The Spoils of War

'Hey Terry, how long did it take you to finish cleaning your windows?'

Every now and then when I pass a building site of one kind or another, or offer to help with / am forced into manual labour or decorating I think to myself “I could have done this for a job, rather than sitting inside and orchestrating an office. Being in the great outdoors, and constructing the very things that make a house or home.”

Well if 4ground buildings are anything to go by I would have lost patience for the art of labour a long time ago, and could be working in a McDonalds by now.

At Invasion I was lucky enough to be awarded two small 4ground buildings and as a team we won one large building. I also won a small Blotz (or Bo-lotz to the podcast listener) but I'll get onto that in a separate post I have frustrations to vent first; this is half a review, and half a rant. For those of you who become uncomfortable or incontinent around ill-tempered English folk click off now.

I had been a clever sausage and booked the week and a half following the tournament weekend off, as anyone who has attended a two day event will tell you they are exhausting! As such I had a bit of time on my hands, and decided to have at the small building kits. I started with the 4ground kits, as I didn't (and still don't) have all the paints I want for my Blotz building.

District XXII Hab-Block 2 and 3

Firstly I will say that I was honestly impressed by the level of detail in the kits. Each sheet (and there

are a lot of them) is pre-painted and numbered, so when using the instructions everything fits together nicely, and you get this lovely little incredibly detailed building, which has little twee doors and windows in which you imagine tiny resistance people peeking out of in fear, and vents with little ventish fans in and different levels which come apart and outside peripheral details to make your building not only 4D (I count the smell of burnt MDF as the fourth dimension) but 5D!! This was everything the kit promised it to be, and it looks even better when made than it does on the packaging picture (which is a rare thing in the days of photoshop)!

What the picture on the front doesn't tell you though is that you have to fit each damn window pane in the building, and that before you can add one of the fifty window panes you have to first add the brick inset into which it fits. So that's about one hundred pieces. And the vents aren't just one piece, they are about four or five pieces which are about as big as a cluster of four black ants having a hug (strenuous metaphor I know, I like the idea of ants hugging though). And on top of all of this, these tiny fiddly pieces will every now and then decided to just break when you're using your (incredibly sharp) craft knife to slice each individual god damn piece from the sprue. Oh, and to put these buildings together you will need the manual which is only one and half pages of A4 paper...

These buildings took me more than six hours to make! SIX FLIPPING HOURS! AND THEY'RE NOT EVEN FOUR FREAKING INCHES TALL!!!

I'm a fairly meticulous model maker, and I get distracted easily, but it's not just me. Mega Mike also won a small building and it took him two and a half hours to make. It's too much! I was so bored of making them by the end I was hoping I would slip with my craft knife, lop the end of my little finger off and have to go to the hospital to just stop faffing with tiny windows.

I may not be being completely fair, but the buildings deserve the criticism. There is no need for them to be this way. The selling point of the 4ground models is that they are pre-painted, and that appeals to a lot of people which is great. When they do finally get finished they look great! But, 3+ hours? Really? If anyone from 4ground ever reads this post, this is what you should do:

Make it simpler.

It is that easy. I know why you've made them this way- for depth. But that can be established by printing three sheets of MDF and stacking them. So for instance, a black 'foundation' sheet, then a sheet with all the windows (all the god damn windows) and bits printed on, where you can just pop out the wood in the window panes, and lastly the brick outer to this building shaped gob-stopper. Three sheets per side (or six if you want to keep the multi layered thing, which by the way is a waste of time on a three inch wide building. No one in their right mind is going to buy extra stacks to make this slither of a building any taller) and hours back in my life.

I almost forgot to mention that the buildings are tiny. The dimensions are (approx) H4”xW3”xD3”. Six hours on two ten point buildings. Every time I say it I can hear my grown up in my head shout “You're wasting your life!”... Shut up grown up Zombie. Anyway that's weird. Time to move onto bigger things. Like the thirty point building we won.

Now this next sentence, after my rant, is going to make you think I am completely insane. After making these preposterous tiny buildings I agreed to take the large one home and make it for the club.

Yeh I know. I probably shouldn't be complaining if I'm doing it to myself. However, I'm still going

Uh oh. This is going to be a big job

to. But you'll probably (maybe? Unless you enjoy my rants) be pleased to hear this was much less annoying! This took almost the entirety of LOTR Fellowship and Two Towers extended editions to make- so about thirty hours? Hah, no, I just felt doing a LOTR joke, about six hours really.

Firstly there were no window panes. The joy! The unadulterated joy! It made me want to skip about the room in my briefs! Well, as I was on holiday, I did. But that's not something I need to share with the internet.

The instructions for this were much larger, but as it was just the same thing for different sized levels much less faffy. The building looks pretty good, although I feel like it could have done with a little more detail and texture in areas. Whereas the small buildings are abundant with details (the mother flipping windows) this has large, barren areas which is a little disappointing, and especially so when I looked up the price (£45!). This also has multiple levels which is useful for storage, but eight of them is a little unnecessary and time consuming to make. I will note that at points the instructions were incorrect, and directed me to use the incorrect pieces which was a big annoyance.

Four levels down, four to go...

All in all the buildings look great, and they really really do and I can't stress this enough- just look at the pictures! But are they worth the downtime? In my opinion, no. I get that these are 'kits for modellers with set skill levels', but fifty freaking windows? I mean, really? And no, I won't let it go. The age grouping is 14+, but I know 30 year olds who couldn't make these buildings without snapping every other piece.

They need to be simpler, much simpler, and without so many fiddly-piffy-wanky pieces. I've read a few reviews on these kits and they all tend to end up the same as mine (although admittedly a little less scathing), so 4ground I plead that you act on it! An hour downtime for a small, and two hours for a large is a good level to be looking at, to compete with cheaper buildings that need texturizing (I don't think that's a word, but oh well) and painting. I can make and paint one of those buildings either quicker or on the same time scale.

One thing I haven't really talked about is price, and I'm not going to heavy into it as I have trashed on for too long now. A quick overview:

Ample enough to hide my
Annihilator behind. It'll do.

£14/£15 for a small ten point building – too expensive

£45 for a large thirty point building – too expensive

I guess the price point is the pre-painted aspect, but it still puts me off.

In a nutshell, if you are in the following very small niche of gamers definitely pick up 4ground gear:

You really don't like painting and have a job which pays you lots of money for very little hours per week worked.

You're not? Okay, well I would hunt out an alternative in which case. There is in fact a whole thread on the Hawk forum which you can get to by clicking just here, headed up by a chap called Pilgrim (probably not his real name, although you never know. Kids get called all kinds of weird stuff now; his parents may have named him after a job they wanted him to aspire too. Imagine being called Postman? Or Senior Sales Assistant? Although your parents would have to have no belief in you when you were born- Right, tangent, back to buildings) which has reviews on a whole host of other buildings to populate your city.

This is of course all my own opinion. Undoubtedly there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of gamers delighted with their 4ground kits. And I will leave you with that image. The image of thousands of tiny windows.