I’ve spent a large chunk of the last two weeks painting up roads and plazas for Battletech from Thunderhead Studio’s printable offerings. It’s been a time consuming project as painting the stripes (which are graciously molded into the prints) was a slow process.

I also had to rethink how I painted the plaza tiles. I originally planned to fill the lines with black oil paint… then found that deeply time consuming. I decided to restart and shift to using an airbrush to shade them from grey to black to grey again. It doesn’t look quite as good, but it was considerably easier to execute and still looks great on table.

It further helps that each plaza tile has planters and benches. It took more effort to fill these in, but they provide an essential bit of color that breaks up the scene.

What I love about this set is how well it all fits together and how well designed the roads are to create easy grids. The only exception is the parking lots, which I would prefer as tiles I could press flush against a road designed to connect to them. As it stands they’re a little awkwardly spaced.

I’ve gotten around this by using what I have considered to be underground parking entrances. It’s silly, really. I’ve put a fair amount of thought into making this a city. I tried to position parking near major shopping or living areas, and I even included some bus stops despite them being much harder to store as they can’t stack in a pile like the other road tiles.

I still had quite a few roads leftover after setting all this up. I always find that with roads you need to make more than one table’s worth so you can fill out your options. You also just need an absurd amount for urban environments. I have around 40 feet of roads here.

What I’ve also now realized is I could use a few more plazas. I have a bit more not displayed here, but I can’t quite really fill up a dense 6×4 of urban terrain. I suppose I don’t NEED to, as normally I’d have areas of greenery breaking up the city… somehow that thought probably won’t be enough to stop me from printing out a few more tiles. There’s something about these dense urban areas that has always called to me.

Battletech: Alpha Strike, to its credit, does an excellent job with buildings. They’re advantageous to infantry, actually get destroyed, and serve much more purpose than just being impassable terrain. One of my next terrain projects will be to paint a bunch of rubble tiles for when buildings get destroyed. Fresh urban ruins feature heavily in Battletech fights and I intend to do that justice on the tabletop.

Plus, they should be a fast project, right?

… Right?

The terrain featured here is from Thunderhead Studio, printed on a Bambu P1P. Here is a direct link to the set I bought:

TECHSCAPE: Concrete Jungle (6mm)