It’s been a bumper year for Medieval miniatures, with Victrix pumping out release after release at a frankly preposterous rate. Following up on the Mounted Knights and Foot Knights comes the Foot Sergeants kit, promising high detail warriors for all your peasant-to-professional fighter needs in Saga, the Barons’ War and more.
What You Get
This set has 32 highly detailed Sergeant models covering the 12th to 13th centuries. Eight models on a sprue – with an accompanying long weapons sprue per body sprue – that is otherwise jammed with shields, weapons, heads and scabbards. Thirty-two is a bloody good number – you could do an entire four point Saga army of warriors with it, and with the kit working for Chivalry and Crusades that’s not a bad option at all.
The kit has a phenomenal range of weapons, allowing you to go all single handed and shield, all spear or all long weapon (bills and polearms), or create a solid block of heavy weapon users. That’ll be important if you’re picking this up for Saga as there’s enough weapons in the kit to make several units with different loadouts. If you want to go “pikes” for Chivalry (I do!), then you can make 32 Billmen or Spearmen out of the bag, or 12 heavy weapons, or 32 swords and shields. You’re not only able to create units of warriors straight away, but able to make several units with different equipment – bloody useful!
If The Barons’ War is more your thing, you get a massive range of different weapons here to create differently armed units. Maces, swords, falchions/cleavers, spears, polearms and axes are all here, so there’s nothing left uncovered for your blocks of Sergeants.
There’s a solid range of head choices here that will let you match the sergeants to specific areas and time periods. Personally I’m a big fan of the kettle/brimmed helmet, so the majority of mine have them – even if you want to stick to only one or two styles of helm there’s still plenty of variation, and you’ll not need to repeat the same head over and over.
Nicely, you also get a drummer and hornblower on each sprue, so you could put together a full band if you wished out of a single bag.
Sculpting
I’m not sure we need to say, “Victrix sculpts are very good” these days – you know that. Instead, I want to focus in on the more interesting bits of the kit. In terms of sculpting quality, crispness of detail and textures, you won’t find better out there in plastic at the moment, and that’s particularly important on these guys as they have two of the most difficult textures it’s possible to sculpt realistically: mail and padded cloth.
The mail is great, taking all the lessons learned from the last several years of Early and High Medieval kits and putting them to excellent use here. The mail detail is excellent, there’s no smeared textures and everything looks like it has serious heft – mail cuffs droop realistically, and slide down the wrist when you’re using the weapons where that would be appropriate. It paints well too, the rings being large enough to not simply fill with bubbles when applying a wash, but small enough to look right at 28mm.
Faces continue to be a real strength of Victrix’ modern offer, with excellent expressions and facial detailing, but the star of the show here is in the clothing. The gambesons – those lovely padded jackets – are where the kit really shines. Unlike the worlds of D&D or Warhammer, these weren’t leather, but cloth – which means they should have volume, creases, quilting and movement rather than looking like rigid lines or diamonds across the arms and torso. This kit really nails that look, with a slightly toned down version of the ultra-high-detail-creasing of the German WW2 kit and Islamic Infantry and deep relief in quilted areas. It’s a tiny little thing that does a lot, as the places where the quilted top of the garments are sewn into the backing (the crevices between the spaces filled with wadding) are subtly uneven. As a result, this doesn’t look like a pattern inscribed into plastic – perfectly even, rigid, and artificial, but like it should after use – slightly worn, the wadding moving around, gathering at the bottom and pulled in uneven directions by movement. It’s a class act to pull this off, and you can really see it best on the diamond quilted gambesons, where each wadded diamond shape is dimpled and uneven.
That might sound like painting these will be a nightmare, but the detail is incised deep enough to make a simple base-wash-highlight incredibly effective. They were a pleasure to paint as a result, the simplest techniques bringing out a really lovely sense of depth, movement and wear to the gambeson-equipped models.
Unfortunately no one is wizard enough to make two-handed polearms/spears/weapons go together effortlessly without trying. Of the long weapons sprue, the options locked into a thrusting/presenting pose are effortless and look incredible every time, but the raised polearms suffer the same issues as in literally every other plastic kit on the planet – you can’t quite line up the wrists with the sleeves. I hasten to add here this is largely my fault – trying to coax the exact degree of “pointing a polearm this way” that I wanted out of arms designed for a specific range of poses is a personality defect I am working on. More time, and more acceptance that some arms just won’t pose the way you want them, would have fixed this. It’s definitely something to be aware of when building – the ease with which these go together does not extend to the polearms.
Scale Comparisons
The Victrix offer in the medieval space has been dead-on 28mm, and these are no exception. They – as you’d expect – scale perfectly with the rest of the range, both on the Crusader and Islamic sides, which makes kitbashing very easy.
They’re of a very similar size to the WA Sergeants and Peasants as well, and while a little larger than the WA Knights, they’ll do well next to them provided you slice off the puddle bases.
Of course, if you want to go for Age of Chivalry with these models, the most likely place you’ll go for other plastics at the moment is Perry – so here’s a Perry Foot Knight (semi painted) for scale. Perry are a bit on the slimmer side, but they work well with the Victrix arms to produce a half-plate knight:
Since publication we’ve had a request to compare to a GW Steelhelm – I don’t have one for a nice picture, unfortunately. However, with the help of Goonhammer Patron Turbominusfog, I can say that the Victrix Sergeants are ~2mm shorter from base to eyes, and slightly narrower on the shoulders. I’m not sure how well kitbashing would work between the kits, but if you keep them on the integrated puddle bases, these should stand virtually eye to eye with the Age of Sigmar equivalent, or at least well within normal human height range!
Compatibility
As you’d expect, the kit is largely compatible with everything else Victrix makes for this time period – the majority of the Sergeant heads will work with most of the Knight bodies (and vice versa), and the weapon arms universally work for both. I’ve kept my crossover pretty limited – a head on anachronistic guidon – but there’s plenty of potential here.
The kit also mixes well with the Wargames Atlantic range. While scale differences in model height and width might appear to make mixing heads and arms difficult, it actually works just fine – I’ve used WA arms from the Peasants set to create a slightly differently posed Billman, and especially when in a unit you wouldn’t notice.
Heads also work well provided you use the right body with the right neck. About half the heads on the WA kit will fit onto half the Victrix bodies, so if you’re going massive units all in one style of helmet, like me, you’re able to hugely expand your options through kitbashing.
Final Thoughts
Whenever we look at the medieval ranges coming out now we have to do a bit of addressing the elephant in the room. There’s a bit of me that wishes we could carve out history and say “every plastics manufacturer makes a different period” so that I wouldn’t have to write these bits, if I’m honest! There are two Medieval Sergeant plastic kits that have come out in the last year – so which one should you get? The Victrix set is typically beautifully sculpted and, even without all the options and the lovely mail and faces, with gambeson textures like these I’d advise hammering that buy button. They’re substantially more dynamic and interestingly posed than the WA kit as well. However, with a focus on giving you literally every melee option, and a ranged kit on the horizon, there aren’t any ranged weapons in here. In comparison, the WA kit also includes crossbows – so it is more flexible – though are less detailed and not as pretty as their Victrix competitors, so if you’re in it for the painting and modelling I’d pick up the Victrix set.
Again I think it’s going to come down to what you already have – if you don’t have anything, or have Victrix stuff, buy this. The reverse isn’t quite true – you can definitely mix this box into both ranges if you already have the WA Barons war sets. Unlike the Knights, where the size difference is huge, this set scales very well with the WA Peasants and Sergeants who are a bit chunkier than their knights. You can mix and match this set with much more confidence that they’ll look good together. If you’re absolutely “one box and done” for your Sergeant needs, then this kit, with all melee and no ranged, might not be the one for you. Personally though I think you’d be missing out on something that strangely feels quite special (they’re only sergeants after all!) – and the ranged equivalent can’t be that far out, right?
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