Victrix Plastic Greek Heavy Cavalry

[Arthur]

I don't think anybody has posted about the set so far (apologies in advance if someone did and I missed it) so here are the sprues for the new Victrix Greek cavalry set, suitable for Macedonians, Successors and various late Greek cities :





Assembled samples :




http://www.victrixlimited.com/products/macedonian-greek-heavy-successor-cavalry?variant=39915075405

[delbruck]

The cavalry look good, with a lot of options.. On the other hand the horses do concern me. It doesn't look like there is much variety.

[AdamPHayes]

Looks like a really useful set with lots of head options. Even the cloaks don't look too bad, but I never manage to get them to sit right on a model so I'm fairly unlikely to use them (the cloaks that is.) I would think there is a good chance that most ancient cavalrymen would stow their cloak before battle in case it got in the way. Three horses is definitely the minimum for a set like this.  With different colours and a bit of a stagger on the bases you can just about get away with it. Probably better if they'd gone down the rout of designing them so that the halves could be intermixed...

[James Morris]

I've got the Iberian and Numidian cavalry and am quite happy with three horse poses; they're all good 'uns, and assemble very cleanly indeed. Obviously we'd all like endless horse poses, but it pushes the price up further. Has anyone actually designed plastic horses where you can mix the two halves successfully? Probably easier said than done.

[tomrommel1]

nice! Let me think if there is any use for a GoT setting

[Coenus Scaldingus]

Thanks for the sprue pics - a nice addition to the Greek/Macedonian ranges by the looks of things.
The stretched arm holding the lance overhand looks a bit awkward (with the weapon's weight, I can't imagine holding it like that would be practical), but some more managable pose can no doubt be constructed from the various other arms included.

Obviously we'd all like endless horse poses, but it pushes the price up further. Has anyone actually designed plastic horses where you can mix the two halves successfully? Probably easier said than done.

Well, GW managed it with its plastic Rohan cavalry 15 years ago... Not sure how it would be more expensive either. Perry's of course did 3(?) different left- and right halves with seperate heads for even more variation in their Medieval sets. The leopard skin would cut the options a bit, but having the others in interchangable halves and seperate heads would still allow for quite some customisation.

[Antonio J Carrasco]

Thanks for the sprue pics - a nice addition to the Greek/Macedonian ranges by the looks of things.
The stretched arm holding the lance overhand looks a bit awkward (with the weapon's weight, I can't imagine holding it like that would be practical), but some more managable pose can no doubt be constructed from the various other arms included.
Well, GW managed it with its plastic Rohan cavalry 15 years ago... Not sure how it would be more expensive either. Perry's of course did 3(?) different left- and right halves with seperate heads for even more variation in their Medieval sets. The leopard skin would cut the options a bit, but having the others in interchangable halves and seperate heads would still allow for quite some customisation.

It is because the number of moulds needed, I guess. Victrix has decided to give us a set that allow us to build three different types of Greek/Macedonian horse. In order to do that, they have cut down the variety of horses, possibly to save money -steel moulds are the single most expensive part of producing injected plastic-.

GW, thanks to the success of LOTR, did invest a lot of cash in building its own factory, with specific machinery to tool the steel moulds and to produce their plastics. That saved a lot of money and allowed them a leeway in producing plastic minis that it is not available for smaller companies.

[Duke Donald]

I actually quite like these horses, the riders a bit less so.

That said, I don't buy the explanation that making different left and right halves for horses that are mutually compatible would be significantly more expensive. As Mentioned previously by Coenus Scaldingus, GW has been doing it from the beginning of their plastic kits.

Two compatible right and left halves with two different heads (as for example in the old GW glade rider kit) does not take more space on a sprue than two horses made of two halves that are only compatible with each other. Though, it allows for eight different horse poses compared to only two for the option of mutually incompatible left and right halves chosen here. The number of different possible poses with three pairs of compatible left and right halves with three heads leads to a staggering 27 possibilities.

I feel this is a bit of a missed opportunity here as the horse sprue has a lot of empty space left, despite being smaller that the sprues for the riders, and is sold with multiple cavalry kits.

[cdm]

Add me to the don't care if there is only 3 variants. I buy regiments in metal with one pose, 3 is kind of a luxury really. I'm sure they have scope if they wanted to push it, but they are a long way from the Warlord French Lancer laziness as well.

[James Morris]

Well, GW managed it with its plastic Rohan cavalry 15 years ago... Not sure how it would be more expensive either. Perry's of course did 3(?) different left- and right halves with seperate heads for even more variation in their Medieval sets. The leopard skin would cut the options a bit, but having the others in interchangable halves and seperate heads would still allow for quite some customisation.

Thanks, I didn't realise the Rohan horses had interchangeable halves. I don't really follow what GW are up to. I guess the cost would then be in increased design costs.  One insoluble problem that Victrix will always have is trying to meet as many customers' wants as possible- some people want endless variants, others want to be able to get the figures quickly assembled and on the painting table. I guess I'm in the latter camp and am happy with three decent horse poses and a frequent release schedule.

[Goliad]

Which metal manufacturer would these fit best with? With plastics I look to add a few metal miniatures into a unit to add even more variety and add a bit of heft to bases (usually big bases for ancients). It also adds another hose pose or 2 to break up any sameness.

These look a bit hefty so I wonder if Aventine would be a good match with their recent Successor/Macedonian releases.

[Captain Blood]

Thanks, I didn't realise the Rohan horses had interchangeable halves. I don't really follow what GW are up to. I guess the cost would then be in increased design costs.  One insoluble problem that Victrix will always have is trying to meet as many customers' wants as possible- some people want endless variants, others want to be able to get the figures quickly assembled and on the painting table. I guess I'm in the latter camp and am happy with three decent horse poses and a frequent release schedule.

It is, as ever, horses for courses... Excuse the pun.
As an avid converter and kit-basher, the more components the better from my point of view. But if you just want to get models on the table, and the modelling aspect isn't so much your think, that's fair enough.

I would just say though, it wouldn't have taken very much thinking / design to greatly expand the options for these Victrix horses. The basic Perry medieval horse frame (which looks to be about the same size as the Victrix one) has three right body halves and three left body halves, plus four heads. Which, for not very much more effort - on the basis of my rudimentary maths - offers 36 different horses...



No it's not essential, but it is very nice to have. It's the flexibility and multi-poseability of plastic which is surely its biggest advantage as a medium over metal (aside from cost). So it always seems a bit of a shame to me when manufacturers offer a limited range of options. Although to be fair to Victrix, after the Perrys, they tend to offer a lot more variety and options in their plastic sets than several other plastic figure kit makers I could mention, who really have sunk into the bad habit of including the bare minimum they think they can get away with...

[Coenus Scaldingus]

I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to accomplish either given that Victrix exclusively sculpts digitally as far as I'm aware. No extra costs (same number of bits), just a little bit of effort. As the Captain says above, one of the main advantages of plastics is the fact that they allow for flexible assembly, greatly increasing variation where desired - as opposed to the 1-3 poses usually available in metal. Even if you don't care for this, the effort to glue two halves of a horse that exclusively fit each other is equally great to when there is a number of options that would have fitted together (or more so, if you clip 'em of a sprue, chuck them in a box and then have to find the parts that go together!).

Ah well. They do look nice.

[Corso]

I do agree that the horses could have been better - I would have avoided the lion skin cloth and made the option like the perry medievals. Especially since this set can be easily converted to punic, etruscan and roman cavalry (amongst many more).

Having said that, the models are highly detailed.  

[AdamPHayes]

Of course the counter argument is that some of the poses arrived at with interchangeable horse-halves don't look at all natural,  so the choice of possible real life poses is reduced back down again. Also there is the risk with separate head having a gap somewhere on the neck that needs filling... If Victrix go for a different horse sprue in each set however, then we could end up with a large pool of horses, all in realistic poses and easy to assemble.