Late Roman Unarmoured Infantry

I just assembled some of these lads. Did I follow the beautiful, detailed instructions? No, because Late Empire blah blah blah. Random parts fit great and tell a story, an epic story. A story of steel glinting by the fire, the smell of leather and the chant of legends recited by bards and stories told by heroes of times lost to the mists. Yeah, the muses of Mary Stewart and Rosemary Sutcliffe have seized me, an unreconstructed Arthurian nerd.
The hearth smoke and metheglin have made my head spin as I assemble these heroes or perhaps it's the massive amount of options that dull my senses.
The meagre 25 mm base barely constrains the league-length stride of these champions. Yet there they stand, charging to a certain fate or stoically bracing for the assault of the heathen.
With Vortigern and the Unconquered Sun as
my witness, there are many, perhaps too many options. I'm drawing funds from the treasury as I calculate how many sets I'll need to fully explore all the options. I'll hold judgement until I see the armoured kit
I'll sign off now as fighting Saxons is a full time job.

I feel like further praise is redundant. It's a beautiful kit. So I'll bring up a negative.

The main sprue. Four bodies is rather minimal for a set this size, particularly in comparision to some other sets in recent years by Victrix - the Dacian, Norman, and Saxon/Anglo Dane sets all had eight bodies on their main sprue, and the armoured late romans will have six. Particularly the Dacian kit allowed for a lot of variety in poses, while the bodies in this set leans into the overhand throw/thrust/strike very much. Even if there are arm options for other poses, they don't look quite as good on the bodies. One or two bodies in a Subarmalis would've helped break up the monotony of having eight figures(Or six. Six would have been plenty) dressed the same exakt way, and added a lesser known piece of armour into the mix.

The fact that you have 41 heads to pick from for the four existing bodies is... excessive. And frankly quite a bit of waste of plastic, since even if you're mixing it up with other kits, you're still going to have an extreme amount of spare heads rolling around(41 heads times 6 sprues =246 heads throughout all the main sprues for 24 bodies). Doing away with a third of the heads would still allow for significant variety, and saved enough space on the sprue to two bodies more.

I have every respect for the production costs, in regarding the pricing of the set. BUT this set could have used four sprues of six bodies, instead of six sprues of four bodies, used less plastic in total, and still charged the same. Or accordingly. But right now we're paying for a lot of plastic that we'll never use, whether in the forms of unused extra parts, or just the extra number of empty sprues. Of course, this isn't uncommon when you do plastic miniatures, but in this case it's just excessive, and it's hard not to feel slightly cheated when you won't be using large parts of the purchased material.

This set is beautiful. But it's really the detail and craftsmanship that make for the positives. Composition wise, it's really quite bad, and with no more effort than they've spent on other sets, this set could've been that much better. The detail of the miniatures is easily a 5/5. I rather can't decide between a three or a four in total though. On the one hand it is an absolute marvel in detail, and I am not unhappy with the ones I have at all. On the other hand... The composition. I'm worried that we'll see repeats of this in future sets, and that, I do not want. Which brings it down to a three. Scary, I know.

What could help aleviate the lack of body variation, is if Victrix would release a separate Shields sprue, like Fireforge has done for several of their lines. Say twelve shields apiece for five-ish pounds, and you could at least mix it up by using bodies from the Archer sprue, or even some of the other Dark Ages/Ancient sets, without having to ration the shields in the existing set.

I am rather looking forward to the rest of the line when it comes.

Best regards.

Great set, with a plenty of options to create a big Late Roman unit. Great work Victrix !!!

Just started constructing them. I find the index sheet a very useful addition to work out the different options I can build. Far more useful than the list on the back of the cover. Not been aware of anything similar in your other sets.

Fine models, historically correct and a real useful addendum ti the range!