With the Painting Challenge coming off the books I thought I'd relax a bit and do some terrain for a change. I've been contemplating doing ECW/TYW in 10mm and in order to sort out my thoughts I decided I'd work on some buildings that could fit in with the period. (I don't get too hung up on scale for terrain, in fact I often like my buildings to be a stage smaller than my figures as they seem to look better than same-scaled models). When I was at Salute a few years ago I picked up this terrain set from Total Battle Miniatures as I thought the vignettes very attractive and the quality seemed quite solid.
When I finally opened the box this weekend I was not disappointed. The castings were pristine, with very little cast lines or bubbles in the resin. The base is a type of heavy rubber which takes paint quite well, but I'd definitely recommend that you give it a good scrubbing to remove all the release agent in order to avoid any paint flaking later down the line.
Total Battle designs all of its terrain tiles so that you can 'slot-in' a wide variety of different buildings to suit your preference - very clever.
I originally picked up this set as I thought the granary closely resembled the one at Essling and I've been wanting to replay the battle using 'Grande Armee' for years. (I notice that they also have a church tile which could nicely serve as the church at Aspern.)
The direction sheet suggested that the models be primed white, but I went with my traditional black approach instead and drybrushed up from there. It seemed to work OK and I had a lot of fun picking out the fine details revealed in the sculpts.
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| Here is the tile next to a base from my 6mm Napoleonic collection. |
Overall I had great experience working on this set and I can certainly see myself collecting more from the range over time. I'm already eyeing both the charming mediterranean Hill Town and the huge Walled Town sets... Highly recommended.
