Small Scale Scenery

 

Hey everyone ! 
So my son and I have had a few games of Flames of Orion now and we've found we're destroying more and more scenery as we play which is a good thing right ?

Now removing buildings and leaving the blank mat instead is not acceptable for me so I wondered about making some ruined buildings and craters to replace the bits of terrain which would disappear (or even just to decorate the table a little further.

To do that, I wanted somthing cheap and quick that wouldn't require me to get bits or anything. I actually had everything I needed at home ! I took some foam board which I cut in random shapes and I stuck some bits of the lasercut cardboard I had left from when I made the buildings plus several bits I had lying.
The craters were just made out of air drying clay and since my block of air drying clay was getting way too dry to work with, I broke it into big chunks which just happen to look like rocks except there was one smooth surface that made them blend on a table much better !

This whole board took me half an afternoon to build so as little energy as possible.

So I made a little dozen of ruined/collapsed buildings to replace the ones which will get destroyed in game

And also a bunch of craters when the scenery getting destroyed isn't big buildings and to just decorate the board when I want.

The air drying clay rocks looks so much like rocks it felt counter productive for a second until I realised the flat bottom makes them blend in much better than simple rocks I'd pick outside. They're also so quick to paint it's a no brainer.

Now of course I needed more scatter terrain and equipment to make the board more fun so I finally painted this set of  Manufactorum Imperialis I've had for a while.
It's honestly one of the best terrain kits from GW, no skulls, very little gothic stuff, generic enough unlike some of the stuff they do, I would be in heaven if there was 28mm scale stuff like that.

The cranes especially are great to give a sense of scale :

The rest of the scenery is modular and I've kept it that way in order to be able to change how things look a bit :

I was stunned to see some of the 40k terrain being replicated the exact same way, you can actually build the containers with the doors opened and the oil barrels all come a seperate pieces (which I glued as groups to avoid losing them all one by one.

The fact the tanks and containers fit on the crane is brilliant too.

Now another need that arose while playing was to have objective markers and I though I could just build some out of the bits to make them stand out a bit.

Not all bits are exciting but they do give a realistic look to the table I find.

Also, several bits can be built in plenty different ways so I had to make some choices. Obviously I HAD to make the shield generator from the empire strikes back :

There are also plenty of topers for the bigger elements :

The pipes are also pretty nice and actually scale agnostic, they're just pipes so I might use them in 28mm games tbh

I also had this statue around so just added it to the mix because it will make the table a little more decorated.

So here's what the whole looks like at the moment, I have other plans like building bigger pieces of terrain to give some variety  and visual interest (and indestructible terrain too) and Flames of Orion offers other types of vehicles than mechs so I'll probably paint a handful of pilots and some flyers too.

Oh and roads, I need roads too.

I'm pretty glad this little project has finally kickstarted my epic terrain projects. It's the kind of stuff I can do on the side of other projects because they can be done in the living rom while the family is watching a movie or playing games, it's low effort/focus and quite rewarding so the good kind of projct to have along other more demanding projects, more work is sometimes the answer to tedious work it seems !

Happy painting y'all !