Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Plastic Models

I've put together a ton of plastic models over the past few months. July was spent putting together a ton of Relic Knights models (all plastic), I've picked up a few Malifaux M2E kits, and I've recently started in on a Convergence of Cyriss army (after admiring it from afar for awhile.) Assembling different plastic models essentially back to back, made from different mediums and by different companies, has given me a much deeper appreciation of what makes a "good" plastic model.

Privateer Press' plastic models were a big deal when they first started to come out (remember what a shocker it was when the Bastions were announced as a plastic unit?) In the years since those first plastic releases, PP's plastics have received equal parts praise and slag, and for good reason.

When PP's plastics turn out well, they're excellent. The details are crisp and clear, they're not too much of a pain to clean, and the relative ease of assembly (due to lighter materials) and lower relative cost to metal make it absolutely worth it.

However, when PP's plastics are bad, they are pretty damn bad. Some of the molds seem to be prone to casting issues - the "feet" of the Convergence walker heavy vectors are prone to halving their halves offset by a noticeable degree - and the mold lines are often in areas that are a big fat pain in the ass to clean (i.e. right down the middle of an area that is difficult to get a knife or file into.) I absolutely hated putting together my Khador heavy warjack kits for that reason: they both had a mold line running right down the plate on top of the leg, and trying to clean that mold line always ended up messing up some other part of that area (they are now rivet free.)

PP's plastics share a problem with the Relic Knight's plastics, and I think it's due to a choice in the medium: their plastic models are a big pain to clean. You can't really file them - it's very easy to over-file and ruin the area and the material just kinda turns into a powder - so you need to clean 90% of the model with a hobby knife. That isn't too difficult most of the time but it is time consuming and tedious even in the best circumstances, all the way down to being a complete drag in the worst circumstances.

Relic Knight's plastics suffer from many of the same issues as the PP plastics due to being made of the same material (so far as I can tell.) Their plastics are a little better about not putting mold lines on/in irritating spots to clean up, but they're still time consuming models to clean. I also have concerns with how shallow the details are in some cases, though I feel that is more of an artistic choice on the modeling side than an issue with the actual production of the plastics.

The Malifaux plastics, in contrast, are a delight to work with. The plastic they use is a hard plastic (similar to the kind used in GW kits) which ends up making it much easier to clean because you can actually file the models and have it be effective. It's also hard to say why, but the Malifaux models tend to have mold lines in "better" places for cleaning. Compared to PP/RK models, the Malifaux plastics are very easy to clean and fast to assemble.

The trade off seems to be that the hard plastic used in the Malifaux models isn't as receptive to sharp or small details. I feel that the Malifaux plastics still look very good, and they're helped tremendously by the art style complementing that possible limitation, but I can see why PP/RK may have gone with the type of plastic/production they did. I'm not sure they would have been able to pull off some of the details they have in some of their kits with the Malifaux plastic method.

Of course, that trade off ends up being kind of moot when the model has some nice details but also has lots of casting issues. The Convergence heavy vector kits have been particularly frustrating in that regard - the legs seem to have consistent offset issues (it may be an issue with that specific leg mold.) On top of that, the act to trying to clean up the rest of the model often leads to details being damaged/erased. Thankfully I'm not super concerned with model quality - the model mostly looks good but the minor issues would be enough to frustrate me a lot more if I was intending to paint these models up for show - but that doesn't excuse the issues I've encountered.

In PP's case, I think the biggest issue is production. Their games have become wildly popular over the past few years and they've definitely had sporadic issues meeting production needs, even back when they were only making metal models. Since they've started to introduce plastic models they've run into the problem where the kits would take a long time to release relative to other elements of that release cycle. This happened twice for Khador releases (Bombardiers, clamjack kit,) it was such a huge delay for the Retribution Destors that they ended up just being cast in metal after more than a year of waiting, and most recently Circle finally got their Satyr kit, almost in time for the book after it's release!

My guess would be that it is difficult for PP to get their kits to a retail release standard, and based on the issues that the actual retail releases run into I'd wager the hold up is with consistency of quality in the parts produced. Considering how off some of the pieces I've worked with are, I can only imagine how bad the worst output from some of their production runs are.

I think it all ends up being a cycle: PP creates plastic models to stabilize prices and consolidate their SKUs a bit, but those kits end up delayed due to production problems. That creates more demand, so when the kits actually come out it's that much harder to really crack down on quality assurance with individual parts (due to the volume of output.) So you end up with kits like the Convergence kit that I was working with yesterday that are kind of a mess, and consistent issues with specific parts (heavy vector feet.)

To be clear: I am not at all implying that PP has some sort of scheme in place where they're releasing sub-standard product and not caring about it. I'm sure that if I complained about the parts I received, they'd happily send me a set of replacements, free of charge. And if they could have their way, every kit produced would be a flawless cast with minimal mold lines. But I think that they're a little bit of a victim of their own success in this case; the demand they have for their product makes it harder to scrutinize that product and make sure that every single unit is free of defects.

If PP can ever get their plastic kit production issues ironed out, I'd say they'd have the best game in town. The models they're producing with the medium are absolutely fantastic - for all my complaints, the heavy vectors are some of the coolest models I've ever put together - and I think the freedom of plastic is allowing them to do things that would be very difficult, if not impossible, with metal (see: the Corollary.)

Until they get to that point, Malifaux still takes the cake when it comes to plastic models. The models look fantastic, they're very easy to clean and assemble (assuming you can figure out where things go, which is admittedly a pain sometimes,) and I love how they perfectly match the artwork. Wyrd's plastics are by no means flawless, but they're the most consistent, "get what you expect" plastics of all the current plastic sets. Relic Knights has some nice models, but that line is currently plagued by scale discrepancies and the plastic they use is one of my least favorite mediums to work with, so they have a lot of ground to make up as well.

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