Cityfight. The name conjures up images of gritty room to room fighting. Even without the cityfight rules, playing in an urban jungle changes things. With more terrain, yet clear lines of fire, tactical choices become harder and mistakes messier. Unfortunately, few people or even stores have good urban terrain. I've been interested in creating my own urban terrain for a while, but a constant issue has been where to store it. While I will eventually be getting a large workshop and gaming area, that will be a while. Recently I ran across a thread about terrain on a 40k forum. One of the members was commenting on his urban terrain collection and said that he had a series of nesting buildings, so that 6 buildings all fit one inside the other and would store in an area about 12x12 inches. I had to read that a couple times, then I realized what a great idea it was! If you can fit a bunch of buildings inside each other, you can have a lot of terrain without taking up much shelf space. The next question that came to mind, was how to build the buildings.

In the 4th edition rulebook, they've got a couple of templates for making terrain. One is a bunker, which didn't really suit my needs, but the other is for a ruined building. Bingo! After looking it over, I decided I didn't entirely like the template, but it was a good idea, so I set out to make my own. First off, I thought about what buildings I wanted. Not the kinds of buildings, necessarily, just the shapes. I wanted most of them to be squares or rectangles, but I thought a single L-shape building would be a good addition to break up the effect. In the same vein, I decided that I wanted a variety of heights for the buildings. A few 3 story buildings, a number of 2 story buildings and a couple of single story buildings should provide enough of a height variance for me.

Now, for the nesting bit. Obviously, the biggest building will be the container for all the others, and it will need to be 3 stories, so that other three story buildings can fit inside it without leaving too much sticking out. By the same token, the container building will need to be big enough to store the smaller buildings, so it'll be pretty big around as well. I decided that I didn't want a building much bigger than 12 inches in each dimension, so it wouldn't take up too much real estate on the table. I eventually decided on a 12x12 inch square building with 3 stories. The smaller buildings that will nest inside it will need a bit of extra space, both so they fit neatly and so that there's a bit of room for anything that I stick on the outsides of them to not get torn off (I'll also need to limit the stuff I put on the outside.) Now, that L-shape will make storing things a bit tricky, but if I work the sizes right, I should be able to store stuff around it inside the big building. I went with a 10 inch long (on each leg) and 5 inch wide L, two stories high. Stored next to it would be a 5x6 building 3 stories high. That gave me a good assortment of big buildings, but I wanted one more, so I put a 9x5 inch building two stories high inside the L-shape, plus a 5x4 next to it. The 9x5 building could store a pair of single-story 4x4 buildings, and the 6x5 building next to the L could also store a 5x4 building. That gives me a grand total of 8 buildings, all stacking together, with a variety of heights and shapes. Now, just to begin construction.

At this point, I got a bit ahead of myself and started out cutting out and gluing some buildings out of cardstock (I used the boxes from cereal and such things, as they are easy to find and fairly sturdy.) I realized after making a couple, however, that it would be much easier to cut out windows and such BEFORE assembling the buildings, so I'll have to go back and redo a few buildings. Once I sat down with the templates GW provides, I got a clearer idea of what I needed for each building. In general, I wanted the windows of the first story to start 3/4 of an inch from ground level, and the windows for the 2nd story and above to be spaced an inch above the first window. I like windows to be 1 inch tall by 3/4 of an inch wide as well. Studying some urban terrain, I worked out that a spacing of approximately 1 inch between windows horizontally made for a good look. These were the measurements I used for my templates. I've included shrunk down versions of my templates so that you may use them as well. Remember that each window is 1 inch tall and 3/4 of an inch wide, to give you scale for when you blow them back up to full size. If you wish to include floors in your buildings (if you do a full floor, it may get in the way of the nesting idea, but I'll let you mess around with that, partial floors might not get in the way, however.) put each floor about 1/4 of an inch above the top of the window from the last story. The templates I've included are enough to make the various buildings that I made, and should give you a fair amount of flexibility for your own. If you wish to make your own templates, I came up with some guidelines for mine.

First off, I figured out the size of the windows I wanted to use. This size of window allows models to look out from the building and be seen inside. It also makes the building look more civilian. With a more military building, you'll probably want smaller, particularly narrower, windows. Alternately, you can make them shorter, like firing slits on a bunker. Along the same lines, the more windows you have, the more "civilian" the building looks. For a more military look than mine, you'll want to space the windows further out. (The fewer and smaller windows you have, the more big chunks of unbroken wall you get, which in turn makes it look much sturdier.) Given my spacing of 1 inch between windows, and the width of 3/4 of an inch for each window, I worked out how many windows to put in each wall. After I found this number, I started from the middle of the wall and worked outwards. As an example, I'll use 4 windows on a 8 inch Wall. I find the center of the wall and mark it lightly. Then I measure 1/2 an inch to either side to get the inside edges of each window(1 inch spacing, remember?) Then I measure out 3/4 of an inch to find the outside edge of those windows. Another inch toward the side gets me to the edge of the next window, and another 3/4 of an inch gives me the outside edge. That leaves 1 inch to the corner of the building. I realized that if I wanted a uniform look for the windows, I'd better put any leftover space between the last window and the corner of the building. (Such as, if the example wall had been 8 1/2 inches long, I would have ended up with 1 1/4 inches at the end. As long as you even it out between the two sides, you should be good. I used a ruler to make sure I kept my windows and floors straight, as uneven floors would make it look too strange and detract from the urban appearance I am going for. Oh, if you want to make ruined buildings, simply take a regular building template and make some jagged lines through it. The most effective way is probably what GW did on it's ruined building, make a big diagonal line that runs through most of one wall. Continue that line in the opposite direction on the next wall. You will end up with two half-buildings, each one being a good ruin and looking somewhat like the plastic ones GW sells.

When constructing your building you will want a sharp cutting tool. Cut away from you, use a cutting mat to protect your table, don't run with scissors, etc. Be safe. As an additional note, the 12 inch template is actually only 11 inches (sheet of paper, y'know) so you'll have to place it 1/2 an inch in from the edge of your card to get it to line up properly. I used cereal boxes and such for my cardstock. I typically left the little flaps on the edges, instead of cutting them off. This gave me something to work with to help the corners glue together. You could also just make your templates a little bigger and fold the edges. You could also take a strip of paper and fold it along the corner to glue them together. (Note that if you do this on the outside of the corner, it will make the building look a little reinforced.) In addition, if you add little bits of paper or card to the building, it will help make it look more realistic and give you different areas and even textures to paint. Experiment with this. We've all seen GWs trick of putting a few blocks of card here and there to give the impression of a stone wall without painting or gluing on each separate stone. You can also make sills for your windows or reinforce the concrete of the building or even put up signs and numbers and things on your buildings, all depending on what you want to do. Remember that the more detail you glue onto the building, the easier it will be to paint it and the better it will look on the table.

You will note that I don't have any advice here on how to paint your buildings, or what additional terrain to make with them to make the board more realistic or interesting. I plan to add this advice in a future installment, so you can look forward to that. Alternately, if you have your own ideas about it, let me know and send me pictures of what you build! Today the city, tomorrow the Hive!

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