I admit it... I'm a mini junky. I have always used miniatures, even back in the day when we didn't use them for much more than occasionally showing marching order. I've run plenty of games without them, and they've been fine... but ever since the rise in popularity of prepainted miniatures, I have been hooked.
Unfortunately, as I have complained about several times over the years, there is a real shortage of prepainted plastic miniatures for science fiction games. They're out there, but they're nowhere near as numerous as the fantasy miniatures.
Today I'll share what miniatures I've been using (and plan to use) for Alpha Enigma, my Savage Worlds campaign that began last month.
First of all, let's be honest. Your science fiction universe probably has aliens of some kind or another. There are a lot of figures from traditional fantasy lines that can be used to represent these creatures just fine. In Alpha Enigma, I have used the shadow to represent a strange ghost-like creature that was killing passengers on the Nova Eclipse, and I used this earth elemental to represent a mineral based life form that the party encountered in an asteroid mine. I haven't used that warforged mini yet, but it'll work just fine as a droid or a soldier in power armor.
Though I shy away from the more recognizable storm troopers and named characters, the Star Wars Miniatures line has a ton of generic looking miniatures that represent less iconic factions. These are perfect, as they fit side by side with minis from the D&D and Pathfinder lines without doing any work at all. I wish there were more of them, but Wizards of the Coast didn't renew their license, so they're technically out of print. They aren't hard to find second-hand, though.
Wizkids makes approximately 9,322,192,823,828,423 different lines of "clix" miniatures. From Mage Knight to Mechwarrior to the actual Heroclix themselves, there are tons of these out there. If you can imagine it, there is probably a miniature for it in one of their products. The scale is a little larger than the Wizards of the Coast lines, but it's close enough that the differences aren't noticeable on the tabletop. My only issue with these minis is that their bases are too large for 1" scale maps. Fortunately, re-basing them is a breeze, and the sheer variety of what is available more than makes up for the minor annoyance. I particularly like the Mechwarrior miniatures that look awesome as large power armor suits.
There are other miniatures that I use as well, most notably those from Warhammer 40K - but the others are typically cost more money, and I have to take the time to paint them. The older I get, the less time I have to sit around painting miniatures in the man cave, and I'll take as many prepainted miniatures as I can find.
Are there any lines of miniatures that I'm missing?