"Future of hard plastic historicals" Topic

With the Perry's latest news of their WotR set release in December, it's clear that hard plastic models are here to stay and possibly become a staple of wargaming.

First, a look back at what's come by manufacturer:

Warlord Games

Ancients
Imperial Roman Legionaries
Celtic Warriors
Imperial Roman Veterans
Roman Praetorian Guard
Imperial Roman Auxiliaries

ECW
Royalist Infantry
Parliament Infantry
Firelock Storming Party
Parliament Cavalry
Royalist Cavalry

Perry Miniatures

ACW
ACW Infantry
ACW Cavalry
Farmhouse

Napoleonics
French Infantry
British Infantry
French Heavy Cavalry

Victrix – all Napoleonics
Peninsular British Flank
Peninsular British Centre
Waterloo British Flank
Waterloo British Centre
French Infantry (1804-1807)
French Infantry (1807-1812)
Highlander Centre
Highlander Flank

Wargames Factory

Ancients

Romans
Celts
Celt Chariots
Celt Cavalry
Numidians
Ancient Germans
Ancient German Cavalry
Roman Cavalry

Zulu War

British
Zulus

Dark Ages

Vikings

Zombies

Immortal Miniatures

Greeks and Persians coming

Given all of the above, I'm keen to hear people's opinions of what should come next. Which periods do you think we'll see or do you think these companies will continue to build out their existing ranges?

I'm too old to appreciate the time needed to assemble plastics…just for the variety. If I'd been raised on GW figures and their use of plastics…well maybe I'd feel differently about it. I like the heft and ease of painting I get with lead soldiers.

As to the next range; I'd like to see them finish off Rome with a 4th-5th century offering along with suitable enemies; Sassanids, Goths, and Vandals.

I'm surprised no one has come out with WW2 plastics. There are lots of 26mm compatible vehicles,

I would also think there is room for some 28mm medievals. HaT has a line of 28mm medieval (Spanish El Cid, maybe).

HaT is playing too with Napoleonic French light infantry with Bavarians and Prussians due soon

I'd be surprised if some Mahdist and Northwest Frontier forces didn't get produced in plastic eventually. Boers would be awesome.

So far the various companies seem to be producing very useful troops, with just a bit of overlap.

Microscale WWII armor?

WW2 Bulgarians?
Finnish reindeer pack animals?
AWI Fusiliers in bearskin cap?
Lee's Legion foot troops?
ACW Rush's Lancers?
FOX News anchormen?
1/144 Boulton Paul Defiants?
15mm Russian ski troops?

Hopefully the manufacturers will have more sense than to listen to the deranged TMP wish lists. We are not financially responsible people.

It's pretty incredible if you think about it. I can remember that first Perry news item (December 2007??) for the ACW infantry. How exciting!

Now look at that list in under 2 years (much under actually because I don't think the ACW set was out until April or May of '08?)

38 hard plastic sets! I wonder what that number will be at the end of 2010!

10mm Napoleonics?

I think WWII would be good. There's 20mm and 1/48, but not 28mm.

I will guess that we will see Normans, Saxons, and Macedonian / Successor armies next. Maybe even some Carthaginians.

John, you forgot to add Napoleonic sleigh drawn cossack artillery batteries to the list. Put me down for a half pack once they are produced. I hope they will be sold by the sprue and I won't be forced to buy a whole pack.

Hi LeadLair – you'll definitely be seeing some Saxons soon. ;-)

Fun to see that list!

All the best,
Tony

Tony Reidy
Wargames Factory
wargamesfactory.com

I really like plastic multi-pose kits. The GW Human mercenary sprues for Mordheim (now the militia sprues) converted me completely. I still love putting them together. I'm not sure, but I suspect those are Perry sculpts, too.

And I'm with Bob, in that I am very surprised there are no equivalent WW2 figures. I think they would be naturals. I think there are some on the Wargames Factory Liberty & Union League, but none have gone into production yet.

Good point! Why no WW2????

I agree they are here to stay and it is good news.

Ranges will keep expanding into anything that folks buy a lot of. Plastics are big battalion stuff and the really-nice-but-we-can't-sell-a lot-of-packs stuff is best left to metal.

Alexandrian pikemen, Landsknechts, Swiss, Chinese spearmen and crossbowmen, 100YW longbowmen and MAA, Norman milite types, AWI, C18 tricorne wars, perhaps multi-period transport and carts… anything that a lot of gamers buy in fairly large numbers.

Mexican American War.

I can see some who would have a snit if only 8 boxes were produced in his suggested range. "I am NOT buying anything until the range is complete! I don't want to get left holding the bag. What? No Pandours? No von Schmittersback Frei Korps? Well, the hell with your SYW plastics!"

People who "suggest" (read: "demand") plastic figures usually have no clue about tooling costs. "Hey! *I* would buy a box or two!" And maybe 12 other guys in the whole world would too.

Pathans?

All the hard plastic releases thus far are 28mm. I'm wondering if there are techinical reasons why they haven't moved into 15/18mm – or will a divide emerge along the lines of '28mm plastics', '15mm metal'?

I think WSS would be good, it scored high on the Liberty and Union league. The figures will do for most armies of the period, you can use a lot of figs to play, the Black Powder rules just came out and seem popular, they are relatively easy to paint compared to Napoleonics.

They just need a big, stunning movie to come out about Marlborough.

I'd go see it.

I'd go see it too but I wouldn't buy the plastic figs.

STOP THE INSANITY! NO MORE PLASTICS! I CAN'T KEEP UP! The only thing protecting my fingers from more Xacto cuts is the layer of dried glue around them. I'm getting involved with armies and periods and scales for which I had absolutly no intrest in before plastics. My fellow gamers look at what we have become(Besides very happy). ;)

>I'm wondering if there are techinical reasons why they haven't moved into 15/18mm –

15mm figures are already available cheaply.

Hat is doing 15mm palstics. I have no more info that the SKU codes in one of their catalogues.

I had invested a fair bit of money into plastics but like Ogdenlulimus I haven't the time anymore to spend 30 minutes assembling one figure. And I did come to gaming maturity with GW's first sets of plastics.

This is really aimed only at the Victrix stuff – I really like their sculpts and am a big fan of their work, but the sheer amount of assembly work I have to perform is a big turn off.

Given these, I hope they will be doing cavalry soon, and early Italian Wars Renaissance as well, e.g. 1494 – 1525, or so.

I agree, 15mm metal is readily available and, relatively, cheap certainly by comparison with metal 28mm. The Hat '15mm' are, I think, more properly 1/72, and in my opinion (for what it's worth), not comparable to most ranges in metal – they don't mix at all, and the plastic used is not the hard stuff Victrix, the Perries etc are using. So is it volume/cost alone that is driving the move into plastic 28mm? 15mm will remain a metal domain more-or-less exclusively?

A few points.

Assembly time. Plastics take the same time to prepare as metals – once you have the tools and technique. I assembled 8 WF Vikings last night – it took less than an hour – so that is more like 7 minutes a figure. A good pair of sprue cutters and a brush on cement really speeds this up.

I think that new ranges will start to come even faster in the next year or two.

I am sure that a year from now, we will have a core WW2 range and more musket ranges. These are doing quite well in the WF League. Perry have said that they plan mounted WOTR and also a pack of Pike and Crossbows. Napoleonics will get artillery from Victrix. Saxons are coming from WF and more Dark Ages will follow after that.

The speed probably depends on how fast the current ranges sell through. The investments for plastics are huge. If they sell strongly, and the tooling costs are recovered, then new ranges will come quickly.

Regards
Mick

WSS – generic troops scream out for plastics. The grendiers and specialist troops could be done in metal. Even the Cav was pretty similar across all nations involved (dragoons and hussars being the only real exceptions).

C'mon Perrys/Warlord/Wargames Factory – Do it!!

I understand that one company is working on WW2, or so rumour says.

I don't see the market for 15mm plastics. THe advanctage of plastics are:

1) They are cheaper (due to high volume production) – metal 15mm are already very cheap.
2) They are multi-part so can be converted – who wants to assemble arms onto 15mm figures? I don't even want to do that for 28mm…

Mike

I'm with you on that Mike – I left assembly behind as a kid when I made Airfix etc model airplanes and ships.

artaxerxes – The HaT 1/72 figs are indeed 1/72. The post from McWong73 about them doing 15mm is not referring to the 1/72 range.

The HaT website has a 'teaser' reference to a completely new range that have '15' as part of the stock code number. No details of what period may be involved have been released, but the only info that seems to be available is that they will be 15mm.

Actually,that 15mm category is gone from the Hat site. I've already seen smaller scale figures in plastic-Risk LOTR and GW epic,and I'd rather stick with metal castings,the detail is much crisper.

30 minutes to assemble a figure? What, do they need ship rigging?
The best part of plastics is the assembly. You get to create the figure that you want/need on the spot without asking "why don't they make a…"
As a bonus, the stuff you don't need at the time goes into storage until you do need it. You certainly can't do that very easily with Pewter. (Which was a vey cool substance in the 18th Century.)

Hi All,
Noticed a couple of references to HaT products, so I've just been over & checked out their 28mm pages & the following are listed…

El Cid Series
28001 Spanish Heavy Infantry
28002 Spanish Light Infantry
28005 Andalusian Heavy Infantry*
28006 Andalusian Light Infantry*
28007 Almoravid Heavy Infantry*
28008 Almoravid Light Infantry*
28xxx Spanish and Moorish Cavalry*
28xxx Command packs*

Napoleonics
28003 French Light Infantry Voltigeurs
28004 French Chasseurs (Marching)*
28009 French Carabiniers
28010 Bavarian Infantry (Marching)*
28011 Bavarian Infantry (Action)*
28012 Bavarian Infantry Command*
28013 Prussian Infantry (Marching)*
28014 Prussian Infantry (Action)*
28015 Prussian Infantry (Command)*
28016 French Light Infantry Action*
28017 French Light Infantry Command*
Wurttembergers*
Austrians*
Russians*
Prussian Landwehr*

7 Years War
2800x Prussians *

* Future items. All future items subject to change.

The web page is here: hat.com/current28.html

Hope that this is of interest…

Valiant have done WWII but in a fairly arbitrary scale which kind of defeats the object. Shame because they are very nice sculpts, just far too large for 1/72nd and too small for 28mm.

I would like to see Vikings, Saxons, Normans and Irish done by the Perrys, lots of swappable stuff between sets to really open up the possibilities. A much as I love my Gripping Beast armies I do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time Dremelling mould lines off shields and trying to make the spearmen hold their spears upright instead of horizontally (a bloody useless pose for WAB). Plastics would make life so much easier.

I find plastics a lot easier to put together/clean than metals as well. In the Perry French box most of the figs only need to have their packs put on, you can get a box of them put together in a little over an hour no problem. It is about the same amount of time you would spend cleaning mold lines off of other figures and gluing a standard pole into a hand.

Hard Plastic WW2 -- I got some samples with a copy of Wargames Illustrated. 1/72 I think but quite nice.

Why cannot we have some single piece plastics to fill out bulk of armies. I do not need to customize every figure in the army. Who remembers the first hard plastic figs --Ros Pack. Those were excellent, in one piece. I would invest in armies of plastic, if I did not have to put them together, en mass.

The assembly time varies depending on the range, period and manufacturer.

Wargames Factory Zulu Wars Brits – assembled in no time.
Perry ACW – assembled in no time
Warlord Games Romans – only a fraction more than it took to do the Perrys.
Victrix French Naps – these took me quite a while. Seperate heads, arms, backpacks, bayonet scabbards, ammo puches etc.

If you can do a Victrix French in less than seven minutes then bully for you! It took me a damn site longer.

Again, I'm not knocking Victrix, I love their stuff, but it was a no brainer for me to put my two boxes back in my cupboard and just buy painted Perry french from DPS. I like how HAT 28mm plastics are pretty much ready to paint once cut off the sprue (as are the Perry's for that matter).

Took a look last night on the HAT site, and they have indeed dropped the "15" SKU. Got to agree with all the posts that 15mm metals are already cheap and readily available, so why bother?

Alot of people are waiting for….

6MM Science Fiction Androids
German WW2 Late War (1944-1945) Rifle Team
Sci Fi Greatcoat Infantry
Generic War of Spanish Succession Infantry
Customizable Ancient Light Infantry
Samurai Warriors
Generic War of the Spanish Succession Infantry
Generic War of the Spanish Succession Cavalry
Modern/Near Future Armed Civilians
Generic Powered Armour Suit and Weapons

Are any of these "100%" complete L&UL actualy going to get made. Some have been a long time coming, it's like the zombies were already made before the voting finished.

also production of the ideas from L&UL slows up Field of Glory releases which will surely annoy Slitherine and Osprey.

EDIT….

German WW2 Late War (1944-1945) Rifle Team
Generic War of Spanish Succession Infantry
Customizable Ancient Light Infantry
Samurai Warriors
Generic War of the Spanish Succession Infantry
Generic War of the Spanish Succession Cavalry

Historicals only but I think you can see the point.

Hi varlives – actually no, I can't see your point. I know that in your short time at TMP you have jumped on WF-related posts and bashed the company. Is that the point?

You need to re-edit your edit as well. You've got WSS infantry twice and Customizable Light Infantry were already released as "Numidians – Ancient Light Infantry".

Wargames Factory just released their Vikings which are fantastic figures – I'd put them in the same league as the Perry stuff.

But perhaps more interesting is the fact that the Vikings are WF's 12th set in one year. They've been averaging a set per month. That's pretty darned impressive in my book.

Couple that with the fact that each release gets better – that they have clearly stated that they're focused on improving their work and it shows each time – that they have a recycling program in place – that they use a non-profit company called Triangle that supports disabled people for their packaging – that they're incredibly responsive to their customers – that they even have a program like the Liberty and Union thing in the first place!!!

So, no, I don't get the point except that you seem to bash them at every opportunity.

Regards,
Bill

If we think with a commercial mind to win money with plastic sets you need:

- A period that would need a lot of miniatures as basic rank and file.

- A period that it's very popular.

- Some special units that are too expensive to buy in masse in metal, as Chariots or Elefants (and also heavyweights!)

If none of those preconditions is true you can't expect to get your investment back. And as this is a business I imagine that the most probable future ranges would be Macedonians phalangites, Greek phalangites; Roman Republic (hastati/princeps, may be also triarii and velites); Carthaginian army; more Napoleonics (at least the old suspects: Russians, Prussians and Austrians); generic Wehrmacht, US and British for WWII…

Myself would like for some plastic 28mm Moderns (US, British and Taliban), but I know that I am a minority, so I won't hold my breath!

I'm happy with the Napoleonics but like others in previous posts , puzzled as to why Victrix would follow the Perry's straight into the British / French line ups. For me, the first company to put out Austrians (minimal changes between fusliers and grenadiers) will win as they are HUGE units in the 1:20 rulesets and plastics will make an Austrian army something very affordable.

Assembly time. Plastics take the same time to prepare as metals – once you have the tools and technique. I assembled 8 WF Vikings last night – it took less than an hour – so that is more like 7 minutes a figure. A good pair of sprue cutters and a brush on cement really speeds this up.

Well I prepared 72 Calpe Prussian Landwehr figures in less than 30 minutes last Sunday and most of that was spent looking for non existent mould lines. I nave assembled WF, Perry and Victrix plastics and they all took much longer than this.

I would like to see anyone assemble 72 of any plastics make in half an hour, possibly Hat excluded.

Interestingly, as much as we collectively might bemoan that Hat, Victrix, and Perry have all made the same French line infantry types instead of branching out into others, that seems to be exactly what we collectively want.

Some of us love the Victrix for the fun of building them. Others want the straight and simple HaT marchers. Others want the middle ground of Perry with some customization but not heavy.

We can all get exactly what we want (in those limited lines for now) and we don't need to plant any standards saying that one is the best. The variety available to us in so short a time is pretty amazing.

It is all good.

HAT are starting up 28mm Bavarians – the marching box set is on my "to get" list for certain. I suspect HAT will bring a lot of the non French and Brit Napoleonic's to market.

The WF Vikings are a lot easier to assemble than the Victrix French, so benchmarking the time it takes to assemble a viking figure to a French fusilier isn't entirely fair. Got to agree with Bill as well, Wargames Factory have been the most prolific of plastic 28mm manufacturers, and their ranges improve with each release.

28mm WW1 I'd like to see before WW2, but again that's my personal preference and the manufacturers have a better idea of what will and won't sell than most of us here.

I'm a little surprised that multipose is the thing and no one is doing a simple box of marching or advancing figures with some simple head variants to stick on. Would that not satisfy the gamers who don't want to fiddle with stickng arms and legs on etc.

hussarbob1746.webs.com

As 1/48th scale is close enough to 28mm for most people, there are already a number of sets out there for WW2 in hard plastic, to go with the increasing number of WW2 ground vehicle models(tanks & such) now being made by multiple model companies. These sets are as good(or better), pose-wise, as anything I've seen by the Perrys, and are priced decently, at about 20-30 USD per pack of about 25-40 figures. I've seen Russian infantry, US infantry, German Paras and regular infantry, and tank crew/ armored infantry packs for them as well.

Hat is doing 15mm palstics. I have no more info that the SKU codes in one of their catalogues.

their web site doesn't mention it – what are they listing in the catalogue you have for their 1st releases ?