Hey
I'm considering building some characters from high fantasy universe and Minutemen bodies would be perfect as a base. They have the same sculptor as Guards and Villagers. Are they compatible? Great War and Death fields aren't but they aren't the same art style neither. The proportions look quite similar (hands, faces). Does anyone have both sets and can show how they compare side by side?
kind curious myself. between turnip28, Sludge, and the like there are plenty of gmaes where mixing the more medieval with the age of musket would be useful. myself i've wondered about using such figures to make a crew of pirates/explorers to do games of Frostgrave: Ghost Achipelago (which has some option rules for gunpowder weapons.. or which you could just reskin the crossbows to muskets)
@Drangir Hmm, they look like they could maybe, frankly I have been thinking about using the the guard along with WW1 bits to make some armored infantry types for game I have been working on.
I have French WW1 and their bodies are significantly more up to real proportions, especially weapons. I think Eisenkern troops fit them quite well. Maybe it's because Grognards are notoriously bigger? I just tried to fit Cannon Fodder arms with weapons and it seems to kinda fit.
Eisenkern also fit to Perry which are even slightly smaller/leaner. Maybe I've got biased by the lasgun prints and comparing them to Grognards at first, IDK. Boots are quite visible difference here, arms are noticably thicker on grognards. Can't say the same for Cannon Fodder.
@Drangir that is becuase the Eisenkern are also in "historical scale" as opposed to heroic scale all the Death Field sets are in. Also in this case I am looking at making a isekaipulp fantasy game, not a scifi game (otherwise I would likely just use the Eisenkern or the heroic offerings I have on hand as is).
Yup! I dig the scale on the one hand, but heroic (even if it's bit less intense for WA) is often easier to convert and paint.
The new Age of Reason seem to be leaning on the WA heroic, but I'm curious about comparisons. I didn't notice they just started shipping. Maybe good souls at the studio could bless us with some general 1:1 photos of their lines.
@Drangir I hear many people say heroic "easier to convert and paint", but from personal experiences over the years, I feel these folks are either lying to themselves or mistaking "subject matter" with "scale"😆
Heroic based on my own experiences can be just as problematic as Historical when it comes to kitbashing and conversion. It’s more like working with various cartoon styles rather than several attempts at realism, so in that regards it can actually be worse to convert than historical at times (hands and wriest don’t always match up, it goes from detailed to shallow in some cases, like with historical the “arm sockets” don’t always match the arm thickness from different heroic sets, heads look to small, some “heroics” are more like historical figures suffering from bad cases of edema in places, etc.) .
However what does make it easier to work with normally as far as arms go is that far more heroic figures have big clunky shoulder pads that tend to hid a multitude of sins if placed right but that is also true the with historical figure arms that have them, you just don’t see it as often. The only thing conversion wise that I would say is easier with heroic is sawing and replacing weapons, and even there it has exceptions as does historical.
Likewise I have painted a couple of heroic model and a couple of historical models; frankly they are about the same difficulty.
I think ease to paint is more reliant on subject matter and herioc tends to be used for simpler subjects (a space marine is way easier to paint than a French Old Guardsmen).
Brian's answer is pretty much on target with my experience, if it helps.
In INTENT, I thinkj the "Heroic" scale is meant to be easier to see as a unique Player-Character personality (hero) on an RPG tabletop, with tthe "Heroic" features exaggerated to make key features easier to see at a glance - especially things like fancy weapons, the curves and "assets" of female characters, the muscles of male characters, and most notably here, the face and eyes.
To the extent that the face and eyes are bigger and easier to see, it's going to be easier to paint fiddly details like lips, cheek blush, irises, pupils, reflections and highlights, and so on - I bet it's far more common for painters to go into really fine detail for a one-off heroic RPG character than to try to do that for each and ever member of a large historical army!
Conversions and the like might be considered easier for heroic fantasy gaming, largely because of the sheer number and variety of heroic fantasy miniatures and bits to choose from: if you want to build a very specific heroic fantasy character, you've got a lot of material to choose from, and the size of wrists, weapons, ankles, and the like are probably more forgiving than the more delicate features of historical figures.
Getting just the right unique costume, magic sword, and such for each character generally isn't going to be a big deal for most rank-and-file historical figures in common eras/subjects, but if you're converting a few boxes of historical figures for a specialized subject and need a bunch of hard-to-find equipment, helmets, backpacks, or whatever - especially if you need those uniform pockets and pouches and collars and webbing JUST right for historical accuracy - you're probablyin for a challenge compared to the more loose and broad-strokes one-off heroic fantasy hero..
I've collected a LOT of spare bits, and in my experience some of the worst offenders for kitbashing between historical and heroic models tend to be oversized heroic heads on historical bodies, and relatively delicate historical arms on heroic bodies: these can look pretty weird even at "tabletop distance"!
That seems to be more true of kitbashing between Wargames Atlantic and its competitors, than kitbashing between two Wargames Atlantic kits, even historical vs. heroic, though as noted by others about the Grognards, that's not going to be universally true from WA vs. WA kitbashing.
I've never paid enough attention to confirm this guess, but I'll go out on a limb and guess that the most exaggerated "Heroic" Wargames Atlantic kits (and thus the ones that might be the most difficult to match with historical bits) are probably going to be the earlier kits produced by WA (and the Grognards certainly seem to fit that theme, if my guess is right!)
In terms of heroic bits sourced from WA's competitors, some of the weirdest heroic proportions I've seen have come from Games Workshop (especially older kits - the figures from the '80s and '90s can look especially weird compared to WA historicals), Frostgrage, Oathmark, and Dead Man's Hand, (There can be a lot of neat bits to work with in these kits, and they generally mix-and-match very well between heroic figures and kits, and it's possible to mix-and-match some stuff between e.g. the WWII French Reistance and Dead Man's Hand or th elike, but in a lot of cases these mixes look a bit odd on historical figures if you're not careful.) I've yet to handle a WA heroic kit that is nearly as exaggerated as any of these! (To be fair, I've not seen the Grognards first-hand, so they might be an exception, and I've never actually assembled the WA skeletons, only broke them up for scenic bits, so they might be an exception and I don't realize it - it's tough to judge skeletons anyway.)
At the end of the day, I've NOT handled the Age of Reason kits, so I can only guess, but I think that WA's newer "heroic" stuff is not as exaggerated as it used to be, and it looks to me like at least the newer WA "heroic" and historical stuff is probably close enough to take a chance on.
It sounds like a fun project, I thought about grabbing a box of the Minute Men to part out as fantasy bits myself, adding elf heads and "gothing" them up a bit into Unseelie elves, and the only thing stopping me right now is uncertain funding and I'm still recovering from going blind a couple months ago - if you take a chance on it, please do post pictures!
@Yronimos Whateley hmm, nah, while you are right about mixing "scales" (though 1/35 model weapons look pretty dang good on historical scale figures😉), given the growing number of fantasy and SciFi minis in historical. I would say its actually about as easy to kitbase fantasy with only historical scale figures as it is with Heroic if not easier. I mean it was really easy to make historical scale fantasy figures out the cheap history sets back when Wargames Factory and Perry were the main historical scale makers in town, places like 4dchan actually had whole "how to proxy WFB army X with historical scale 28mm figs" articals and there where certian people who said "new IG proxy army project" with new shooty historical sets, and historical scale theme options have only grown since then while heroic is basically focused mostly on "genric SciFi" (which means 40k apparently to the hammerheads) with a side of genric fantasy (supposedly WFB also to the hammerheads) .
Also historical scale actually tends to show off the female body better than heroic (Sheildwolf's "asset heavy" offerings for example I would say are more "historical scale" rather than heroic, perhaps the subjects are more historically important to nerd fandom and startek, but the proportions are historical or at least warlord cinematic nontheless). Plus while this isn't a problem WA's female plastic sets have thus far and there are exceptions, most of the heroic scale female humaniod sets I have seen tend to be so mannish it sometimes makes me wonder if the mini sculptors and manufacturs know what a woman is 🤣.
Nah, I am pretty sure the main advantages heroic has is that heroic works remarkably well with "fisherprice" style toys and appeals to the hammerheads who started off with 90s 40k plastics. 😉
