We dive into a little bit of an older offering from one of our favourite historical miniatures companies this time around, with the Late Roman Legionaries (1): Lorica Hamata and Goth Warriors boxes from Wargames Atlantic. These make up so far the only kits in their Decline and Fall Range, and together they’re a strong contender for cheap SAGA warband in the Age of Invasions.
That’s right, it’s SAGA summer, and we’re going Goth.
Thanks to Wargames Atlantic for providing these kits for review.
Designed to cover the era 284AD – 476AD (an incredibly specific slice of time) these boxes are actually much more flexible than that suggests, especially towards the later end. You can absolutely use them to cover the Goths and Late Romans of that period, but these styles of dress, weapons and armour would continue on for some time, with many of the models not looking out of place for another couple of hundred years.
Spears, Shields and Shining Mail
Let’s have a look at what these kits offer. They’re quite different from each other, but we’ll circle around in a moment to why I’m reviewing them together. For now though, let’s consider them separately.
The Late Roman kit, despite being numbered (1), is the only one they sell, so it needs to serve a pretty broad range of purposes. And on that basis it is a little disappointing. It does have a decent range of heads letting you represent troops from all over the late Empire, as well as crests and decorations (and a lovely wolf skin cap) to portray the command. Command options are also well served with a horn, a banner and so on. It’s a decent way of doing things, though attaching the Draco (the serpent banner with a metal head and silk body that may have whistled in the wind too) is somewhat awkward.
But this is where the options really stop. The models in this kit feel the same, uniform in a way that isn’t just dissatisfying but also historically inauthentic. We’ve written a bunch recently about the myth of pre-modern uniform, but looking at these models with close to identical torsos, down to the same arrangements of straps and buckles, feels like it embodies that myth. It’s such a shame, because it means that even just building and painting a sprue they models all look alike. And as soon as you’re building more they’re even more similar, because there’s a real limited amount of weapon options in here so you’re going to have some models that just look exactly the same.
It isn’t helped that there are only four models on each sprue and only 24 models in this box. That makes them much less good value than many other Wargames Atlantic sets. The quality is fine but nothing to writing home about, and so it’s hard to see how it can justify fewer models in here than comparable kits.
We also have an issue with the shields. You may notice in the pictures to follow that I have not used any of the shields from this kit, and there’s a reason for this. The shields are absolutely absurd, outsized and chunky to almost comedic proportions. If these shields were scaled up to full size they’d be almost a foot thick. They sit awkwardly on the models, and they do not look right at all. I ended up using Victrix shields on these models instead (we’ll talk about that in a bit).
The Goth Warriors kit bears up a lot better, and of the two it’s the one I feel more confident recommending with a few caveats. The range of poses is still relatively limited, and the outfits are also very similar, but there is more variety in the weapon options so they feel a little more varied than the Late Romans. It also lets you build archers and slingers, which I appreciate a lot, as it massively increases the versatility of the kit. The box also comes with 30 miniatures, which makes it better value.
The biggest complaints here are the facial sculpts and the lack of chainmail bodies. The facial sculpts are rough – not outright bad in all cases, and some are better than others, but they’re soft on detail, and not pleasant to get to grips with. The lack of chainmail bodies makes some sense if you’re giving a lot of variety of unarmoured bodies – but then the bodies here are very similar to each other, so that opportunity is lost. The recommendation is instead to use chainmail bodies from the Late Roman kit, and that’s why this is a double review. I grabbed that kit, used the helmeted heads from the Goth Warriors kit, and mix and matched some other parts where appropriate.
The shields here are more practical than the Late Roman ones but I’d hesitate to call them good. They have entirely smooth backs and minimal detail, and you can get away with it on most of the poses, but it’s not great. There’s very little reason they couldn’t have put some sculpted detail on the reverses (they do on other shields, including on the ones in the Late Roman kit) and it’s a shame not to see. This is actually worse when you come to putting these shields on the armoured bodies from the Late Roman kit, as those poses are relatively side on and so the rear of the shield is very visible with some arms. That’s why I dug into my bits box and grabbed out some Victrix Early Saxon shields for them as an alternative.
Assembling a Warband, and Is It Worth It?
The good news is that with these two kits you can absolutely fully build out a SAGA warband for the Goths in Age of Invasions (and given the nature of the sculpts, you can probably stretch them out to cover a few things in the Viking Age book too). Here’s what I went with:
- Warlord
- 6 Hearthguard (1.5 points)
- 6 Hearthguard (1.5 points)
- 8 Warriors (1 point)
- 8 Warriors (1 point)
- 12 Levies with bows (1 point)
That leaves you enough armoured bodies over to actually build some of them as Late Romans and so have some mercenaries to join your forces. A good option as well for this faction.
This is very solid! For £50 a full SAGA warband is nothing to be sniffed at. The extra models also would let you do things like build a champion, or several other options for alternative mercenaries. Really nice, very hard to be angry at.
However, there are some caveats. These models are fine. They’re perfectly serviceable and they’re a good price. But we do have to discuss that fact that these models have specific and direct equivalents over at Victrix and those models are just flat better.
The Victrix models have better poses, more variety, way more weapon options, incredible face sculpts, fantastic shield designs, and they are, model for model, cheaper. However, they are less conveniently arranged specifically for SAGA – the bags they come in are just too big and you may find yourself with too many models (oh no!) or splitting bags with friends to get to the right result. The good news is that the same models can work, thanks to the flexibility, for Late Romans, Goths or Romano-British forces, so you can just buy a bag of each thing you need and then, you know, have more than one warband. It’s the way they get ya.
But that said if you want a single one stop warband purchase, this is a great choice. It’s the easiest, least wasteful and most economical way of buying into Age of Invasions. And for that alone we can overlook a little some of the issues with the kit.
If you’d like to pick up either of these Wargames Atlantic kits and support Goonhammer while you’re at it, get them through our affiliate link.
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