[(not)Review]64019 Siege Of Issiad

[The_Cook]

A review of Nuju Metru's 64019 Siege Of Issiad; one of a series of MOCs designed to resemble real Lego sets. I've attempted to emulate the Eurobricks Reviewers Academy style as much as possible, but it should be pointed out that this is not a real set!. Regardless, enjoy it.

Unboxing

The bricks fill the box. This is the flagship "opposition" set for the first wave of Not Dragonlands and at 1470 bricks, 7 minifigures and a horse compares favourably with 9474: The Battle Of Helm's Deep.

Bag 1

Bag one builds the wall segment that contains the main gateway.

The contents of bag 1 emptied out. Interesting parts in bag 1 are the Pearl Dark Grey Portcullis and the Dark Brown Stockade Doors. For the remaining parts the colourscheme is predominantly Tan, Dark Tan, Dark Bluish Grey and Reddish-Brown with a couple of Dark Red pieces in amongst.

The build starts with a simple tree built from a handful of brickS. For the gateway itself the build IS simple without being repetitive; building from the ground up. A little bit of SNOT around the top of the wall provides the detailing on the crenelations but everything else is fairly standard.

The portcullis runs smoothly in grooves; the friction of the technic gear being sufficient to hold it in the raised position. The stockade doors open and close easily but I feel like I'm missing a simple lock on the gates that the attackers can break through. The final play feature is a tilting barrel on the top that can drop transparent orange cones, presumably representing oil or fire, onto attackers caught in the gateway below.

The minifigure in bag 1 is General Lerus and his mount. The dark green of the breeches and shield complement the tan arms of the torso; the detail in printing lends the prince a definite air of wealth and nobility.

This section took just under an hour to build.

Bag 2

Bag two builds the throne room tower. Tan, Dark Bley and Reddish-Brown are in predominance amongst the parts with a scattering of Dark Red and a few Green and Dark Green pieces. Interesting parts here are the Pearl Dark Grey arched gates, a Pearl Dark Grey 4x6 gate, a Dark Red 2x2 Round Tile which is quite rare, and the Pearl Gold 3x3 Quarter Domes.

Bag two starts by building the trebuchet. This is a mix of studded and technic construction with technic beams being utilised to lend strength to the assembly by tying the bricks together. The mechanism uses rubber bands to provide the mechanical power necessary with the "counterweight" being held together by some simple SNOT construction in order to take the forces generated. The pivot for the ballista arm is made up of two technic wheels running on 1x2 rail plates; this arrangement provides a useful little flick to the arm as the pivot moves closer to elastic bands.

The build for the lower part is slightly tricky as it comprises mounting a 4x4 corner panel on plate hinges in order to allow it to hinge as an escape hatch from the prison. The upper level is a more standard build with a band of Dark red to provide an architectural highlight and the dark red being carried through into a well designed throne. The dark red is contrasted by the green carpet.

The build continues on up to assemble a domed structure uising the Pearl Gold 3x3 Quarter Domes. The dome itself sheltering a telescope type piece.

The play functionality here is obviously the trebuchet. In the prison the moving wall is one play feature whilst the front gate is loosely mounted on 1x2 jumper plates allowing it to be removed either as an escape tactic or just to get little hands into the back of the prison chamber. The throne room provides plenty of decorative elements in terms of claws and hat-stands but they don't qualify as action features.

The minifigure in bag 2 is Vorash and his Wolf steed. The muscular green torso gives a wonderful impression of strength and power.

This section took about an hour, with about half of it being the Ballista and it's mix of studded, SNOT and technic construction.

Bag 3

Bag three builds the Smithy. Tan, Dark Bley and Reddish-Brown are again in predominance with more Dark Bley than earlier bags; Dark Red pieces act as a contrasting colour. Interesting parts here are the large printed slope Panels, a plethora of Sais in Pearl Gold and Pearl Dark Grey and a lone Olive Green 2x4 brick.

The build for the lower part is densely packed; a number of Dark-Bley pieces build up the rock structure that hides a secret compartment containing a Pearl Gold axe/dagger weapon. The printed Panel and a LURP quickly bulk out the bottom layer but with enough additional decoration to avoid the big grey wall effect. A band of dark-red provides the architectural demarcation between the lower and upper halves of the wall, with the upper half being comprised predominantly of Tan. A mix of plain and pallisade bricks provides texture with Dark Tan taking over for the crenelations at the very top. The build is finished through the assembly of a ballista that can shoot flick fire missiles.

Play functionality is the Ballista, it rotates on a turntable and sits firmly in it's pivots through the use of a Technic 3L pin with friction ridges. The momentum of a flick is transferred through to the missiles through a 1x4 technic axle with stop.

The minifigure in bag 3 is the Ustokal Blacksmith

This section took about 45 minutes to build.

Bag 4

Bag four builds the Kitchen. Tan, Dark Bley and Reddish-Brown are once more the predominant colours. Interesting parts here are the large printed slopes, the cloth canopy and lots of food and drink pieces from apples and carrots through to bottles and plates.

The build is split into three parts a loose table and benchs, a 12stud wide section and 6 stud wide section. The table and benches get built first and are complete within a minute to two. The 12 stud wide section is slightly more interesting but goes together fairly quickly by virtue of it using large panels. There is some interesting texturing on the upper wall but the build here is brick-on-brick, the crenelations use a mix of SNOT and overhang that is familiar from the earlier bags. The top is crowned by a tilting barrel using a mechanism that we've already seen above the gatehouse in Bag 1. The smaller 6 stud section is a slightly more intereseting build as it involves some shelving for the produce and a cloth canopy mounted on a number of T-pieces and sticks clipped together with robot arms.

The minifigures in bag 4 are an Ustokal Warrior and an Ustokal Archer. They look particularly fine figure in their Gold Breastplate armour with the variances in the headgear and weaponry giving them sufficient differentiation that things don't look too regimented.

This section took about 30 minutes to build.

Bag 5

Bag 5 builds a section of Wall. The wall is identical to the 12stud section found in Bag 4, the build is therefore the same. Once the wall is built a siege ladder is built. With the exception of the siege ladder this section is repetition but it passes fairly quickly.

The minifigures in bag 5 are two Ardun Soliders; what differentiates these from many earlier castle figures is the Armor Leg Anti-Blast Kama 61190a in Dark Bley that they are wearing.

This section took 20 minutes to build.

Bag 6

Bag 6 builds the final two angled sections of Wall. The usual mix of colours is present; interesting parts being the Dark Brown 1x5x4 Arches and the Olive leaves. The two sections that are built are identical, starting from angled plating at the bottom that is held at the correct angle by hinge bricks through the Dark Bley slopes in the lower section up through the tan of the upper section. There are some clever construction techniques on the front of the wall where the angles would cause bricks to intersect and round bricks or the space of the window have been used to relieve the corners where the intersection occurs.

No minifigures in this bag.

This section took 20 minutes to build.

Conclusions

It's a big set, assembled it stands 30cm tall and forms a wall about 50cm long. There will be the obviously complaints that it's not an enclosed castle but there is precedence for sets like this in terms of 8877 Vladeks Dark Fortress or 8813 Battle at The Pass. The "defensive wall" format allows play to easily take place on both sides either as the besieging force or the defending force. The detailed rear of the wall with it's throne room, prisons, smithy, and stores gives plenty of opportunities for "Doll's House" play around day-to-day life in the city. The large number of minifig food and utensils helps with the "Doll's House" play and is reminiscent of "An Unexpected Gathering."

The build is simple but engrossing, there are no ground-breaking techniques, but the simple SNOT that there is makes for change of pace in the build sequence and the provides clever architectural detailing that stops the wall being just another pile of bricks.

In terms of parts the majority are fairly common, the Dark Pearl Grey doors and portculis being the rarest.

Minifigure selection is good. Whilst there is always the desire for more minifigures to replay epic sieges the number feels about right for a set of this size. There are enough minifigs to have a small attacking force and enough for a defending force to repulse.

Observations

At 1470 bricks the (suggesteD) price point of $115 is a little low given that 9474 was $130 for 1368 bricks. One could argue IP costs offset the extra 100 bricks but that still leaves the actual cost $115 lower than it should be; whilst that might sound great for buyers it wouldn't keep The Lego Group in business.

Section 3 could do with a little more design work, particularly around the rock structure within which the golden dagger/axe thing is hidden. There is no support across the bottom between the two plates, potentially this is my interpretation of Nuju Metru's design rather than a flaw in the original. My attempts to reduce the number of unique elements also resulted in the the sliding mechanism being compromised which me to rethink this section at the last moment. I feel the decoration on the Ballista is slightly flimsy and0 a plate or two should probably be added to firm it up.

Section 6 with the two angled sections could also do with a little more design work, it feels like the angle of the section should be fixed rather than fully flexible as it is at the moment. The issue here is ensuring that the underlying structure adequately supports the plating at the bottoms and the 2x2x3 slopes at the front. Currently a 2x2 corner brick ties all of this together, replacing it with a hinge brick a 1x1 brick and a 2x2x3 brick to tie the 1x1, hinge and exisitng 1x4 technic brick together might make a more robust structure. Again this might be my interpretation of Nuju Metru's design.

The amusing thing has been seeing what "spare" bricks come with each section. How can there be spares when the bricks have been purchesed to build exactly the set? Miscounts on my part when counting out pieces for each of the bags. Bag 2 had 5 Brick, Modified 1x4 w/4 studs instead of Brick, Technic 1x4 a counting mistake that cost me a week whilst waiting for extra Brick, Modified 1x4 w/4 studs to be delivered in order to fill later bags.

Given that I'd pre-sortted all of the parts into bags and built from one bag at a time the build times felt as if they were about the same as a large system build. I recall 9474 taking about 4hrs to build; this seemed comparable which feels about right for a set of this size and was sufficiently lengthy to justify the $130 cost.

Sensibly distributing the build across the bags was a challenge, the Trebuchet should have been included with the simpler more repetitive sections towards the end of the build, possibly bag 6 which doesn't contain any minifigures. Also rearranging the build order such that repetitive sections were interspersed with the interesting Throne Room or Blacksmit sections. With hindsight, Gateway (bag 1), Store (Bag 4), Throne (Bag 2), Corners (Bag 6), Wall (Bag 5), Blacksmith (Bag 3) would be a more engrossing order.

The Process

The process started some 12months ago where over the course of a couple of business trips, where I was stuck in hotel rooms with nothing to do, I reverse engineered the model in LDD from the available photos and a couple of PMs with Nuju Metru to clarify some of the more awkward to see areas. There then followed a process of taking the 1303 parts and 317 unique elements and reducing them down to 1456 parts and 303 unique elements. From a manufacturing perspective reducing the number of unique elements is important because it reduces the number of moulding machines that are needed to generate the parts. Recreating the design gave me clear knowledge of the parts utilised, it was obvious that a couple of key sets went into the design, notably 8877 Vladek's Dark Fortress which supplied the printed slopes, 7571 Fight For The Dagger which supplied tan bricks and the gold dome, 7573 Battle Of Alamut which supplied the Dark Brown Stockade doors, 4183 The Mill which supplied the Dark Tan details and 7187 Escaped From Dragon's Prison which supplied the Dark Pearl Grey Portcullis and Arched Gates. Of those I knew that my collection contained a Vladek's Dark Fortress, the Prince Of Persia sets and the Pirates Of The Caribbean The Mill.

Months pass, seasons change, empires rise and fall, etc... My first job is to modify the Bill-Of-Materials spreadsheet that LDD produces and subtract the bricks I know that I have in my stock sets; the remainder will need sourcing through BrickLink. I start trying to use Brickficency but realise that it's alogrithm is set up to minimise the number of orders not the cost of the orders; with the number of parts I required it was picking some of the most expensive Bricklink shops as they have the largest stocks. I revert to a manual method picking local Bricklink shops and focusing on obtaining the rarest elements first; some of the Dark Pearl Grey parts have only appeared in one set so they were a priority. Once I've located a store I scour it for other parts that are needed for the build and other parts that can go into stock assuming that their prices aren't too extoritionate. The aim is to ammortise the cost of postage across hundres of bricks rather than repeatedley taking the postage hit on small orders. After some 20 bricklink orders I've got all the majority of bricks necessary to build The Siege Of Issiad and Dunrak Harbour plus an amount of bricks that are going into "stock" for the next build. In total £416 (there was a brief "oh my" moment as ExCeL revealed the total!) on 28 orders to obtsin 7338 pieces, of which 2000 are used in the Siege Of Issiad and Dunrak Harbour Builds at an average price of 6p per pieces. At that average price Siege Of Issiad has cost £83 to obtain.

The needed bricks are counted into a box and cross-checked in the spreadsheet. The discrepancies result in more BrickLink orders and another week of delay before building. As a secondary check I separate the big box into separate bags, once more checking against the spreadsheet. What would I give at this stage to be able to feed my lists into TLG's packaging pipeline and see all the little balances and scales measuring out the set rather than me counting it laboriously by hand. As I'm separating things out into bags it occurs to me that I should write this up in the style of an official review; which is how this all came about.

The process of identifying the Minifig parts begins; scouring the Bricklink Catalog for corresponding parts. Knowing the base sets helps; some of the minifigure components are drawn from them, others result in more Bricklink orders in particular the Golden Breastplates that come from the Lando Minifig on the original 6210 Jabba's Sail Barge. I can't identify the torso used for Vorash, my suspicion is that it's a custom; an Atlantis torso has to be substituted.

After many months of waiting I actually get to "open the box" and start building. There are no instructions; buids are done straight from the LDD model. As a result I'm building slightly slower than I would do if I were following official instructions but the finding of the bricks is no slower than an official build since the bricks for a section have already been picked and sortted. Photography is an iPhone 6 against sheets of white foam-card. There are a couple of miscounts on the bricks that force me to raid my stocks and a couple of design errors that need to be rectified in order to create a stable build. Thankfully the required parts for all of the issues can be found in my stocks.

Much as I would like to binge on the process and build it all in one afternoon I'm deliberately drawing it out one bag per evening to make the experience last longer and to give me something to look forward to after a long day in the office.

Assembling the Minifigures turned out to be harder than I was expecting. Some of the rarer parts such as the CMF Elf shield were always going to have to be sourced from BrickLink but I'd expected to have more of the Viking era Torso's in my stock. It turns out that most of the Viking Torso's I have are of the alternative "tattered" design. I also need to raid my Troll stock in order to retrieve an Orc Captains head and finally my stock of Flesh heads (of which I am not a great fan so my stock is minimal) for the human opponents. After another 3 weeks waiting the Minifigs are finally assembled and photography and reviewing can begin.

[TitusV]

A really cool set, thanks for bringing IT to our attention. We all understand the feeling of wanting to rush a build, but instead slowly doing it one bag at a time to have a good evening after a boring office or schoolday.

[Nuju Metru]

I'm extraordinarily impressed by your dedication to detail, accuracy, and simplification of the model, as you've recreated it. This review itself here is also quite comprehensive, and I really enjoyed seeing my build so thoroughly picked apart. Bravo - I never expected somebody to take my little creation as far as this!

[The_Cook]

The simplification is the hard part; how to change the number of unique elements without compromising the aesthetic of the model. It's surprising how building something in LDD doesn't generate quite the same "visual" awareness of the bricks going into the set. With hindsight I've reaslise that a whole set of 1x2 bricks in Dark Tan are just used to support the 2x2x2 slopes holding up the big printed slopes; these could easily have been Light Tan Dark Bluish Grey; another element saved that I wouldn't have spotted as easily in LDD.

In terms or recreating the model, the "clean" design (in the same style as a normal Lego set) allowed it to happen; contrast that to the more artful Derfel Cardan designs with their much more "chaotic" design which would be impossible to recreate directly but on "in the style of".

Last few pieces for Dunrak harbour might turn up this morning... and I've got a trans-atlantic flight at the weekend so I might try to recreate 64034 and of 64036 in LDD.

Edited October 1, 2015 by The_Cook

[SirBlake]

I'd like to leave a more thorough reply, but suffice it to say for now that this is more Cook greatness on a really cool set design. Well done!

[The_Cook]

I'd like to leave a more thorough reply, but suffice it to say for now that this is more Cook greatness on a really cool set design. Well done!

Just to point out that I didn't design this, the design is very definitely Nuju's, I just recreated it for fun because I wantted a "copy" of the set.