Welcome to the battlefield

 Hail and well met! (sniff...miss EQ)

Well howdy gentle readers. How are you? I'm not doing too badly. I know this update was supposed to showcase the new Paint Night Manticore model from Wizkids. That will be coming up, but instead today I wanted to show you what happens when a grown man gets obsessed with an idea.

So last update, I shared a review of the new command terrain expansion from GW. I was pretty impressed with it. So much so, I went a little crazy. I immediately went out and got myself another one. Also, as I recall, I talked about how the new bigger terrain set looked like a good deal too. Well, so I went and got one of those as well. Upon further reflection, I realized that was a lot of the same type of terrain. So to mix it up a bit, I went to old ebay and found myself a nice mechanicus set from Kill Zone. The results speak for themselves.

You'll have to excuse the poor photography, I'm still trying to figure some of this stuff out. With the flash, this is what the table looked like. Lets talk terrain. All of the terrain from the new box sets are snap together. None of that terrain is glued at all. The mechanicus stuff did require some glue, but more on that later.

Oh, and pardon the mess of my basement. The last few years we really haven't been using it much and it sort of became a storage area. I cleared space off my table to be able to set this up. Back to the table. 

As you can see, pretty darn good coverage. The lighter grey terrain seems to be the mechanicus stuff. The aesthetics with the newer stuff fit right in. The mechanicus stuff, while not snap together, does have some modularity to it. The platforms use a peg system and thus you can really go to town with how you decide to lay them out. I thought that was pretty cool. So in terms of space, you can break down 90% of this terrain for easy storage.

Ugh, that flash was not helping. So I turned that puppy off.

Oh, I should point out that from the new Vertigus set, one piece is not push to fit. See that structure in the top corner...that had to be glued. Seemed a bit odd to me that they would include a piece like that. But not complaining...more terrain is more terrain.

All told, with online discounts and the like, this setup came to about $400 which is the most I have spent on GW in quite some time. That being said, I'm really pleased with the purchase. I own a few battlefield mats already, so I wasn't sure about the cardboard mats, but honestly, I like them. Two sided, so I can either go Mars red or a dark grey. The dimensions are GW's minimum specs so it is really easy for me to lay out a field for any size game. 

Another thing to mention is that the mats in Vertigus are different from the command expansion. The command expansion basically fit down to 8x11 or close to it. The Vertigus are more like 8x22, or 16x11...basically, due to the larger box size, they made less folds. So while they won't fit in your backpack as nicely, less folds looks nicer on the table.

Okay, so now I gotta paint this crap. Thankfully I own an airbrush, so fingers crossed, it won't take too long. Not that its high on my priority right now, not like I'll have anyone over for a game anytime soon.

Okay, so nice time, manticore. Promise.