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Hi All

Apologies if this gets a bit waffely as i'm still in the early planning stages and not really sure what i'm doing.

I know the short answer is a building can be as big as small as I like, but hoping my fellow dakkites could give me some advise for dimensions. I know that each storey of a building is about 3" but how big is a typical hab unit meant to be?

whats a good size for a non feature building?

Does anyone know the dimesion of GW or similar buildings?

I'm currently trying to plan a city fight board, well to be more precise 7 to 9 modular buildings most of which will be basic habs except for two feature buildings (currently thinking Governors house/temple and a fountain. monumnet). Now the board i've imagined is a dessert village, a bit like the stereo type mexican village in westerns, crammed into a 4 x 4 (or a 6x4 with 2 foot clear of buildings to represent open dessert) but i'm not really sure of sizes.

I've got some poorly drawn doodles so far but really want to start getting the dimensions down. I don't have a lot of experience making scenary, i've only made a couple of ruins so far.

The building i'm currently planning is two stories so 6" high, now I want to do solid steps going around the outside. I'm using 0.5cm foamboard so i'm looking a 14 steps to get up 3". My original thought was 6" x 3" x 9" for the building with each hab unit being 3" x 3" x 3" but this means the steps are quite steep and I know according to fluff invidual units are tiny but this seems really small.

thanks
Spank

As for table top dimensions, what I sometimes do is cut out a few plain cardboard(or similar material) bases to get a general idea of how much room you would need to fill the table with. Stairs for buildings can be tricky, depends on if you intend models to stand on them or how you are going to play the rules. As for exact measurements I can't think of them off the top of my head. With the height of the stories I tend to make them tall enough to hide a terminator size model per floo(with a tiny bit of room so they don't have to duck), usualy 3" is fine for most models that tend to use building cover. What may also be cool, if it isn't going to be too ruinesque, is to make some buildings with a removable roof so some units can use the roof and have some in the building itself. Hope some of that helps or sparks some ideas

You have to remember that this is meant to be the dark future with decaying civilisations and people are treated like slaves so average living spaces are tiny you'd be lucky to have a living space any bigger than a university halls of residence flat. maybe 8-10ft total for each flat. Then you have to scale it back down to 28mm model scale. this allows for more people in a smaller space. basicaly lay down an imperial guardsman man measure its length height this should be around 6 ft ish for scale.

40k vehicles are not to scale, even less are 40k buildings. They are just symbols, much too small for realistic buildings. So make them small enough to fit onto the board and still look reasonable. Realistically sized buildings are too massive for tabletop games.

@monkeysmut

thanks for posting, I got out some graph paper last night and drew up a too scale 4 x 4 board. It was good for working out sizes of terrain pieces. The removable ceilings is a good idea I might have to try it.

@mullet_steve

3" x 3" does look really small but does make sense in a hive. Thing is the ciy fight board i'm making is more of a dessert village and I wasn't sure if the citizens in arural setting would need to be as cramped together.

@ Kroothawk

I realised this when I looked at my chimera, how's that meant to fit 12 men in it I just wanted to get an idea of the, lets call it false scale, so things don't look too out of proportion.