely better deals than GW at the moment.

In particular their gag "Don't want your hobby money turning to ash" means they know it too

This is one of the reasons why I'm a pretty big advocate of Mantic and other small companies like them - their sculpts may be more akin to those of GW 10 years ago (which to be honest isn't that much of an insult anyway given GW's sculpts were perfectly decent 10 years ago), but so are their prices, and the fact that they have by-and-large kept it that way despite the competition with GW shows that they care more about just giving players decent miniatures to play fun, balanced games with, rather than charging players a small fortune to play games with regularly dubious levels of balance as GW does.

 

RGD Gaming looks set to release three plastic sets this month that definitely fill niches in the wargames market.

First up are the Scythians, an ancient historical faction in dire need of a plastic set. The sprue look all-round decent - separate torsos, legs, arms and heads allow for maximum poseability, and 4 bows and quivers, 5 spear arms, 3 hand weapon arms and 5 shields per sprue means you can build up multiple units with different weapon options pretty easily:





Next are a set of Amazons, well-known to have existed in Greek mythology and rumoured to live in territories ruled by the Scythians among other places, probably a mythological allegory for Scythian women regularly joining their male counterparts in warfare, as per a lot of other Northern European 'barbarian' cultures. The Amazons sprue comes with a similar number of bows, one less spear, two fewer shields and 9 hand weapon arms:

As with the Scythians the leg poses are fine, and I'm pleased to see there is at least one female head with long hair here - so many female warrior kits give their girls Sisters of Battle-style hair or shorter, and as a greater appreciator of females with longer hair it's a breath of fresh air to see it represented.

However, probably the one flaw with this kit is particularly evident when you look at some painted examples:



I honestly think the weapons are too small - it's as if they aimed to shrink the hands for the Amazon weapons to represent smaller ladies' hands, which I can understand, but instead of just shrinking the hand part of the component, they shrank the entire component, so that the weapon also looks undersized. The swords look more like daggers and the bows look like children's toys. However, the maces and picks don't look so bad, and, as per RGD's earlier Faun and Centaur kits each set of Scythians and Amazons comes with one sprue of the other set, to add some Scythian women warriors or Amazon enslaved males to the unit, so you can easily give your Amazons some more appropriately-sized bows and swords from the Scythians kit, and hopefully the difference in hand size won't show too much.

Each set also comes with a sprue of 4 horses, all nicely posed and proportioned (and with interchangeable side pieces as well, I particularly like cavalry sets with this because it maximises the number of horse poses you can make), and legs to mount two Scythians and two Amazons on them:


Personally I'm not such a fan of this approach as it means you'd have to get at least a couple of boxes just to form a normal-sized cavalry unit of 8, which isn't the best way to represent a people like the Scythians whose armies were almost entirely composed of mounted troops, but once these kits are out and distributed across the world, it'll be pretty easy and cheap to buy additional horse sprues separately from numerous sites. Both kits will cost £25 for 40 figures (four of the main sprue, one of the other) plus the horse sprue, nothing to be sniffed at there.

Finally, my favourite of the three kits - the Satyrs:


These lads look great in my opinion, particularly as a Beastman player. I'd love to see a size comparison of these with a GW Gor and Ungor to see which unit they'd be best to add additional models to. RGD have already released a size comparison with some other models:

The Satyr looks particularly at home on a 25mm base and is significantly taller than either a Stormvermin or a Mantic Orc (though they do stand on 'puddle' bases so if you cut those off they'd be a little shorter than that), which, along with their stocky bodies made me immediately think they'd make good Gors, particularly if they were given GW Gor arms. However the more human-like arms these models have mean they could also fit as Ungors, particularly the Ungors that accompany the Gors in 6th Edition Beast Herds (but then, given Gors are Strength 3 anyway, same as a human, perhaps the arms aren't anything to worry about anyway).

Here's a shot of the sprue:


A great mixture of weapons there, with the ability to give them additional hand weapons or shields, and I certainly imagine some spare GW Gor shields wouldn't look out of place on these. I particularly like how they've given these a mixture of caprine, bovine, porcine and equine heads for these, which really fits GW Beastmen which in lore, despite the Gor kit consisting entirely of goat-men, actually consist of men mutated with all manner of beasts. There are also some fun elements such as one arm wielding a torn-off branch to bludgeon some hapless foe to death in the crudest way possible, a Greek Urn (no doubt filled with something for the road) and poseable mini horse tails!

Now, I do like GW's Beastmen a lot, and I still plan to pick up at least one box of their Gor models, but given Beastmen fare the best in units of 20+, it'll take a fair amount of time and cash to build up a force the GW way, even with their Beastman kits still being on the more affordable side individually (though it doesn't help that the Gor and Ungor kits have 10 models per box, where the 6th Edition Beast Herd kit that preceded them had 20). By contrast this kit has 5 of these sprues, meaning 40 models per box as per the Scythian and Amazon kits, for a similar price tag as the GW kit. If I combined this with one or two boxes of the GW Gors it would really get my fledgling Warherd up and running in the Core department, with big potential for kitbashing and perhaps even head-swapping. If you didn't have any of the GW kits and really wanted to build a Beastman army on a budget, you could easily combine this kit with their Fauns, which would fit well as Ungors, though personally I find the latter really too thin and spindly, especially as I have some of the GW Ungors already and think they are fine.

 

Those look very nice. I might have to pick up a box. Actually, I wonder how they compare size-wise to Frostgrave gnolls. I was thinking of doing a small beastmen army and using gnolls for gors. If these are slightly smaller, they might make decent ungor raiders to supplement them. And, I had a friend who did a really nice conversion of some Wizkids DnD Gnolls into minotaurs that I may have to copy.

 

Given the size comparison pic above, I would have thought the RGD Satyrs would make better Gors (as they're quite a bit bigger than a Stormvermin which is probably the size of a GW Ungor) and the Gnolls would be more fitting as Ungors, especially given this other comparison pic I've found:


But of course I would imagine the Gnoll heads would be easily interchangeable with the Satyr heads, so you could easily swap heads and weapons from the two kits to create Gnoll Gors and Satyr Ungors.

Do you plan to use your True Children of Chaos in AoS, Fantasy or both? Regardless, I look forward to watching your Warherd grow!

 

Probably fantasy with the additional option of using them as orcs and goblins for Oathmark.

 

Then I shall be the first to welcome you into the almighty Coven of Lustrian Beastlords! I have set up a Beastman thread here where we can camp around the Herdstone, chat about our preferred tactics (though no challenging or headbutting, we’re all equal in the Coven ) and discuss various ways to play the Cloven Ones in rank-and-flank style battles. Do come and join us, for with every new Beastlord we grow stronger!

 

Awesome! Thank you for the welcome and I look forward to the discussions.

 

I'm going to tell you professionally those Scythians are more fantastical than historical.

I don't care for the proportions either human kit. The satyrs may see a purchase from me though.

- - - - -

McDougall designs presents the fantasy releases for Medbury miniatures. Added to my webstore for your purchase of licensed 3d printed models.

There are a few model releases I have to catch up on. I will be adding more models throughout the day, to which i will either add to this post or, if the thread has been replied to, I will make any further release its own separate post.


https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-armored-wood-elves-with-spears

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-wood-elf-equerry

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-wood-elf-tuathal-warden-of-gwyrdgalas

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-wood-elf-tuathal-hero

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-wood-elf-captains

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-woodsmen

https://mcdougalldesigns3d.com/products/medbury-miniatures-wood-elfs-with-bows

 

Finally Mantic have given their first shots of painted versions of their upcoming new Skeleton Warriors and Horsemen:





I'm pleased to see the weapon hafts look thinner now compared to the renders we saw back in January, as I was hoping. Perhaps the weapon heads are still slightly reminiscent of those of the 6th Edition GW plastics, but they are no worse and could easily be trimmed down if one wished. Without a doubt these look much better than the naked GW ones.

The only concern is the barding on the steeds, which wouldn't fit the 8th Edition rules, but the video below shows that the side plates come separate from the bodies so that they largely look no different from existing conversions based on Hexwraith horse bodies:


And this is just the start it appears, with more news appearing this week and beyond as new Legions of Khemri approach Pre-Order!

 

On the contrary, I find these to be much better-looking than GW's naked 6th Edition Skeletons that were given the bare minimum to try to look Egyptian, because GW wanted to recycle as much as possible from the Vampire Counts equivalent kit at the time. All they had that looked even vaguely Egyptian were the shields, some of the hand weapons (and yet some didn't look Egyptian at all like the axes), the banner tops and the occasional head with a diadem. These on the other hand still look recognisably Egyptian, but are also properly dressed as soldiers emerging wilfully from their tombs to fight for their king, clad in the uniforms they were likely buried alive in. Remember that these are fantasy and don't have to be a direct carbon copy of actual Bronze Age Egyptians, just undead. Creators can be a bit more creative and put their own flair on the design, and so long as they still bear Egyptian-style designs and aesthetics, as they've done here they still fit as models for an Egyptian-inspired faction.

And regarding the horses, the riders are separate as seen in the video above.

Interesting that they have kept the Pharaoh/Priest and Catapult models, though I'm looking forward to seeing everything else they come up with. The mounted Standard Bearer also looks great.

EDIT: I've just found this great-looking mounted Priest on the onTableTop site:


Again beats the old GW metal ones by a fair old margin.

 

Highlighted for emphasis. I can see now why the skeletons are so oddly proportioned.

They're also using the usual cop out of skeletons being fragile as to why they needed to add cloth and armor.