Yep, exactly what it sounds like. I picked up a set of modular tiles from Uncertain Scenery a little over a year ago. They got sidelined by playing a couple of Kingdom Death campaigns with a buddy, and then COVID and a move, but after I wrapped up my latest two titans for AT, I was sitting at the start of Memorial Day weekend with no project actively in WIP and, well, a closet full of MDF.
Now I have a closet full of MDF that takes up significantly more space than it did a week ago. Such is life
So this is my hobby thread for this project, as I try to take these city tiles from bare wood to distressed urban concrete, and then do my best to populate them with apartment complexes, office buildings, churches, power stations, warehouses, whatever I can fit in!
Here's what I finished over Memorial Day weekend:
...and here's what I finished today with a little downtime:
That brings me to 22/24 tiles necessary for a 4' x 6' tabletop, and I have a few more pieces coming in the mail (another set of ramps down to the sunken highway, risers and ramps up to "hill" sections, along with galleries for cladding those "hill" sides with), and a few more open space tiles so it isn't all city streets).
Here's a few close-up shots of some of the details:
Craig's a great guy - he let me talk him into designing a traffic circle tile above & beyond the 4-way intersections he had. I wanted something I could throw a statue onto, get that proper "cyclopean imperial city" feeling to it. He obliged with a set of plinths that can also be converted into fountains, so I popped out the centers, built them as fountains, and kept the necessary parts so I can close them up and pop a statue on top if I feel like it. This way I can open up the board more while still having light cover for infantry in the middle of the tile.
Obviously this is why I went with Uncertain Scenery's tiles, over just using a neoprene battlemat or the Dropzone Commander tiles/maps these are loosely based off of: depth. Where else can you use the ramp for an underground parking garage to emplace a Shadowsword hull-down? seriously!
The sunken highway. I can't wait to see how heavily this does or doesn't feature into actual gameplay. Do people avoid it for the open-air deathtrap it is, or take advantage of it to road march across the board in a turn? Do the ramps back up to street level turn into bottlenecks? Do fire teams hunker down on the bridges on overwatch?
Do people set up field artillery in the courtyard mini-mall? I have visions of IG mortar teams sandbagged down in front of a bombed-out Warhammer store, lobbing shells at Orks on the other side of the highway
More likely, it'll give Dave somewhere to park his Eldar grav tanks for their pop-up attacks. At least until I fill it with MW barrages...
I like that the designer (Craig Birks) has thought of just about everything - he even included some faux tunnel entrances so you can run the highway into the side of a tile if you wanted to, and have it pop back out again elsewhere on the board. The galleries that wrap around elevated tiles can do the same thing for surface-level roads (more pics of that when they arrive).
So yeah, my goal is to get this fully painted by Fall In/Historicon this year, and to hopefully have a table's worth of city terrain (buildings & ruins) to populate a standard table. Yes, it's scaled to 10mm, but no, it doesn't really feel "too big" for Epic, at least not with the Stalkers I laid out there on the board for scale comparison. Bigger still works - it just fits that over-the-top Imperial aesthetic of building everything a little bigger than it needs to be.
