I've give streets in Epic a lot of thought. Coming from the original Space Marine and Adeptus Titanicus eras, my view of Epic is one of titanic machines stalking down main boulevards, with troops fighting building to building. Wide open tables with only a smattering of terain smacks of Fantasy or Warmaster to me. Open fields are great when you have a block of infantry with halberds - not so much when you have heavy bolters and volcano cannons. Buildings are a must, and with buildings, come roads and streets.
I'd love to have a board with roads, but I have yet to find an economical solution that looks good. Personally, if I'm going to do a city, I want to do a CITY - none of this one road running through the center, or some strange little pocket of skyscrapers in the middle of a field. Roads are obviously not a necessity, as the negative space between buildings can be counted as roadways. But, I'm a magpie and I love pretty things, so pretending roads are there when they are not kind of removes me from the environment. I must be getting more OCD as I grow older...
I like the FW roads, and love, love, love the roads Stark did over on the Epic.fr boards, but good lord, it would cost you a fortune to do an entire table. I've been toying with making tiles like Stark's, but I've got too much on my plate as it is.
I kind of like the Hawk Wargames stuff, but I think the building pads are a tad too large. That could be a trick of perspective though, as empty areas always seem huge until you put something in there. The city tiles are certainly reasonable though, and I think the roads are a good scale for Epic - they are a little too large to be "truescale" but the 40K universe is one of grand scales, and I think they will work.
I backed the Games & Gears DZC boards, so maybe they will be a nice alternative - large enough not to be a pain to assemble at a game, but with enough flexibility to offer different layouts. We'll see. I certainly plan to repaint and "40k-ify" them though. Obviously, they are the same layout as the printed cards, so the building pads are the same size - I'm hoping to be able to figure something out to take advantage of all that space.
|