I’ve recently had a copy of Cities of Death fall in my lap and foolishly mentioned to Stu that a review for his blog might be a good idea… so, here I am.
Cities of Death is the latest release for Warhammer 40K. It replaces the old City Fight supplement and along with the new scenarios and special rules GW have also released a selection of very nice buildings. They have a definite “Games Workshop” feel to them and completely embrace the gothic sci-fi style of 40K, unfortunately this means they probably won’t gel very well with most existing urban/industrial/sci-fi terrain. On the plus side I love 40k gothic so find the designs very appealing.
As with all things GW the cost is steep and the box I am reviewing was $130nz. It includes 1 large and 1 standard building, some accessories and the rule book. However if the thought of shelling out $130 on buildings makes you queasy GW are selling the individual buildings at a more respectable $45nz each. This compares very favourably with the price of their existing terrain pieces which are terribly average. In addition to this they are doing a number of accessories including razor wire, barricades and a battle mat which represent differing value for money but it’s nice to see a complete range available.
The rule book is up to GW’s normal high quality, lots of pretty pictures, excellent fluff and gorgeous illustrations. Along with the main book GW includes a brief folded instruction booklet showing various design ideas.
The real guts of CoD is of course the buildings and the first thing I noticed when unpacking the box was just how heavy the sprues are. They will definitely create a solid piece of terrain and once glued together with polystyrene cement should last the rigours of gaming well. An advantage of the weight is that if you (like me) tend not to base your buildings and be a tad clumsy they should survive the odd bump without sending your carefully painted figures crashing to the tabletop.
I do feel there are a couple of weaknesses to the design though. The first is a plethora of skulls. Every piece from the Basilica set is festooned with skulls, I’m not sure of the fluff behind the Basilica Administratum but it looks like it should be a mausoleum or Cult of Death headquarters! This problem is further compounded by the lack of variety in the individual wall pieces. There are only 3 styles of wall section that make up each set and to my eye creates rather repetitive looking buildings. They definitely would have benefited from another solid wall section. The Manufactorum doesn’t suffer from this problem as they have a number of filters, icons and pipes which add more variety, unfortunately the set I have doesn’t come with one of these buildings.
So far I haven’t put anything together but my first impression is good but not great and whilst not quite overpriced Games Workshop has (unsurprisingly) charged the very most they could for these buildings and still manage to sell them. Hopefully I’ll find time to put together the buildings and accessories over the weekend and will report back on how that goes next week.
I got to put together a pre-release shop copy of one of the small buildings I think. I just happened to be killing time at the local Vagabond store and Mark showed me the sprues.
There was the usual amount of cleanup required for a GW plastic kit. Which means HEAPS of noticable mold lines.
The pieces are designed to sit next to each other but the DO NOT lock together and provide no structural support so I HIGHLY reccomend styrene cement (proper plastic glue)
To make advanced features such as balconies I had to heavily carve plastic off the pieces to make them fit in a manner that would support any weight.
I think the idea was good but the execution was poor. GW’s previous buildings have slotted together in some manner and worked as a whole to give support to the structure, kinda like lego. COD buildings are more like wooden blocks.
The hexagon and platformer sets are in my opinion superior in design and flexability where the GW buildings seem more usefull as feature details on scratch built terrain.
Stu mentioned using them in conjunction with Hirst arts blocks and to be honest I think they will look better unpainted than a heavy metal team constructed master piece.
Yes I was quite surprised to find they don’t slot together in any manner. That kind of kills their usefulness for a lot of younger gamers I imagine. Me, I like pinnning stuff!
It’s most likely I’ll pick up the manufactorum this week and try trimming down or padding out the pieces to fit in with Hirst Arts gothic blocks. I notice from a bit of quick measuring of Aaron’s sprues above that the wall and doors pieces appear to be constructed to NO standard whole measurement. Meaning they’re not round inches or cm’s in width. They’re some annoying dimension like 2 7/12ths of an inch.
The paranoid delusional cynic in me imagines GW have probably done that deliberately. Particularly since they are definitely aware of the Hirst Arts products as they’ve featured in US GW constructed scenery and White Dwarf.