Yeah, like the title says any thoughts on the Zeds.
Personally I think the historical heads are the right way to go, and controversial opinion but if they have make cuts anything they should ditch the modern heads first since they don’t really have anything in plastic to fight from WA and should probably be an STL.
I'm not much of a zombie guy (more of a skeleton/draugr fan) but I think it's a really good-looking kit. There aren't any hard plastic zombies out there right now that I've had a genuine interest in getting. I'm greatly considering adding a box of these to my large pile of 'boxed grey'. Stellar selection of heads - no less than four(!!) types of helm to use for what I call "generico fantasy", plus Brodie, Adrian, and Stahlhelm helmets for Weird War One - no-fuss bodies that aren't covered to the nines in sculpted-on gribbly bit accessories, and 30 in a box. 👍👍
The only gripe I do have with the models is the lack of any real variety in their clothes scraps. Other than some leg apparel that look to be skirts, it's all very similar. I would have liked even one model to have trousers that come down to roughly the ankles. Some armor scraps would be nice too but then we're leaving the realm of multi-use (unless included as add-on bits). I can always raid my collection or get some bits/some other sprue from a seller.
Yeah, I really like these zambos. Simple but well done imo.
@Krisps Actually as kitbasher and someone who has made few offbeat zombies, I am cool with the bodies scrap cloths as is since what you do for adding more varity or uniformity of clothing for your undead hoard is to buy a box (or mix of sprue frams) of the historical troops you want your zeds reprsent then slam the zombie arms and heads on some of those trooper bodies.
I think the kit is great - keep the WWI heads for sure, a box of these zombies should be an instant add-on for anyone interested in the "Last War" boxed set!
I think the hardest heads to make a case for keeping might be the Napoleonic and 18th-century tricorn hats, but even there, I think an easy case could be made for the tricorn heads at the very least being used for a horde of zombie pirates, and I'm pretty sure there's a fairly popular black-powder era horror miniature game out there with room for 18th- and early 19th-century zombies.
In the comments for the WA News update announcing the zombies, I saw another complaint a few minutes ago about the nondescript rags being a little TOO nondescript, supposedly making them a little too bland to work for any specific setting, but the heads and arms look great on historical bodies for anyone willing to kitbash these zombie bitz against their favorite Wargames Atlantic historical sets. Just paint the shirts and trousers of the historical bodies in faded and muddy cloth and rusted or tarnished metal, with zombie rag sleeves and hats to match, and you're golden - and no reason you couldn't mix in a few nondescript rag bodies just to sell the zombie horde illusion!
And for sci-fi gamers willing to put a little beginner-friendly modeling work into it, I bet these zombie bits will mix well with boxes of "The Damned" or "Cannon Fodder" - and just as well with Star Grave kits - for hordes of post-apocalyptic sci-fi zombies and mutants....
So, I think the biggest complaint for most customers is easily fixed with the most basic kit-bashing with any WA kit that suits the era you're gaming in - not perfect for anyone who wants to buy one box of zombies and nothing else, but easy for anyone who doesn't mind spending a little more for donor bodies, or those of us with hard plastic multi-part kits and bitz to spare in our unbuilt, un-painted piles-of-shame. I'm betting that'll be most of us who've been doing this a while: you can't make everyone happy, but there's no reason this set couldn't make many - and probalby most - of us happy.
My only "complaint" would be that the selection of heads doesn't include anything especially exotic, beyond the great selection of historical era hats: the only thing that could make this set better for me would be some mutant and alien heads, alternative monster faces (vampires, goblins, ghouls, "evil dead" deadite demons, and what-not), eerie masks (hoods, flour sacks with eyeholes, jack-o-lanterns), long ragged hair, and so on - but honestly, that sort of thing is probably best left to STL files, if not simply left to my resourcefulness in sourcing or inventing the bits myself, since most customers for a zombie kit are probably just going to want to field a nice, quick, simple horde of generic modern Zombie Apocalypse zombies, or a horde of generic fantasy zombies, and call it a day - the non-"generic"-fantasy-friendly historical heads are just a bonus for the rest of us! So, my "complaint" is small stuff, and it doesn't affect my positive final score for this set.
With that in mind, a box of these zombies, combined with a box of WA Goths or "Partisans I" for fantasy or sci-fi gamers respectively, will probably make about 80% or 90% of the target demographics happy, while "Last War" gamers will surely want to grab a box of these zombies to go with the boxed set for Weird World War zombies/mutants to cover almost all of the rest of the customers for these zombies!
Additionally, I really REALLY appreciate the efforts made to keep this set flexible and versatile enough to be used for so many different settings, and i also REALLY REALLY appreciate the effort put into making some pretty spooky looking zombies: the competition seems to go for somewhat cartoonish zombies, but this set looks pretty mean and malevolent - I love it, these guys should really fit the bill for a proper horror setting.
Seems like a winner of a kit to me! 🙂
I second the call that the modern hats might best be left off and made an STL.. right now that is a lot of heads, and they'll take up most of the sprue. enough so that i can already forsee a lot of people complaining that the box includes too few actual zombies in it.
i also suspect you could get by with only about 3 of each set of era specific helmets/hats. mixed with the generic bare heads, and you can still give the whole mob an appropriate look for the era you want, without every single one having a helmet or hat. that would cut down the sprue space needed. perhaps enough to fit an extra body or two with a couple extra arms per sprue so you can up the number of zombies per box.
i also think that the smooth nasal helmets (far top right) and the banded nasal helmets (3 rows below them, next to the viking helmets) are too similar. and IRL the two types pretty much co-existed for most of the 9th through 13th century.. the banded style was just the cheaper version of the nasal helm, because the non-banded style required a lot more skill to make, and thus was the more expensive.
@Yronimos Whateley Nah, the Nappy heads are easy since Silver Bayonet exists and its not the only blackpowder fantasy game with undead and as you mentioned tricorns can be used for Pirates, frankly if Last Pslam where the main game WW1/2 zeds heads made sense I would say those shakos and tricorns were the bigger "must keep", but several www1/2 althistory settings with zombies exist and Sludge can use them.
Also I am pretty sure it well make more people happy even in the "just one box of zeds" catagory since those guy's can use the bald heads and treat these as older risen corpses.
@Mithril2098 I kinda of agree a lot of them could go with a 2 or 3 of each helmet/hat type per era set up, particularly with the Dark Age/ Early Middle Ages helmets since frankly any and all of them would work for every group in Europe at the time, though I think the Roman heads should stay as a 6 pack (and its a keeper) as should the bald heads and if kept the Cowboy head selection is probably good as is.
The main advantage of having 6 of each is that works as good kitbash fodder for those wanting to convert whole historical sets to the undead empire.
and honestly, there is nothing keeping them from taking any heads they didn't use in the box, and sticking them on an upgrade half-sprue of just heads. (and maybe a few more arm varieties, like say carrying clubs of some kind, or ones with some exposed bone)
I honestly don't see where room on the sprues will even be a problem, unless WA is going to be using going back to the smaller-sized sprues like those from their earlier sets or something: the bits that tend to take up room on the sprues are weapons - especially any variety of two-handed weapons and/or heavy weapons - and accessories like backpacks... since the zombies set appears to be including neither weapons nor accessories, and zombie arms do not seem destined to take up very much space nor deman much room, there's room to spare for most,if not all, of the head variety in the preview image.
For comparison, full-sized sprue sets like the Cannon Fodder II set had room for four different head types for five different bodies (cap, helmet, gas mask, shaved convict head), with plenty of extras, up to almost 40 heads on the frame, plus backpacks, heavy weapons, almost twice as many rifle arms as needed for the bodies involved, a couple pistols, several off-hand arms, and miscellaneous accessories including a grappling hook and knives.
Each of the full-frame WWI sets for French, Germans, British, and Russians has 5-7 bodies, and an avergage of around 30 yeads each with different styles of caps, helmets, and gas masks - the Russian frame has over 45 heads (the Germans had the lowest number - 24 heads - but include lots of entrnching tools, stick grenades, gas mask bags, and other extras to round out the frames with....) And that's in addition to plenty of rifles, machine guns, pistols, and other bits to work with. Most of these sets have six bodies per frame, but that Russian frame managed to fit seven. (The British set were the "losers" on the number of bodies with only five bodies, but made up for it with a great variety of heads, plus a wealth of entrenching tools, gas mask bags, packs, and other gear....)
For the zombies, we've been previewed six bodies, and six each of 14 head types, with a modest selection of arms:
(That's really not that many medium- or large-sized zombie bitz!)
Naturally, that preview image should not be taken as a promise that all those bits will make it onto the final frame, of course: WA can and does trim out the fat when fitting things onto their frames for final produciton.
BUT heads and weaponless arms take up relatively little room on these frams compared to, say, weapons, and without weapons and gear, it's not looking like it would be hard to fit most of those heads on a full frame with the bodies and arms - the ~84 zombie heads in this preview image is only double the number of heads from the Russians set - easily do-able.
Sure, I might be missing something in regards to the manufacturing process that might limit what could be put on a full-sized frame, but at a glance at a frame of the WWI Russians, the zombies - with one fewer zombie body than on the Russians and only about twice as many heads with none of the weapons that come with the Russians (there were plenty of spare rifles for those Russians!), it looks like it might even be easily do-able to fit all of the previewed bits on one full sprue. And it's not like the Werewolves, which are on a half-sized sprue: there's really not a lot more you could add to a werewolf set of the sort WA went with, even if you wanted to, unless you were to fill the frame out with regular wolves or something.
(WA doesn't seem to be doing a lot of half-frame sets these days, but I don't see any way to fill more than a half-frame of werewolves of this sort with alternate heads, arms, and gear!)
Looks to me like the room is there, they should use it, and what has been previewed looks to me like a fine mix of popular and eclectic options!
(They managed to fit a LOT of stuff on that full-sized frame of Russians!)
IF something needs to be cut from the bitz list in that preview image, I can't imagine it would need to be very much.
And with that in mind, I'm surprised nobody nominated the cowboy heads for deletion - I like them and hope they make the final cut (I'll be surprised and disappointed if they don'tl), but they seem to be the oddest man out of the preview: I don'tknow of any wargames demanding a lot of undead cowboys (maybe "Dead Man's Hand" and the occasional RPG like "Deadlands"), while fantasy and zombie-apocalypse games are surely the biggest markets, Silver Bayonet (yeah, that was the game I was trying to think of) can surely make use of those black-powder era heads, and the newly-realeased Wargames Atlantic product "The Last War" (using Forbidden Psalm rules) is only one of the Weird World War games that can make use of of the moderns. They're cool, but odd, and maybe the onesthat might get the least use! No, the zombie cowboys, Napoleonics, and tricorn guys are the oddest men out in the preview image within Wargames Atlantic's current public catalog, and the cowboys in particular are a bit niche for current wargames in general, but I think they're cool options for the set, and see no reason to think much, if anything, would need to be cut for a full-size frame of zombies....
Unless we have reason to believe WA's aiming at a smaller frame size, or plans to add zombie weapons or corpse-bits to gnaw on or something, I don't see any reason to worry about them running out of room badly enough to just give up on all the modern heads or whatever. And, I might be missing something from the communications - I'm not on Facebook, for example. Did Wargames Atlantic say somewhere that they would have to cut something, or did they give any indication this wouldn't be a full-sized sprue?
well i was figuring that if you can cut a few of the heads, you could up the bodies and arms to 8 per sprue. most people when they buy a box of plastic zombies, they expect *bulk* numbers rather than variety. a box of 32 zombies (4 sprues of 8 bodies) is going to go over a hell of a lot better for $35 to $40, than a box of 24 and a couple hundred extra heads.
@Yronimos Whateley I didn't suggest cutting the cowboy hats cuase I didn't think of it but there is at least one game that would probably out of the box use them: Dracula's America which is set in the old west alongside a number of Weird West RPGs.
Also cowboy hats work great for a number of settings other than the old west such as: Post Apoc, WW1/2 Aussies, can work for ECW/30 Years war era if you add feathers (and yes there is a Zombie Apoc wargame rule book set in that era), ACW, boer wars, other 19th century colonial settings, Modern Latin America, Rural USA from the Civilwar to current date, Steampunk fantasy, regular fantasy. They are actually pretty dang useful.
In addtion to Silver Bayonet, the Nappy heads are also good for Flintloque which has a following, Sludge, Turnip28, as well as steampunkery D&D, and those are not the only rules they can be used for as people keep making Blackpowder Fantasy wargames. The Tricorn hats work for all those while not being as tied to one nation, as well as vanillia D&D and Pathfinder (yes alot of genric fantasy has tricorn hats in it now).
None of them are odd men out.
Likewise nah they should totally cut the moderns first if they need to make cuts. While there are a lot of modern games that use zombies, Zeds done for modern are kinda of an over done fad to the point you can get tons of modern zeds for cheap already off ebay. Plus of the rulesets for modern that use Zombies the one getting the most love (read only one really getting played in a popular way) is Zona Alfa which the modern heads we see here don't seem to really zero in on (like only the beanies and construction helmets really fit the Zona Alfa vib and the bald heads do so just as well if not better).
Also while you can theoritically use most of those modern heads for WW2 civilian zombies its kind of a strech for all them except maybe the beanie and Bobby police helmet heads and of those two the only one that really works for WW1 is the police helmet. I suppose the Fire helmet might work as well but honestly the French and British helmets fill in for all the other civilian helmet rolls other than police nicely for WW1/2 and a bit after internationally.
@Mithril2098 If deliverd as promised you get 30 bodies, which isn't bad considering price rises due to inflation, though I get the feeling they could actually do this as a 40+ figure set with it just being 6 Vanillia zombies on a half sprue or less frame and sell the cool heads heads by themselves on another half frame, possibly even as whole multiple single sprue type upgrade box.
Here's the final frame layout
looking at that, i forsee a lot of people complaining that they have way too many redundant heads, and not enough bodies. especialyl since i highly doubt that many people are going to want to have every single zombie of a 30 count box with the same style of helmet. cut the number of helmeted heads to at most 3 per type, and you'll easily be able to bump that sprue up to 8 bodies (with another two sets of arms arms to keep the variety) for a 40 figure 5 sprue box. which will make it sell a lot, because that would make them about $1 a zombie.. and you'll still be able to make your horde well themed for a given era by mixing the bare heads and helmeted heads of your choice.
Bummer, that out of all the themes, you dropped the Conquistadors completely. I would have liked to see them.
@Hudson Adams You dumped the conquestadors heads in favor of the moderns. Why? could have just added those modern zed heads to the modern civilians later on if/when you do them.
Have to agree, it is kind of a bummer to see the Renaissance/Conquistador helmeted heads completely cut. Would have paired well with the existing Conquistador and cavalry kits no less. It also appears that the one-piece nasal helms have been removed as well? I count 6 spangen- and 3 Gjermundbu-style helms. I guess it wouldn't be the most difficult conversion job to remove the rivets and spangen/fill them in with Green Stuff, but admittedly I like when I can be lazy and get a quick out-of-the-box build. I don't see the need for 6 spangenhelms, nor 3 of the Gjermundbu either.
