I find it amusing that it's taken us so long to complete a miniature city building project that it would have been possible to construct a real building (albeit a small one) in the same time. Ladies and gentlefarts, may I present a project chronology:
Christmas 2024: public consultation
Sector Imperialis ruins reappear on Made to Order on the GW website, and the terrain-enthused subsection of our gaming group known as Deep Space Nein do something financially responsible.
July 2025: planning permission granted
A courier drops off some huge boxes at my house. Harvey, Drew, Tom and I consult our calendars looking for dates all four of us can do. We swear a bit.
November 2025: main construction
April 2026: detailing
The buildings and main sections of rubble are built and primed from plaster, sand, offcuts and plasticard. Tom points out we're going to need more rubble, and I realise I'm going to have to figure that out before our scheduled paintathon at the end of May. Cue more swearing.
May 2026: public opening
A weekend's paintathon occurs with all of DS-N with extra help from Amalia.
CHONKY RUIN PROJECT COMPLETE.
To say that this development is satisfying would be an understatement; at this point the deranged itches originally spawned by 2001's Cityfight supplement released for Warhammer 40K have been vigorously scratched. OK, yes, I do still have a few more small ruins from the Hivestorm box left to paint, but after that, I feel (perhaps foolishly) like I might actually, you know, have enough 40K buildings. The concept of not wanting more of a particular kind of terrain is a bit confusing to me, and I'm still adjusting to the concept. Time will tell if I adjust to it by making even more terrain just to check.
The Painting
Owing to the enormity of the buildings, this was kept as simple as possible:
- Metal walkways/railings primed Color Forge Hyrax Brown and masked off
- Prime with Mechanicus Standard Grey
- Generous zenithal/patchy spray of Zandri Dust
- All over drybrush with Army Painter Skeleton Bone
- All metal fixtures except doors painted with Cygor Brown Contrast
- This is the longest, most punishing stage; we tried not to pick out too much and assumed much of the building to be painted to match the plaster, but there's no getting around moving parts like fans, and we wanted to blend the balconies into our Sector Mechanicus walkways.
- All metal fixtures drybrushed with Army Painter Gunmetal
- All metal fixtures drybrushed with Vallejo Air Steel
- Cabling picked out in Black Templar Contrast
- Doors sloshed with Nihilakh Oxide
- Doors lightly drybrushed with Warplock Bronze
- Doors lightly drybrushed with Hashut Copper
We also picked out one or two details like sunken barrels/crates in various colours, drybrushing those colours into the rubble to create fades and preserve the dusty colour.
The Buildings
The Grand Archway
This is the largest of the buildings, with a footprint of 24"x14.5" (or 20x17 if you include the big statues). If you squint, it's a Kill Team board. You can get something of the scale of it from the title image in this post - it's on the left hand side, but you can't see the whole building in that shot.
At ground level, it's actually two separate buildings joined by the archway. This means that the building is big enough that you have to assault it with multiple units and/or capture it in successive fights. With the big statues in place, it also adds an additional sight line axis for hiding from enemy units.
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| The archway is big enough for most medium vehicles and monsters to move through, although heavy tanks like Repulsors won't fit through the narrowest section. |
We made a point of providing plenty of usable vertical space. On the first two floors you can fight room to room, while on the top floor it clearly used to be a larger more stately room that now offers plenty of space for opposing units to smack into each other (assuming they made the climb or flew up). We've given its doors a variety of treatments, with several of them having been blown off their hinges, whilst another is merely wide open, leading out onto a balcony. Like all the balconies on these buildings, the front railings can be removed to join to modular walkways.
For storage, we had to make the rubble removable, which made assembly more time consuming! But as it was these things were already going into the biggest boxes sold by the Really Useful Box company.
The Ruined Market Hall
This huge structure is affectionately known as 'the offcuts building' since the idea was always to build the big archway above, and then see what else we could make with the rest of our haul. This building, then, I conceived as two things: first, our comedy response to the infamous L-shaped ruins of the tournament scene, since with the addition of an antechamber to the side of the building, this right here is our L-shaped ruin. There are some implied internal walls on the ground floor, but the first storey has no such internal divisions combined with a big open arch onto an immodestly large balcony. I assume it served as a civic hall or more likely a covered market connected to other structures by the walkway.
This is the only structure where any of the walls have survived intact up to the full three storey height, to try and convey the scale of the once-proud structure.
Thanks to the L-shape combined with the rubble, this building ends up with a similarly huge footprint of about 20"x19", but that's only if you include the full length of the balcony. The building itself is more like 14"x14" at the widest points.
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| Termagant for scale (no bananas were available) |
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| The ruins of the antechamber |
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| I had to get creative with the rubble to ensure this thing could fit in the box |
The Junction
This building used most of the serious parts that were left after we made our (tee hee) L-shaped ruin. Because I have Star Wars and Necromunda-induced brain worms when it comes to adding walkways and other vertical nonsense to games, I decided it would be cool to use the last major components we had left to construct, essentially, the other end of the bridge suggested by the ruined market hall above. So another giant balcony, but with a smaller balcony on the side that could then connect to thinner walkways or, indeed, the little balcony on the side of the grand archway. Crucially, this also gave us a smaller ruin that would fit less overwhelmingly into board layouts. I imagine it might serve various purposes, but it's got strong boiler house energy.
The slightly ajar door opening onto the balcony means that units can either hide behind the solid doors for charge staging, or move out onto the balcony if they want to be in cover but still able to shoot out at other units.
The Bleakest Ruin
As well as having big tall sexy buildings, I also liked the idea of using some surplus ruin components to make a really pulverised building. At this point rubble supplies were running low, but the final dribble of productivity offered up one last 3x4 ruin:
This actually offers welcome variety and turned out to be quite a useful bit of terrain, thus proving that you don't have to do the kind of idiocy present in most of this post to get perfectly serviceable terrain. Being smaller, this was also a lot quicker to make since all the rubble and basing could be permanently attached.
Walkways
As intimated above, our big priorities were modularity and vertical space. Walkways are a big part of that. Here's an example:
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| The front railings on the balconies are detachable |
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| Brood of 10 termagants for even more scale |
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| Brood of 10 termagants for walkway agoraphobia |
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| One can have acceptably large fights on these things |
Layouts
Having shown all this nonsense off, we are contractually obliged to provide some glamour shots. Well, as glamourous as our photography allows. To start, here's a quick shot of all the new Imperialis stuff put down together:
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| Realising the hallowed goal of having a walkway leave one building on the first floor and connect to another on the second floor |
Right. That's enough photos (or possibly too many photos) for one post. For other people's sake, I do rather wish the Sector Imperialis kits were more frequently sold by GW, but you can at least do almost exactly the same thing with the Sanctum Administratus kit they still sell, albeit less gothically. Toodle pip, chin-chin, and yay for immersive board layouts.
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