This project started many years ago when I saw a copy of White Dwarf on sale, it was Issue 331 from July 2007 and it came with 2 free Mighty Empires tiles. That was my first, and for a very long time my only, issue of White Dwarf. This encouraged me to later buy the Planetary Empires set. Much later I tried to find an old copy of the Mighty Empires set as the tiles are easier to diversify and great to mix with the other set, but only available for absurd collector’s prices. Though after finishing all of this I’m glad I didn’t double my workload. Although this was a very large project I see it as a very useful one as these tiles and planets can also be used to make campaign maps for many other games.
The idea for planets on painted backing was from an old Mini War Gaming campaign video, I like to see their ideas and although this one had been done by several others, they had been the first I’d seen to do it so well. This was all very cool for younger me who would have been playing Dawn of War: Soulstorm around this time.
Tiles
So the edges of the tiles are actually quite annoying to clean up and prepare. The interlocking system is way too tight after painting, which is still an issue with some modern GW products such as the Gallowdark terrain, so the paint scrapes off along the edges very easily when tiles are connected and separated. But the painting of the actual landscapes was very fun, lots of dabbing with a big brush and drybrushing with the occasional details dotted around.
Planets
As the tiles have been split up into different planets, I looked into making circular discs to act as a base for each, though as I needed some larger than all of my A4 stuff I found a website that would cut extruded PVC discs, I got the whole set of 7 for around £12 which was very reasonable. As the tiles and planet discs are double sided this makes a total of 14 unique planets.
When painting the planets I made a big mess of different paint colours and used scrunched up newspaper to make different textures and patterns while it was still wet.
Cities
The original set comes with 6 space port tiles which aren’t double sided. For 4 of these I converted them into cities or similar and didn’t worry about making them much taller. This was simply just removing the inside of the tiles and using XPS foam, brass rods, glue gun adhesive, milliput, and plasticard to make some different city types.
Flags & Buildings
This was the most tedious part of the project, there are 96 little flags and 40 buildings to paint, but as they were so hard to remove from the tiles I filed down all the pegs so they would be a looser fit. There were also the bits from White Dwarf that needed repairing from when I was younger and less patient with stuck pieces. This was a very monotonous production line task which I spent a good few days getting through. I put extra time into the 3 Mighty Empires buildings rather than the drybrushing and quicker details that were done for the other buildings.
