Well from the boxes they already have available it looks like they might be the same cost as buying the metals. So I think it’s just going to be a choice based on if you prefer plastic over metals. Ideally they should be costed a lot lower to entice gamers to build those BIG armies, but these days gamers are more used to warband level rules rather than games with 100s of figures on each side…

Well doing the old cav figures cost twice as much as infantry figures, 64 inf and 32 cav (or basically the equivalent of 128 infantry figures) the retail on the boxed armies works out at just shy of 30p a figure.

The metal Xystron figure from Scotia work out at about 53p a figure

So it IS indeed a fair bit cheaper for the plastics. However we’ll just have to see how the plastics end up looking like.

It’s a bit strange as the “in house” armies are all Late Imperial Roman era, but the Xystron range is definitely Punic Wars era (with a few figure codes going on a bit to the Hellenistic era). So they don’t really expand on each other to build out a cohesive range in any one era. But the in-house ranges are definitely going to be popular with the Cav Generals (although fighting Huns can be a bit grindy with all those fast horse archers), and the Xystron range more suited for the plodding infantry armchair generals (which is more my boat).

Strange however they didn’t just go with the “default” Early Imperial Roamans and Gauls the nearly every company goes with when first launching anything related to ancient wargaming (which is probably a good thing). I do remember an article here on BoW featuring some photos of some Early Imperial Romans in 15mm and in plastic (just can’t remember the name of the company)