@warzan it’s hard to really tell without seeing a miniature next to it but based on a comparison to the pickup you put it next to I’d say the limo didn’t really look out of scale.

I’ve been thinking about the alternative miniatures and 3rd party bits. I agree with pretty much everything @warzan said regarding alternative miniatures. They’re worth buying if most of your games are played at home or at a club that doesn’t have a vested interest in making sure all players are using genuine game pieces from the correct miniatures ranges. I also agree that when companies like Games Workshop organise tournaments or allow you to play on their own premises that they’re well within their rights and totally justified in insisting that you play with in-range models only. After all, it’s essentially a form of advertising for them and they should not be obliged to advertise someone else’s products.

I think the waters get muddied when it comes to 3rd party conversion parts because quite often they are not alternatives to a GW component (I’m using GW as my example here because that is who this predominantly applies to) they are components that don’t exist within the GW range. I say this as someone who regularly purchases 3rd party parts (mostly heads, weapons and Shields) to achieve a specific aesthetic that would not otherwise be possible using just GW components. I have found that among GW store staff there is not a consistent opinion on this and I guess it is generally down to managers discretion. I have heard, within a single store, two different opinions on it; the manager was generally happy to turn a blind eye to minor things like head swaps and the like as long as models were still easily recognisable as GW products. On days when he wasn’t in, another member of staff had a very different point of view and was of the opinion that even though the base of the model is a GW model, every penny spent on the additional parts is a penny not spent on GW models. Now while that’s technically true, for me it holds no weight; I spend money on other things all the time and if I didn’t spend it on those things I wouldn’t necessarily spend it on GW products. If I buy, for example, a squad of guardsmen and convert their heads to something else (such as colonial era pith helmets), if GW then told me I was no longer allowed to do that and continue playing in the store (and assuming I wanted to do so), I would not then spend the money I had spent on conversion parts on more guardsmen. I would actually buy the same amount of guardsmen and use ghe money previously spent on parts on something else. I’m happy to pay extra for the conversion parts to achieve a specific look and feel to an army, if I wanted to buy 2 boxes of guardsmen, the purchase of additional parts is not necessarily a consideration that would stop me from doing so; I could afford to buy the extra guards if I wanted them and the conversion parts I needed.