Opinions on armies which incorporate diff. sculpts?

[Zephaniah Adriyen]

So, I picked up some old-school Plague Marines to field with my Death Guard recently. They're the old Finecast, and I'm painting them up in the same scheme as my regular dudes - who are the modern sculpts. They're smaller, and don't match up super well with the others, but after a quick re-base and full repaint of all of them, I figure they'll look okay together. What's your opinion on armies like this, which incorporate multiple distinctly different sculpts or eras of sculpt (in cases where it's glaringly obvious, such as this one)?

[Panzer]

As long as one can see what model/unit it's supposed to represent and its equipment it's fine imo. I might not find it aesthetically pleasing, however that shouldn't be a concern of yours.

[Magos Takatus]

My Eldar army is still on the backburner but I have plenty of models for the Seer Council that range from the Rogue Trader Farseer and Warlocks with laspistols up to modern plastic sculpts. Admittedly the models are more consistent than some other ranges but I see no problem with it personally. I don't use any of the 2nd edition plastic Goffs in my Ork army but that's my restriction as the owner of the army. If I saw an Ork player that did use them in their collection I'd probably mention the nostalgia factor and leave it at that.

[Marshal Rohr]

Perfectly fine. Post pics when you’re done!

[Zephaniah Adriyen]

Perfectly fine. Post pics when you’re done!

Maybe I'll start a showcase thread for my full Death Guard army once the old-school Plague Marines are finished and re-based.

[Azekai]

My 3rd edition plague marines have a few 2nd edition plague marines scattered in; they look silly as heck, but those fat little guys are hilarious. I have not bothered to put together the new Death Guard, as the size difference would be quite stark between 2nd ed and 8th ed, but I have used some of their bits to create characters- if a biologus or chaos lord is a bit larger than his fellows, it hardly matters.

[Marshal Reinhard]

So, I picked up some old-school Plague Marines to field with my Death Guard recently. They're the old Finecast, and I'm painting them up in the same scheme as my regular dudes - who are the modern sculpts. They're smaller, and don't match up super well with the others, but after a quick re-base and full repaint of all of them, I figure they'll look okay together. What's your opinion on armies like this, which incorporate multiple distinctly different sculpts or eras of sculpt (in cases where it's glaringly obvious, such as this one)?

 

I know it'd bother me immensly... IF it was MY army. Inconsistencies in scale just bother me. It's why I don't mix classis marines with Primaris.

 

Not my army in this case though, so no bother of mine. Not really sure I should have an opinion even, this far-reaching, about someone else's army.

[Lay]

What's your opinion on armies like this, which incorporate multiple distinctly different sculpts or eras of sculpt (in cases where it's glaringly obvious, such as this one)?

 

Nothing out of the ordinary. A lot of loyalist Space Marine armies look like that nowadays, what with Primaris and old school Marines being fielded side by side. Me personally, I've completely rebuilt my army with newer sculpts. It's really down to personal preference.

In the end I believe that a good paint job will tie all types of different miniatures together.

[Slasher956]

We have an eldar player at the Chelmsford club who runs his different guardian sculpts in different units...

 

It’s cool and realisticly the models don’t match up to each other anyway.... 10 first born in a rhino? Really!

[Closet Skeleton]

I'm pretty inconsistent, my 8th ed armies are all same generation kits for scale reasons while my Black Legion had their 1st and 2nd ed metal mini-terminators banished but I bought some 2nd ed power armour guys who I use mixed in with all sort of sizes of models.

[Arkhanist]

 

Perfectly fine. Post pics when you’re done!

Maybe I'll start a showcase thread for my full Death Guard army once the old-school Plague Marines are finished and re-based.

 

 

We'll hold you to that ;)

 

I don't think anyone's opinon matters but yours anyway on their suitability. Personally, I kinda like having some old-school models for nostalgia's sake, but I'd need to repaint mine to current standards!

 

Couple of ideas you can do to reduce the scale issues - if you want to, of course. A bit of extra basing under the old figures will help, a few mm can make a real difference in apparent height. And the new backpacks are quite a bit bulkier (and have nice gubbins) which is a trivial swap and still fits the look of the old models IMO.

[Marshal Rohr]

I like the idea that the 3rd Edition plaguemarines might be newly ensnared servants of the Grandfather, led by the bloated and malformed mark 3 wearing veterans of the long war.

[MARK0SIAN]

I think a wide variety of models in an army can only be a good thing. The only caveat I would have for me personally is that I would never have two differently scaled models in the same unit. So I would never have different sized Terminators in the same squad for example.

[Zephaniah Adriyen]

Yeah, I'm keeping the old-school Plague Marines separate from the modern Plague Marines. Assuming it's a thing I can do, I'm planning on having it be so that the leaders - my modern Lord of Contagion in Cataphractii and Chaos Lord in Mk III - were present at Isstvan III. I even named the LoC after my profile in that dumb little mobile game which takes place at the conflict on Isstvan III, Drop Assault (I play Traitor Death Guard in that game, so it works).

[Evil Eye]

For my Daemons I'm intentionally mixing different sculpts along with heavy conversions, as being unnatural creatures born of literal chaos, it makes sense for them to be anything but uniform, and after all, variety is the spice of life. Also some of the old Daemon sculpts are just too cool to not include, so that helps.

 

For my Chaos Marines, I fortunately don't have that many of the smaller sculpts anyway (my first squad currently awaiting stripping) but the ones I do have are either sufficiently converted/based that it won't really matter or will just be handwaved as Manlet Marines. Even Astartes have their size difference after all, not everyone can be an Abaddon! Personally I'm of the school of thought that as 40K (like most wargames to be fair) isn't actually true scale, as perfectly scaled 40K would be unplayable, slight variations in size don't really matter, and in any event people aren't all the same size anyway.

 

As far as actual sculpting style goes, for Chaos it doesn't hugely matter as their whole thing is, well, Chaos. For my Tyranids however I am trying to maintain SOME consistency as obviously being a monolithic horde of alien locusts with no individualism or free will, there's not much room for variety. As such any older sculpts will either be used for conversions or will be worked in logically as brood leaders/mutants/whatever. Though that said I must be the only person in the world that loves the 3E 'nid sculpts and wants some of the old Tyrant Guard with the spineshields.