Recently, Forge World's siren song proved to be too strong for me and I went on to buy an infernal guards package. My plan was to use the Mantic guys as cores and the ForgeWorld ones as elites. This way, the cores and elites would look different from each other, yet have decent amount of character in them.During painting, I used my usual recipe. The painting process was rather quick, due to the fact that they are armored to the teeth. I spent some time on the freehands on the shields though. I think the flame designs turned out to be quite OK; but it is up to you to decide.
There are two points that left a sour taste in my mouth. First, the ranking up issue. I generally took my time and plan ahead of time before placing the miniatures on their bases to avoid the ranking up problems. In this case, no amount of nudging, tweaking and moving around solved it unfortunately. Checked the stock photo after I gave up and I still can't see how it could be done. Maybe they used bigger bases, hmm...? :)
Another point which bothers me was the size of the minis. Don't get me wrong, their scale is correct; but they are small compared to the Mantic ones. The Mantic ones have decorations on their helmets and that's the main reason that they look bigger; but as are the old-skool GW chaos dwarfs. I don't see that the ForgeWorld guys will blend in with them nicely too to be honest. I have 10 of these guys now; but I think I won't be buying more of them.
You can see the photos below. I'd recommend you to check the size comparison shot with Mantic mini to get a better feeling about the size difference.
