Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Pikes, Muskets and Flouncy Shirts => Topic started by: pikeman on 27 November 2024, 05:28:00 PM
-
I need some 28mm Stradiots for my Italian Wars collection. They are pricey, and shipping from my favored overseas suppliers makes them unaffordable. My hobby is on a financial shoestring!
So I bought the Old Glory PIL-08 Stradiot 10 pack.
I have never been a fan of this manufacturer. My primary scale is 15mm and I always found the OG figures rough, poorly cast and not well sculpted.
As a first time buyer of the 28’s, I expected them to be better. They are bigger, should have been easier to sculpt than the 15’s. Nope. Not at all! First, the horses are poorly done. They are just ugly, and some were malformed, badly cast, that were clearly rejects. Evidently they don’t care. Second, the horses and riders are mismatched. I expect they cheaped-out and used horses from another range. I have spent almost an hour with my dremel tool modifying both horses and riders to fit. They still don’t match up properly. I also dislike the lack of light lances.
Bottom line, theses aren’t a good product and confirm that there wont be any more OG products on my workbench.
-
OG definitely vary between ranges. I have had a few packs from different ranges over the years and never been terribly impressed. Generally sculpting is adequate but a little rough; posing very hit or miss (the notorious 'hey joe!' poses where the figure appears to be waving with a head facing in a random direction) and casting about average. I think their niche was 'cheap unit filler' before plastics were widely available.
That said, their Wars of Religion figures are less bad than some of the others
-
Why didn’t you send them back for a refund if they are this poor?
Or does the USA not have distance selling regulations?
-
I would echo v lazy dragon's comments, but add that OG's figure quality varies within ranges and even packs. I have some of their Celts. Some are very nice, others truly awful. Likewise a friend put a load of their Indian Mutiny Sepoys straight into the bin as many had "zombie-like" faces.
-
The big attraction has always been that they sell lead by the pound. Some of the sculpts are pretty good, some are not.
I'll be ordering some of the brand new 15mm Spartacus range shortly, they look just as serviceable as the rest of their Romans and enemies, and the price as good as ever.
-
I think it's fairer to say that some of OG's figures are acceptable, at a pinch and usually in the absence of anything else being available. Most are shite and a goodly portion are simply grotesque.
Vaguely anthropomorphic has always been their best description.
Good luck returning them. I don't know if you've ever witnessed the result of mild criticism of OG on another forum, when the owner chips in. It goes south very quickly and the owner goes ballistic usually in inder 30 seconds flat. I get the impression that Russ isn't given to any doubt in the superiority of his product. It really is a case of 'my shit smells the best', shit being the operative word.
-
The quality of sculpts definitely varies a great deal between ranges and even within a range, as others have said. Some are very good in my opinion, and I have always been happy with the horses. If you have a very large project to do, perhaps in collaboration with a friend or in a club, it can work out very economical to buy packs of filler troops in bulk where you share the cost, especially when not needing a whole pack contents for yourself. .
I do like that the head varients and interesting poses give some variety so I always check out Old Glory.
Others will disagree, and that's OK.
All my figures look shite after I paint them anyway haha. :D ;)
-
All my figures look shite after I paint them anyway haha. :D ;)
lol lol lol
Hmm...forum discussions turned nasty? I wonder which forum in question that could be... ??? It wouldn't have the initials T, M, and P, would it?
I used to buy a decent amount of Old Glory when I was doing 15mm Ancients. They weren't bad, and they were what the local store stocked. As I try to buy local when I can, I ended up buying and painting a number of them. I also bought 15mm Minifigs from Wargames, Inc., which was based just down the road in West Virginia. I've since sold all my 15mm Ancients, apparently Cat has some of mine... :D
Once I started getting into 28mm, the shortcomings of O.G. became more noticeable. I think that price has always been a leading sell point of theirs, though. What's the maxim? Quantity has a quality all its owns? As it is, I have a lot of O.G. in my unpainted lead pile, where it will likely remain except for an odd miniature or two that I may paint up. To each his own!
Mike Demana
-
I have loads of OG in my collection, mostly from around 20 years ago. Back then, OG was cheap so was a great way to fill out an army. Quality of sculpts varied from not bad to atrocious. In addition to being cheap, OG seemed to have almost any historical subject I was looking for, from ancients to medievals to Napoleonics and beyond.
Nowadays, however, with more companies in the market, selling better sculpts and especially with plastics and 3D printing, OG's advantages are gone. I'm not getting rid of anything I've already bought and painted (sunk costs and all) but I don't foresee that I'll purchase any new OG figures.
Pikeman - depending on your modelling skillz, would you consider purchasing the Perry Miniatures plastic WotR light horse as a basis for converting into Stradiots?
-
I have painted quite a number of their Italian Wars, Late Medieval, and ECW ranges and have found them some of their nicest figures after painting. I understand individual tastes vary.
https://sl.bing.net/epcjTJro7u8 (https://sl.bing.net/epcjTJro7u8)
-
I have boat loads of OG 25mm figures. Most I like, but the cavalry I have from them definitely do not sit their horses well.
The "Hey, Steve!" poses can be an annoyance.
If you plan to buy a lot of them the Old Glory Army discount card is worth while, but you need to be planning to buy a bunch of figures to recoup the cost of the card.
I have found the 15mm Blue Moon to be fantastic. the 28mm Blue Moon are stylistically odd and the large integral circular bases are a turn off.
A big frustration for me is that the photos of the 25s on their website are terrible! Very hard to tell what you are actually buying.
-
"A big frustration for me is that the photos of the 25s on their website are terrible! Very hard to tell what you are actually buying."
Which I suspect is quite deliberate. lol
-
A big frustration for me is that the photos of the 25s on their website are terrible! Very hard to tell what you are actually buying.
TBF it's quite an investment for a small business to take nice photographs of their products and we can't be sure this new fangled internet thing is going to take off.*
* I have been making this joke about wargame businesses for over 20 years now.
-
I remember looking at those Stradiot from Old Glory from their UK outlet more than 25 years ago. In their naked metal variant they are quite ugly. So I chose not to buy them. Thought I would wait for another manufacturer to make some.
A few years later, still waiting for other manufacturers to get their acts together, I decided to bite the bullet and buy them from Old Glory. Still ugly when they arrived I gave them to a friend with much more talent than myself to paint.
When they came back, they were absolutely stunning! And, to be honest, when I get them on the table, they still draw plenty of praise from on-lookers, even against modern figures.
So although the figures are not nice, they can become terrific.
-
Some pictures.
-
Those look good! In the end, a good painter with can make up for casting shortfalls with quality brushwork - well done!
Mike Demana
-
Why didn’t you send them back for a refund if they are this poor?
Or does the USA not have distance selling regulations?
I bought a dremel tool and extensively carved them. If I didn’t have the tool, I don’t think I could have done the work with a blade and files. I used those for the fine work.
The time and inconvenience outweighed the effort to cut them up. And yes, the US does have regulations about goods and quality. Getting the problems fixed is another matter! It’s not the first time I have had bad figures from a US supplier. These were crushed figures, horses were actually broken. Fortunately I had extras that worked okay.
-
As a first time buyer of the 28’s, I expected them to be better. They are bigger, should have been easier to sculpt than the 15’s. Nope. Not at all! First, the horses are poorly done. They are just ugly, and some were malformed, badly cast, that were clearly rejects. Evidently they don’t care. Second, the horses and riders are mismatched. I expect they cheaped-out and used horses from another range. I have spent almost an hour with my dremel tool modifying both horses and riders to fit. They still don’t match up properly. I also dislike the lack of light lances.
Bottom line, theses aren’t a good product and confirm that there wont be any more OG products on my workbench.
Had exactly the same problem with their 28mm AWI cavalry - bought a bag of 17th Light Dragoons and over a period of about a week, tried EVERY single rider on EVERY single horse and, guess what? Not one of them fitted properly. Or at all, really. Have never bought them since.
As for Russ Dunaway's PR skills, I made the mistake of mentioning (yes, on that "other place") that three of the batch of four new Blue Moon 15mm horse poses he was praising to the heavens as "the best you'll ever see in this scale" were actually physically impossible. One had a foreleg straight out horizontally in front, another had a foreleg curled around so that it resembled a snail's shell; the only one of the four that looked even vaguely horse-like appeared to be in a crouched pose with all four feet firmly planted and looked like Bull's Eye (Woody's horse from "Toy Story"). Incidentally, I can't see those two "impossible" poses in their inventory any more!
Russ pointed out that the sculptor had spent many years working on a horse ranch. One can only assume the poor chap was the cook.....
-
never bought OG, never wanted to, the images alone suggest they are far from the best.
-
never bought OG, never wanted to, the images alone suggest they are far from the best.
To be fair, they have been a boon to recreational anglers as well as folk who like to reload their own shotgun shells.
-
Weighing in, I cannot speak to the quality of the OG 25s - or even the Blue Moon 28s, though some of the photos do seem to show odd sculpts. And do you lump the Blue Moon in with OG or are they a better option? But I own a lot of Blue Moon 15s. Sure, some sculpts are better than others but overall they are serviceable and, in some cases, they are actually quite good - the 15 mm Sherlock Holmes is exceptional.
The big draw above and beyond price (which is as good as it gets - you can still get 15 mm figures around 40 US cents each with the army card versus 1 dollar US for a goodly portion of most other manufacturers, a few still at the 80 US cents level - cost is more when adding in shipping for others generally (30%), OG within US not so much unless a tiny order) is sheer variety of periods, without Blue Moon 15s there are still many of their periods no one else offers or offer minimal variety and that variety is another 'strength' of their offerings if you like varied poses. Having said that, they do make odd choices - their 15 mm French Foreign Legion Mule Company makes no historical sense, it is but a pack train with no allowance for mounted soldiers which was the whole point of the mule companies.
Based on information gleaned over the years, someone must like their figures because they sell them in vast quantities. No idea in the end but I would not be surprised to find out OG/Blue Moon et al in the aggregate sell as many - or more - historical figures than the aggregate of all other historical figure makers combined, at least in metal. And that excludes the figures they produce for other companies ranges. They are, like them or not, a behemoth in the metals market.
Hard plastic? Not for me. Resin figures (3D), have a few but would trade every single one of them in an instant for the same thing in metal. But 3D buildings and terrain scatter have transformed such options greatly for the better - but there is clearly a durability/fragility issue in that realm.
In the end, most figures once painted look just fine on the table. And once on the table neither the sculpt nor the paint job matter as much as how are the figures performing (as long as you can tell what the figure is supposed to represent, based on sculpt and paint job).
Seems, however, a lot of electric ink being spilled over what, in the end, are but toys. Don't like them, don't buy them. But lots of companies sculpts are no better and often worse than OG yet I don't see such animus directed at them. Does make one wonder as to the why.
-
Well it might be that....
1) The sculpts are shit and about 10-15 % of the poses in a pack are so bizarre they are either unuseable or require major surgery. Clearly the Exorcist was a more influential film than we often think.
2) The owner acts like a c*** in public.
I agree there are a number of other manufacturers who provide shoddy goods or shoddy service. For example Irregular's sculpts are often so bad thet could effectively be marketed as universal soldiers but the owner is, by all accounts, a decent human being. BTD are notorious as grifters with a well deserved buyer beware reputation. I very much doubt I'd want to break bread with them but they do produce some nice figures (they're a bit hit and miss across ranges) if you wanted to chance your arm and enter the lottery of an order with them.
In a day and age when we are blessed with any number of superb ranges of toy soldiers, there seems little reason to buy shite or deal with dickheads. If asked why you don't buy from X or Y it's fair to give an honest answer.
-
I suspect the reason they get grief is because (unlike other manufacturers of poor figures) people often pop up in threads to say 'Old Glory make xxx range and they're cheap!" often accompanied by a caveat that the range in question is "one of their better ones".
-
I think price matters, a lot, to a lot of wargamers.
Then there are those that buy just GW who have a very different idea of what is expensive or not.
-
The pictures of their sculpts naked on the website are definitely not appealing. And when you open them in the flesh, they are a bit of hmmmm. However, even a barely competent painter like myself can get good results with them.
Their price is good, and if you join the Old Glory Club, the price is great. A good option for a group of gamers.
From the position of the table top general, they can look really good.
-
I've not had a problem with their Italian wars range.
-
Depends on the range. There are some OG lines that are very good.
I always liked the price but as I moved into more skirmish gaming I didn't
need a bag of 30 musketeer figures. But early on much of my figurelines
were Old Glory.
-
Over the years I have ended up with plenty of Old Glory 28s in my collection because the packs were cheap. They are fine as unit filler when seen on the tabletop.
One of the issues I have had with the OG 28s is the blobs for hands in some ranges, but I could guess where the fingers lined up and paint them on.
I don't regret buying the OG 28s that I have. Nowadays I look elsewhere for figures and don't mind spending more money for better quality.
-
Depends on the range. There are some OG lines that are very good.
I agree with that. I have some OG late 16thC landsknecht pike men and they are really quite nice. Their medieval Muslim range is not to shabby (used to be Revenge miniatures). I also have quite a few OG ECW which I bought 2nd hand as part of job lot and would not have considered buying them otherwise.
I think OG does well because the brand has been around for a long time, has a substantial following as a result, and the minis are really quite cheap if you buy large amounts: a lot of gamers don't care if the horses' hocks are on backwards and the facial features look like they have been carved with a hammer if the price is low enough.
-
I've never bought anything from Old Glory but have considered doing so. The main issue I have is that it's really hard to find pictures of what they're selling that aren't the blurry naked ones they have on the website. For many manufacturers, Google is pretty helpful but with OG it doesn't really do anything useful.
I however also have to confess that I'm not someone who cares a lot about how good the faces and the like are in terms of fine details. My painting is atrocious enough that no one will notice if the underlying sculpt isn't perfect anyways. That, and for my historical I like proper big armies and units, which also means that the individuals won't be that visible.
-
Old Glory UK has some painted pictures on their site, but some ranges (e.g. Wars of Religon) have more than others
-
I've never bought anything from Old Glory but have considered doing so. The main issue I have is that it's really hard to find pictures of what they're selling that aren't the blurry naked ones they have on the website.
Well taking nice pictures of your products is an investment of time and money when you can't be sure this "internet" thing will take off.
-
I dunno. People these days seem so unwilling just to use their imagination. :)
Availability has probably been OG's greatest friend. Not suprisingly, it's main market has been the old Estados Unidos. The OG Army thang probably does make things cheaper there but does kind of lock folk into buying more of the same crap to realise the er... 'value'. OG: The Costco of wargaming.
Once you add overseas shipping any impulse towards the cheap and cheerful rapidly dissipates. Having found no suitable alternatives I contemplated buying OG's mounted US cavalry from their Pershing Expedition range for a while, as it's one of their better ranges and well there are no commercially available alternatives. Shipping costs rapidly burst that balloon.
-
Their approach of charging $85 flat rate international shipping, and offering any overcharge back as OG voucher is downright abusive.
Considered buying a few things from them over the last couple of years, but that insane policy means it's a no go
-
Their approach of charging $85 flat rate international shipping, and offering any overcharge back as OG voucher is downright abusive.
Considered buying a few things from them over the last couple of years, but that insane policy means it's a no go
Oh wow. I didn't even get to that point but that is a very good second reason not to order from them. Especially because such a voucher is worthless when just trying out a company.
-
Bought a few over the years and mostly have been very disappointed with them, I won’t be buying anymore.
-
Old Glory? Just generally, poopy.
Old, bad, weird sculpts. Maybe awesome in the 1980s…
Avoidable today.