Before I begin I need to say there are a ton of options out there that I did not have the chance to try out. I have spent a few days looking around online to see what people use, including scratch built polystyrene walls, Games Workshop's own 'Zone Mortalis' scenery, and whole host of companies in-between. The price range of options available is wild, you can build a table worth of terrain from as little as £10, or spend literal hundreds on some of the more expensive products.
What I was primarily looking for was a decent value option that covers 9 Zone Mortalis tiles (pretty much the largest game size in the '2D' option of the game) and does not require weeks of work.
Practicality of storing the terrain, and assembling / dismantling the battlefield is also a consideration.
Finally I was trying to keep in mind future buildability / compatibility with other pieces, in case I want to expand to a larger board.
Aesthetics is something deeply personal to each individual, and there are some products / companies I did not consider because their terrain options did not appeal to me. They may still be excellent products, but I simply did not like their design.
Boxes to tick
£100 budget
Fill 3x3 ZM tiles (roughly 26 columns, 12 long walls, 24 short walls)
Ease of assembly
Practicality of use (storing, assembly, etc)
Future options
Design aesthetic
Games Workshop
The Games Workshop scenery (albeit looking fantastic) is quite pricey. The only currently available terrain kit retails for £50 and contains 6 columns, 1 long walls, 4 short walls, 2 double wide doors, and 2 single doors. To fill a table to the above parameters, I would need to buy 5 of these sets and use the excess doors as walls, which is not ideal when you spend £250 on terrain. On top of that this would be a ton of plastic to glue together.
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| Credit: Games Workshop |
Pros:
- Amazing GW design with some very clever solutions and customisation options
- Fully compatible with other GW kits
- Plastic is easy to convert, if you are so inclined
- Very durable material
- So much plastic cement! (use a respirator, please)
- Elements must be glued together, or magnetised to stay connected
- Price
3D printing
Pre-printed 3D printed scenery was the next thing I looked into, but the price point almost immediately turned me away. Besides, all pre-printed plastic scenery I have seen online is printed at 0.3 or 0.4mm level, which makes the layer lines quite visible. I like that with some pieces, like Blackstone Fortress scenery, because it adds to the weirdness of the design, but with Necromunda I feel it would bother me.
With a help of a friend who has a plastic filament 3D printer we test printed at higher quality a freely available 3D model. I picked a column with short wall piece attached for this, and slightly modified it in Meshmixer to create a duct through the wall section. The piece came out great, I quite liked the aesthetic, despite the small inconsistencies and the still visible layer lines. Clean-up was pretty much non-existent, the supports effortlessly broke away from the inside. The cardboard tube I was planning to place in the hole was a bit of tight fit, but still did not require any filing or other work.
After calculating the material costs we decided it would be about £45 for the whole table. The printing time on his home printer, however, was nine and a half hours for this one piece, which was not even printed at the highest quality / layer resolution. Considering the amount of terrain needed I decided this was not a great option either.
Pros (assuming you own a 3D printer):
- Can easily modify / customise any piece
- Can print as much of each piece as you need
- Loads of different aesthetic options available online
- Relatively low material cost
- Virtually no clean-up (unless you want to get rid of the layer lines)
- Practically indestructible (really, I can actually stand on the test piece with no issues)
Cons:
- Layer lines
- Time it takes to print
- (Price, if you don't have your own printer)
Scratch building
I have recently seen a post on social media by someone who scratch built a full board out of good old fashioned polystyrene. I love the results he got, looking like the gritty, barren, unadorned walls of the underhive. Here's a link to his project. This is on a closed group on Facebook, called Necromunda Terrain Makers, if you do not know it go check it out, it is a well of inspiration. I considered copying his project, but with the current lockdown in place polystyrene was not available anywhere around here, and with the amount of work required I was not too keen to chase down suppliers. I have to say I am a little sad, though, as I really love the gritty look of this version.
_Slight update_ Maciek kindly gave me some feedback here, and corrected some of my assumptions. Apparently this is much easier to make than I thought, with just some foam, leftover bits/rubbish, a craft knife, and some pva glue. Also, he coated the whole thing in PVA before painting which massively improved the durability of these walls. Honestly give this a go if you haven't already purchased some expensive product, these look fantastic!
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| Credit: Maciek Urbanski |
Pros:
- Each piece can look exactly as you want it
- Can make as much of each piece as you need
- Very low material cost (possibly)
- Can be done with just a craft knife and some pva glue
- Takes more time and effort to make than most manufactured products
- Difficult to get pieces to fit as perfectly as a manufactured product
- Very light material means your terrain pieces will easily move about on the table
Laser-cut MDF
The next popular solution is laser-cut mdf (or hdf) terrain. I have seen some of this in the past in my local gaming club, where we had infinity tables built of this. After a quick online search and digging around on forums I narrowed down my options to 4 companies. Out of these TTCombat and Art of War are the two that I best liked the look of, so ordered a few pieces from each to decide what set to get. Their price range is pretty much the same for a full table (around £65).TTCombat
Full disclosure: I splashed on the TTCombat kit because I was fairly sure I would pick them as a final option; their design looks fantastic. From them I ordered the Iron Labyrinth - Death Quadrant Complex kit, which is one of their later additions to the range. It comes with a few columns, walls, doors, and some stairs and ladders, giving me a bit of everything I need, and some stairs to use in the future.
The kit arrived in 12 sheets of roughly A/4 sized, 3mm thick MDF. Right off the bat I could tell there was a lot of stuff in there. When I got down to building some test pieces I realised that the superior aesthetics come at the price of more complex builds, including more fiddly parts to make up each element. As an example, a column piece is made of 20 separate parts (3/side, 1/corner, 1 top, 1 bottom, 2 bits for the top joint to stack several columns).
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| This sheet contains 2 and a half columns, with some connector bits for walls |
The other thing I realised very quickly was that each part is separately and firmly attached to the frame (sprue?) with several joints. I wondered why adjacent parts were not lined up to 'touch' each other, but I figured there must have been a reason so I just got on with it. It took a fair bit of effort to cut off every part with a hobby knife. All in all with cutting, clean-up and gluing, one column took about an hour to assemble.
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| Note the 'gaps' left between different parts. |
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| All the extra bits do add up to a pretty good looking piece in the end. |
After putting together a few pieces there were a few things I was not perfectly happy about. Namely that the parts (to build one element) fit together quite loosely, so some of the elements ended up a bit wonky. The doors especially suffer from not having a top part, so the sides of the door-frame cave in a little while the glue dries. Also, the connection of various elements is done with little tabs sticking out of the wall pieces, that fit into holes in the columns. This would be fine if all the pieces were geometrically perfect, but since they are not, a long sequence of elements (I put in line 4 columns with walls and doors in-between) end up not sitting flat on the tabletop. I guess this can be fixed by carefully making a few perfect pieces, then setting the freshly built ones next to these while the glue dries.
Lastly, some of the laser cutting seems to be at an angle, rather than being perpendicular to the mdf sheet. This is not a problem 99% of the time, but some smaller pieces end up looking odd, and some of the joints are less than perfect. Still, the more pieces I put together, the better it was beginning to look, so I was cautiously happy with this purchase so far - but the experience did make me order a few test pieces from the runner-up.
TTCombat's online shop has the 'full table' set for about £65, but it does not quite have enough elements to fill up the 9 boards as I wanted. The kit I ordered as test cost about £25, and it will make up the difference with the full pack, so overall this is still within my budget.
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| The kit looks great! Note the clever solution to hide the connector tabs when doors and walls meet. |
Pros:
- Cool design elements make it less 'boxy' than expected
- Plenty of compatible kits available
- All you need is a hobby knife and PVA glue (maybe some sand-paper) to prep and build
- Pretty good price point
- Relatively difficult to cut parts off the frame
- Takes a bit more time to assemble than expected
- Parts do not quite fit perfectly
- I can see how the tabs that join the elements could brake over time
Art of War Studios
Unlike TTCombat, Art of War did not have a smaller kit in their newer range, so I ordered a set of columns, two types of walls, and doors. Note that this is their 'Necromunda Underhive Compatible' range. Their older 'The Hive' range is more similar to TTCombat, and is about 50% more expensive.
These each arrived on one or two sheets of roughly A/4 sized, 3mm thick MDF, like the other kit, but there were also some thinner 2mm sheets for parts like doors and barricades. The parts were lined up nicely, like I imagined they should be, and pretty much every bit of space was used to the maximum potential. Spare corners had small decorative elements to customise bigger pieces, and there were also a few barricades included, which is a nice bonus.
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| Note the barricade in the top left corner, as well as the grill/no grill options for the duct. |
The joints that keep the parts on the frame are a fraction of a millimeter each, and there are no more than a couple on each piece, which made the cutting off and clean-up of these a lot easier than the previous kit I tried. There are also less parts per element, which make this look a bit 'flatter', but after struggling with the more complex TTCombat bits I actually appreciated this. If I use the column as a comparison, it is made of only 14 pieces (1 for each side, 1 / corner, 1 top, 1 bottom, and 4 bits to go inside the side walls). Cutting off, cleaning, and gluing together took about 15 minutes.
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| Fraction of the time, but still looking pretty good |
I decided to try some of the more complex elements too, so I assembled the doors, and a long wall section with a duct through it. This latter was the most complex bit I could find in the lot I ordered. My overall impression was that the joints to fit the parts are more snug, in fact most pieces stand up and stay together just fine without gluing. It also means that the elements are more precise, and fit together better when combined on the table.
Placing the parts close together on the frame made a huge difference over time; in just over an hour I had two long walls, a short wall, two doors and a column done, along with the bonus barricades. This was about three times faster than assembling the other kit, piece for piece.
After a few pieces I realised that the holes on the sides of each element are there to fit magnets. I am guessing most people know this when they buy this product, for me it was a welcome surprise. A quick online vendor search told me that I can sort out all the magnets (5mm x 3mm n35 neodymium) for a whole table for under £10. The only flaw I noticed with the magnet option is that the walls don't have a back support for the magnets to rest on, so you gotta be careful when gluing them in. Also, the holes are a fraction larger than 5mm, so it is not a snug fit by any means. This may be good or bad, I do not know, as I have no previous experience with magnetising mdf terrain.
At this point I went back to Art of War Studios' online store and did a quick calculation. For some reason the elements ordered individually come to a lower price than their 'full table' set. The whole kit for my full table project comes to £55 (including the bits I ordered as test). This, plus the magnets put this well within my budget.
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| The fruit of an hour-and-a-little of work |
Pros:
- Comes with decorative details to customise pieces
- Compatible kits available
- All you need is a hobby knife and PVA glue (maybe some sand-paper) to prep and build
- Very good price point
- Easier assembly and less clean-up than other kits
- Magnetisable
- Looks a bit more boxy than other kits
- Elements stay loose if you do not magnetise
- Magnet holes are a little loose for the magnets
Comparison
I was trying to summarise my thoughts in the form of a table of some sort on this, but honestly I struggled. Deciding between any of these options I explored is a subjective choice as I do not think any of them are superior to the others. At the same time they all bring something different to the table (no pun intended). So instead of a fancy table here's a picture of the 3D printed piece with a part of TTCombat and a part of Art of War Studios terrain. For clarity they all have very similar footprints, with the 3D printed version being closest to the GW terrain, and AoW following the printed Zone Mortalis boards the best. Height-wise the 3D printed and the AoW stuff are the same height at 64mm, while TTCombat is 3mm shorter - which is an easy fix; it is exactly 1 mdf layer difference.
Conclusion
I enjoyed this exercise, even if it cost me a third of my budget due to me going a bit wild on one of the kits, and I am happy I looked around first as it saved me some work and disappointment in the long run. Thinking long and hard about all the different pros and cons I went for the Art of War Studios terrain as it fits my wants and needs as a good value for money option. I was considering re-selling the TTCombat stuff but then I figured I can make it compatible with the AoW kit; I only need to add on some flat rectangular magnets to the columns and insert some steel screws or nails to the sides of the walls. In any case, it will definitely be a future project for when I want to expand the table, and any un-built bits will stay flat packed for now.
The one final test that remains to be seen is how these all look on the tabletop when painted. I will try and do another post once these are painted up, but I can already tell you that even the bare mdf walls enhance the game experience hugely.
I decided to put up this very wordy post because I could not find any side by side comparison when I was researching my options. I hope someone will find it helpful when trying to decide on their next purchase. And if not, well, I guess there are worse things I could have done with my time.
See you in (hopefully less than) another ten years.
_Post updated on 19/06/2020 with some feedback received from the creator of the DIY set, and after some more experience putting together and magnetising a large batch of terrain.
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