"GB Plastic Romans (and friends)" Topic

I've recently been painting and basing some serious quantities of figures, including some new 28mm Patrician Romans built on the core of a couple of boxes of the new-ish Gripping Beast plastic figures.

Of course, the project expanded and soon included some Foundry and Footsore metals, and a huge number of Old Glory not-quite-historical hairy barbarian foederate foot and mounted to pad out the army.

All of the figures are based for ADLG, on 60mm wide basing with 2 ranks for all of the non-skirmishing infantry. The Auxilia in particular who are on 60x60's really suit this basing, with some even being based in a dangerous-looking wedge formation.

There are ow plenty of pictures of them all posted on my website :

Nicely done! Can't wait to see a battle report featuring them. Are you buying 54mm oversize figures for generals for these?

Nice work!

Looking good- I particularly like the masses of barbarians.

NICE work, they look excellent.

-Will

Once you start basing up on ADLGs "2-ranks of DBX" sized bases the barbarian masses suddenly start to look a lot more hairy!

Those GB Romans do look very good, may need to get at least a box to flesh out Arthur's army.

I do like the look of the hairies 4 deep, much prefer that to the 2 ranks you usually see with ADLG.

The GB go together nicely, but I do reckon you will want some metals to give them a bit more variety. The body poses are pretty identical, and there are not that many arms or weapons choices on the sprue either.

Then again, a business model that means they sell some metals too is hard to complain about….

People have commented on the 'strangeness' of the helmets on the GB LIR figures. I was examining the sprues more closely a couple of days ago when I noticed the variation in the neck-guards on the three crested helmets. The one in the middle has a full-length guard, whilst the other two are truncated, and unlike any depictions of LIR helmets I've ever seen.

I queried this with GB, and was told that Bob Naismith only did one crested helmet sculpt (obviously the middle one), and that the truncated versions resulted from the mould production process. GB was aware of the 'change' in the appearance of the helmets, but considered it acceptable, and went ahead and put the mould into production. So, this is, in a sense, an inbuilt defect that appears in all sprues of this type.

I haven't seen this issue mentioned in any of the reviews of this set I've read. Either people haven't noticed, or they have noticed and they've chosen not to draw attention to it.

If you feel that the problem I've highlighted renders the two heads in question unusable you still have five usable heads; enough to 'head' all the figures on a sprue – albeit with reduced opportunity for variation. Personally it won't be a problem: I had a vague plan to put the unprotected heads on the archers anyway; and the defective heads can still be utilised. There were numerous modified forms of Roman helmets in use among Germanic and Roman successor forces, often lacking neck-guards. At least some of mine will probably end up adorning Saxons, with the addition of putty long hair to cover the vestigial neck-guards on the helmets.

It does seem to me to be an odd commercial decision to put a knowingly flawed mould into production. It was inevitable that the inferior castings were going to be spotted at some point. Alongside the diminishing 'bang for your buck' we see with its plastic sets generally, I think the fact that GB considered this mistake to be within 'acceptable parameters' sadly says a lot about the recent erosion of that company's standards, and suggests that, for whatever reason(s), economising has taken precedence over other commercial considerations.

It costs a LOT of money to remake a mould

No doubt, but…