Alexandrina

So I've had the set sitting in a box for nearly a week waiting for me to finish another set (Indiana Jones, and a great set too tbf) but I finally had chance to start building today. Only done one bag - I like to spread my builds out with new sets, so I won't be done with this for more than a week - but so far I'm impressed. Can't say I have any problems with the printing of the soldiers' torsos. As others have said it's not the same white tone as the legs, but it doesn't look horrible at all imo. If I hadn't been primed to look out for it because of what people had said, I wouldn't have noticed anything amiss. A minor quibble I do have with the set, though, is the fact that the instruction books aren't numbered (I think this might be a Lego thing though rather than specific to this set). There are four instruction books and no indication without opening them which one I'm supposed to start with. Only takes a few seconds to look through them all and put them in the right order, but I'm sure they used to number the books.

Careful what you say! There's still time for Lego to remove the goat from the set and keep it in hiding for another ten years...

Because as I have previously speculated, the goat was likely included in the original plan for the Lion Knights' Castle before the village part was split off (which would make it one of the first animals in the recent uptick in new animals) and now that Lego have a village coming, and the goat is going to be in it, they don't need to introduce it. Internally the goat 'exists', so to speak. You're right: there is no mystical force field around the goat. There is a bit of a mythos among AFOLs, though. Because of the history of the goat, Lego are holding off to release it in a set where it'll have the most impact. Who knows, maybe when the village is out, they'll release cheaper sets with goats in. And why would goats be thrown in a Farm set? Unlike sheep, they're not in the A tier of farm animals. But here's the thing: I've already said all this. It's been done to death. You raised economics as a separate point, but that's not the be-all and end-all. There is both an economic argument (that moulds do cost money) and a separate argument that Lego are waiting to release the goat at the right time. I'm not sure why you're acting like nobody is making any argument other than the economic one, when people are just replying to your comments. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is no village, or there is no goat in it. But from what we know and the rumours that exist, it seems likely.

Moulds are expensive to make. And yes, Lego can afford to make a new mould, no trouble, but they can't afford to make unlimited new moulds (and there's not a pot for animals alone; every new part is eating from that budget). I don't know the ins and outs of why Lego make certain animals in certain sets, but there is logic to it. (Brachiosaurus is a separate case; licensed sets have to represent the license they're based off, so Lego have to make dinosaurs for the Jurassic Park sets) The baby seals are in a cheap set that is going to sell at large volume; they don't need to recoup so much of the cost of the mould per set, as they'll be selling thousands upon thousands. More expensive sets don't sell as many (that's not to say they're bad sellers, but there aren't as many people who can afford a £300 set as can afford a £15 set) so there's less room to put unnecessary moulds in.

The wolf in the picture is from the Red Riding Hood Ideas set, dressed up as Granny. I don't think the wolf in the story is ever referred to as female, but you could definitely use the fig as a she-wolf.

I prefer pirates as the antagonists - the soldiers are the heros! Honestly I'm not sure. The only Pirate stuff I had growing up was the 2009 wave, so my childhood was redcoats only, but I've not had any since and in going back through old sets acquired a decent crew of bluecoats. I suspect having the two Eldorados on display for a few months will swing me firmly over to the bluecoats side.

I get that too (and I'd never even heard of a Discovery Centre before this thread) but when I've made a mistake, not realised somewhere was closed, I groan and blame myself. I wouldn't take to the internet to complain about the business I wanted to patronise, if the information was available and I just hadn't seen it. And again, at no point was I trying to be rude. It's just that this situation isn't Lego's fault.

The goat has legendary status among AFOLs because of its limited run. Lego know this - if they're bringing the goat back then it makes sense to do it with a bang, and get people talking about the goat. (Also, the influx of animal moulds has only come in the last few years; if we assume that the village is coming next year, it would have been conceptualised early in the period of adding new animals. Even earlier if it was part of the original design of the Lion Knights Castle.) It could be the case that internally Lego know the goat is coming imminently. Because they know the goat is coming imminently, they're not rushing to put out a small City set containing it. I don't follow your logic here. Why does a set being £160 rather than £200 mean Lego can make as many moulds as they like? It's well known that they have budgets for new moulds (divided by theme). They decided to use some of the City budget for the Orca, some of the Jurassic Park budget for the Brachiosaurus.

But in this example you'd sell them for £0.80 (as they were selling for two years ago) and undercut the market by a believable amount. Selling such a huge stock at 1/3 of market rate screams 'scam'.

But the point I'm making is that the ant mould was introduced fifteen years ago. Lego clearly didn't have problems making single-use animal moulds back then, or when the goat was introduced, but that doesn't mean the policy holds true today. Now as it happens I think they will absolutely release the goat and they're saving it for a set like this because they know of its status among fans, but the company's policies a decade and a half ago can't be taken as proof that the same policies apply today.

That may be the case - especially now, nearly thirty years removed from the original release, when there's been time for people to buy them shipped internationally and later sell off their collections (or buy them while living in North America and later move elsewhere) but every source says the sets were never available in the rest of the world (actually, I did once see a comment suggesting that they were included in retailer catalogues in Europe but not widely released, so it may have been technically possible for small independent stockists to carry the sets for a time). They don't appear in any Lego catalogues for the rest of the world. And if you look at Bricklink, almost every listing for sale is in either the USA or Canada (there are a handful from Asia and Europe, especially for the cheapest of the sets). There's also a minifigure head that was only available in these sets (3626bpx12) and this head is literally only available to be bought from American sellers, as it has been for some time. (I'm attempting to collect every yellow head print ever released, and I kept an eye on it for a long time hoping for a European seller before I bit the bullet and had one shipped from the States). Literally any head print that was released in wide-release sets will have listings from all over the world; the fact that 3626bpx12 does not only furthers the suggestion that the head was never released outside North America. And while it is possible for global consumers to buy the sets now, the nostalgia factor isn't going to be there for the simple fact that people who have been able to afford to have a retired and desirable Lego set shipped across an ocean are already adults; the amount of people in the rest of the world who had these sets growing up is going to be negligible.

Without intending to be rude, if the information is on their website in multiple places and you just didn't look hard enough, that's not Lego's fault. I used to work at a shop with a post office attached (that closed earlier than the shop) and people often turned up wanting to use the post office out of hours. The opening hours were listed online, though; it wasn't my fault, nor the post office's, that these customers hadn't checked before they travelled.

I can believe that someone bought lots to resell. I just don't think someone who invested the money in 1000s of shakos and held onto them for the better part of a decade would then proceed to sell them at such a cut price right as the price goes up because a new set is out and people want printed ones to replace the plain ones. The price of shakos has gone up recently, so if you had that many why not sell them at the old market rate? £0.39 a pop is too cheap imo.

Is there a specific reason 10320 is raising anger in Poland? Calling for a boycott seems like an extreme reaction to a set not living up to personal expectations 6079 was a North American exclusive I believe (iirc the whole Dark Forest subtheme was) so I think it's a very unlikely candidate for Icons - a large portion of their audience won't have any nostalgia for the range because it was never available for purchase in their region.

They made the ant mould before they made the original goat mould, so the ant doesn't really work as a comparison

It's hard to see how they're not fakes, to be honest. Nearly 5,000 isn't a quantity anybody is going to come by through natural collecting even if their business model is buying joblots and selling the parts on, and for whatever reason they held on to the shakos. (If you had one of every set that contained the shako, you'd have 26 of them). Especially since they've been absent from Pick a Brick for years - in fact, have they ever been on Pick a Brick? I was in a mini-Dark Age in 2015 but I know the whole Pick a Brick range has had an overhaul since then. When you add in that the average price of a used shako has gone up 20p in the last two years, and suddenly they're selling them at barely more than 1/3 of the current going rate, where are they getting them from?

Is there a known regional factor in the brittle brown prevalence? I see people from America and Canada posting photos with dozens of broken bricks, and I've never encountered any brittle brown damage myself (I do have a red slope from the 70s that's broken in the same manner but no brown) - am I just riding a wave of good fortune or is it known to be worse in some places than others?

None of those sets have stickers, if that's why you're nervous. (In fact I don't think any Modulars have stickers)

I would love to see Aquazone but I'd be upset if they didn't bring back the octagonal bricks at the very least. They are genuinely interesting parts that weren't made in nearly enough colours and would be very welcome in the Lego canon to this day.

Where are you getting that it wasn't produced for twelve years? According to Bricklink the longest gap between sets since its introduction was 2012-2017. It does seem that it was retired (all the 2012 sets retired after just one year according to Brickset, which seems like a short lifespan for Friends sets) and brought back for the reissued Taj Mahal, but certainly not after twelve years.

It's not that they won't invest in new parts per se, but I can't see them spending the money to bring back multiple single-purpose moulds (such as in the monorail). It would be a big expenditure for parts they might well not get any use of again. Space sets could easily come back as the sort of parts they'd be investing in would be more likely to find a use elsewhere in Lego's range.

My thinking is that Lego are going to want to stick to sets that are iconic and also translate into something cool for today. Sets like Pizza To Go, therefore, are unlikely. What would distinguish a modernised version from any bog-standard City set? They've shown as well that they like to rotate among themes for the most part, so the next set is unlikely to be Pirates (maybe a Sabre Island GWP at some point but we're probably not going to see Skull's Eye Schooner 2.0 next year). On top of that they won't want to do a set that would require lots of extinct parts to be brought back just to work (so no monorail) and they probably won't want to compete with the standard themes - something like Flying Ninja's Fortress is unlikely to be remade while Ninjago is still on the go. Personally I don't think it'll be a Castle set - the three recent offerings plus the rumoured Medieval village pretty well cover all the bases that Castle sets need - and I don't think it'll be Space because all the iconic factions are either recently made (Classic, Blacktron) or require the neon colours that have recentyl been discontinued (Ice Planet, M:Tron) Taking away the three most iconic themes leaves little to pick from. Paradisa sets are more likely to be "soft-remade" as Friends sets than as Icons, and Aquazone was mainly full of smaller vehicles which wouldn't be strong movers imo. For that reason I personally think the next Icons set will be a Western set, either Fort Legoredo or possibly Gold City Junction. We know from the 2002 rereleases that Western made it into the pantheon of Legends (where Aquazone never did); Fort Legoredo is an iconic part of Lego history that's not similar to anything on the market and can be remade with parts that presently exist; and when you take away the Big Three themes, there aren't that many truly iconic Lego sets that are old enough to warrant a remake.

I'm not sure if we're talking about different things (can't say I'm aware of any recent sets with vinyl wings which might have brought this to your mind) but I thought they were as good as Lego could reasonably be expected to get for the wings of the Geonosians in their 2009/10/11ish appearances. The wings in the film itself had a similar sort of look to them, and using solid plastic would have made them look too blocky.

Thank you for the feedback! 6093 was definitely on my mind when I was designing this (I now have the instructions saved on my PC despite never owning the set) Yeah, I built from the bottom up so when I was putting in the yellow corner walls it was with every intention of having a lot of yellow. Not sure what happened but I'll definitely seed more into the build. I also thought of decals for some/all of the panels, and that's something I'll work on for version two. I did toy with the idea of going for thick bases but I'm a sucker for the baseplate. 1999 still seems to be in the transitional era between baseplates everywhere and big bricks everywhere. Adventurers sets still had baseplates rather than big bricks, as did a fair few Ninja sets. I might experiment though - bricks as bases might add a bit of modularity. This is helpful feedback too. I wasn't sure if they were perhaps too plentiful - perhaps my gut instinct was right all along!

In its original incarnation, the beloved Pirates theme ran from 1989 to 1997. Barring a pretty horrible Jack Stone wave in 2004, Pirates sets would not return to the line-up for over a decade, before 2009's sets hit the shelves. But what if they did? For my entry into the Eldorado Fortress competition, I tried to imagine what it would have looked like if Lego had given Pirates a revival in 1999. This, for context, is one year before Knights Kingdom ended a mini-hiatus of Castle sets and brought more explicitly named characters into the world. I present Fort Broadside, flagship set of the 1999 line. Inspired by both the sets of the classic Pirates line and also late-90s large sets such as Fort Legoredo and Flying Ninja's Fortress, Fort Broadside represents my attempt to bridge the gap between the latter-day Pirates sets we knew in real life and the sets of the first reboot. Excluding minifigures, it contains 788 parts; this would put it as the second-largest set of 1999 excluding Technic, Dacta and Basic boxes, as well as the third-largest Pirates set to date (after the Black Seas Barracuda and Skull's Eye Schooner). In short, while a big set, it's not out of the realms of possibility for a flagship set. There are nine minifigures in the set, which is a sizable chunk but not excessive for large sets. These include a return for Governor Broadside, as well as the brick debut of his daughter Camilla. There's also an officer and three soldiers; I consciously chose to break from the Pirates tradition of giving the soldiers generic smileys, as by 1999 this was no longer standard practice for the Lego group. Two of the three faces used were in the standard rotation at the time, and in fact both were used for cavalry in the Western sets. The third is a custom design which is in the style of 1990s face prints. Crucially, all of the soldiers have the generic smile as the underlying core of their face. There are also two pirates and a maid. The pirates are there for obvious reasons (someone for the soldiers to fight); the maid is there to be something different. Almost all of the minifigures can be made with genuine Lego. There are exceptions: the aforementioned face print with the brown moustache was a custom design so sadly doesn't exist, and the Scala wine bottle was somehow never made in trans-dark green(!). In addition, nothing of Camilla can be made in real life except for her hands and the flowers. The torso is a custom recolour of the standard female bodice of the 1990s in light yellow, with her red belt added, and her skirt is a slope of the same colour. The face is a custom design (though to be honest I'm tempted to just give her 3626bp02 instead) and the hair is a recolour of Qui-Gon Jinn's in orange. Both orange and light yellow, while uncommon colours, were in production in 1999 (orange having been introduced for the X-Wing pilot torsos in Star Wars). Structurally, Fort Broadside is a semi-modular design built on three baseplates. They're hinged, meaning the model can be folded into an almost-square configuration as seen in the above image, or held almost flat as in the top image. This modularity was directly copied from Fort Legoredo (and in fact my original plan was to have the fortress spread over four baseplates rather than two; this, as you can imagine, quickly became far too big). Unfolding the baseplates gives access to the fort's interiors; these include but are not limited to a storage for cannon balls, a map room for Governor Broadside and Lieutenant de Martinet to study in, and multiple stands where muskets can be clipped. Play features include the obligatory cannon and crane. There is also a jail cell beneath the cannon, which holds a very disgruntled pirate. He's almost impossible to see in this configuration, but unfolding the baseplates moves the rocks out of the way to reveal a secret entrance. Throughout the building process I was conscious of using period-appropriate bricks, and pretty much everything here is achieved through regular bricks that you could have had to hand in 1999. The exception is the eight big sloping panels at the front of the fort. Although the mould was in use in 1999 and appeared prominently in large sets, it was never actually made in white. Although I reason that there was nothing stopping Lego from making it in white if a set demanded it, it does unfortunately mean that the fortress cannot be made with real bricks. There are also a few instances of 1x1 bricks with clips (which wouldn't be released until 2008) which I didn't realise was an anachronism until after I'd done the renders and was compiling a parts list. This is prominent in my list of changes to make. I also sought to recreate the feel of classic Pirates sets, though I made a few conscious changes to the aesthetic to match what I imagined a 1999 wave would do: I used tan pieces rather than yellow for sand. The last Pirates sets to include sand were released in 1996; by 1999, through first the Western and later Adventurers sets, tan bricks and plates were becoming commonplace. It made sense to me that Lego would use tan for the sand rather than yellow. I made liberal use of 1x2x5 and 1x3x5 bricks. These weren't unheard of in Pirates sets but were far more common in large sets around the turn of the century. So why post if it isn't finished? To solicit feedback. And to make sure that I get something out. If time gets away from me in the coming months, at least I've got something. And of course I want to be able to action any criticisms/suggestions people have, especially people whose formative years with Lego were the golden age in question. I got into Lego a few years later, and while I have built my share of classic sets, I quite often catch myself defaulting to a piece which didn't actually exist in the 90s (like less-chunky frames for jail cell doors, for instance). I do have a small list of changes I already know I want to make, mostly stuff which I either noticed during rendering or which is trivial: When making the custom face prints I used the wrong image size, meaning Camilla and the soldier's faces are too chubby. If I get round to it I'll redo them to be the right size, but this doesn't affect the quality of the build. The previously-mentioned 1x1 bricks with clips need to be replaced with plates. I forgot to make an opening for the map room; once the model is built, it's currently inaccessible without dismantling a wall. This is true regardless of baseplate configuration. I hate the crane mechanism I used. I was working off an Eldorado Fortress remake, but I can't figure out how to use regular string in Studio so the actual crane is a ham-fisted way of getting something. There is a sliding rock mechanism inspired by Rocky Reef, which allows access to the secret entrance to the jail cell (as well as some hidden treasure) but right now the dock juts out one stud too far so the rock piece can only slide one stud along before getting stuck. The palm tree is rigid. This is laziness on my part; I realised after I'd made it that I had to rotate each connector individually, and put it on the "do later" list. There are yellow panels in the lower portion of the build. These are inspired by the classic Pirates look but there's no other yellow and they look odd on their own; I intend to either change them to white or add more yellow detailing. Big fans of the Pirates lore might notice that Bo'sun Will Cavendish is not present in this set. He was in the original design, which was to be four baseplates long and include a merchant boat/tavern. When I realised how big all this would be, I downsized to the core focus, and got rid of the excess minifigures. He does appear in another set I've been half-heartedly working on from the same imagined wave, but whether that'll get finished is another matter.