Number two on the way.
Rough 'sketch', with the idea that the nearest part would be a plaza covered with the remnants of the tower the spire was on top of. Buildings to have higher floors that units can be placed on, to make gameplay easy.
Some 40k bits being repurposed, with a ledge on the back for the floor to sit on:
Floor in place, followed by blanking out the lower floor windows (it's a pain in the neck trying to get everything inside black) plus supports for the rather thin floor:
Top view again, showing how the small Plasticard stringers added underneath look like broken rafters:
After the experience with the first piece, I decided to take a different approach to the scatter material. Rather than applying glue and then scatter, I tried placing all the scatter and then soaking it all in (cheap builder's) Superglue.
It turns out that the sand prefers being added afterwards, so I ended up with a two-step process where the finer materials are then scattered over placed glue. The results look pretty good and are very robust as each individual sand grain etc. is properly glue in place instead of only being glued by a very small portion.
I ended up adding some more sandy areas to the top floor to reduce the amount of untextured area, then used roughly the same process with a load of matchsticks as bigger broken beams on the ground floor:
The next quadrant had the same again, with the spire firmly glued in place. This is actually the mounting spike from a solar-powered garden light in the shape of a mini pagoda that was bought for 28mm Infinity terrain:
Inspired by other people's terrain I decided the plaza should be tiled so scored some 1mm foamed PVC and then laid it down where the tiles would be visible through the rubble. It had some blank 1mm sheet glued down the sides so that it wouldn't look higher than the surroundings.
I forgot to take any interim photos so here's the finished plaza, with a lot of MDF offcuts used to build up the area of the collapsed tower. As you can see from the shots with the infantry stand, it's very easy to place models almost anywhere, as the individual bits of scatter material are very low compared to the size of an Epic base. Very tall metal models on 25mm bases would get tricker to place, but even then there aren't many steep gradients.
Here's the whole thing so far. I'm not totally sure what to do with the fourth quadrant as the ruined tower in the 'sketch' photo pretty much doubles the height of the piece and will make storage more of a pain. Possibly the top of an underground bunker (using an old card building rooftop) that's now semi-hidden by collapsed material.
