About 3 years ago I got hold of a set of out of production City Battlegrounds from Miniature Scenery, which make for excellent 40k style road/city tiles that can be arranged in any combination of layouts. I posted a bunch of pics of these painted quite some time ago here.
Since I last posted about these in May, the next wave of construction is overdue...
The main thing lacking in the city tiles themselves was 'vertical' elements - for rural games you have hills or equivalent; there should be something similar in city maps to add height.
The Miniature Scenery people very thoughtfully used to do a set of 4 flat-topped buildings which give you the equivalent of LOS blocking 'hills' in the middle of the layout.
It took me two years of eBay/email haggling to finally get hold of a 2nd hand set in my hands - 12 MDF router cut sprues of parts that have been out of production since about 2013...
Since you can't get them any more, I took a bunch of pics of the kit itself.
Just about in shot in the pic below - the kit also comes with a little bridge (that can span between 2 of the raised tiles... very cool), plus an extra road tile so when you add this set to the 20 city tiles you have a set of 25 squares in total for a 5x5 layout.
These are pretty old school compared to most modern MDF which is laser cut - the router gives you slightly round cuts and the detail is much chunkier when cut into the surface.
To give full credit though, there is *really* very little wasted space in the sprues - the layout is tight and uses the full sheet well.
One of the 4 buildings has more of a heli-pad surface cut into it... should look quite good with a bit of extra paint & weathering.
There is quite a lot more work cleaning up/sanding these than laser-cut (a good part of why they are now OOP), so it is taking a while to clean up all the bits that form the walls/frame.
And since the router gaps are also much larger, I'm trying to use some filler while working through construction to give some smooth surfaces.
A whole bunch of parts together gives you 4 'walls'...
Which slot together to form a very robust square frame. The extra pieces of detail add a whole bunch of extra stability to the top surface. While I'm not going to test it, you get the sense that you could just about stand on it (let alone stick your heaviest minis on top).
Progressing slowly, but getting these to fit tightly/neatly together will make them much much easier to line up with the basic flat tiles with their machined edges. More WIP pics coming - the first 2 semi-finished levels are in the pic at the top of this post.
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