Product Review - Steel Warrior Studios

Today an order of 6mm buildings from Steel Warrior Studios arrived. This is my first time ordering from this company. I will recommend them and would order from them again.

The complete order, with existing Sixmillopolis for scale

Steel Warriors sell a range of both terrain and miniatures, in a number of different scales. Their product line is very focused on sci-games (particularly Battletech or mech games) but some of their buildings would work for modern cities as well. The buildings are 3-D printed resin. While I've ordered resin models before, I think this is the first time I have ordered models manufactured using 3-D printing, and the results are excellent. The detailing is very crisp and there are no voids or imperfections.

I ordered a range of different buildings, and this should be enough to complete Sixmillopolis (barring any special tiles I might make, like say an airport or somrthing).

First up, some small and large apartment buildings to create some suburbs. Looking at Google Earth views of cities you see they always have their suburban belt of residential housing, so I wanted a few tiles of shorter buildings to surround my existing downtown area. I ordered 18 of the Small Residential and 9 of the Large Residential buildings, which will be arranged (with driveways, yards, maybe some small parks) into suburban tiles.

Small and Large Residential Buildings

Example surburban tile

Next up a hospital, which just seemed like something a city should have. As a decently large building this will probably get a tile to itself.

The mech has an owie :)

Next up, a shopping center. It's laid out as one L-shaped row of shops in this image, but it's actually seven separate pieces; the six-sided corner piece, four smaller square stores, and two larger square stores. I'm thinking of splitting these, to create two shopping centers to put somewhere on my suburban tiles.

The last building I ordered is a High Rise Residential Block. This is again a multi-part kit (hence why it looks like it's going to fall over, the pieces are just sitting on top of each other at the moment) - a two-story base block, as many levels as you wish, and the roof section. Hint when ordering this model, the floor count is actually the number of middle sections included. So if you order a "one floor" kit it will in fact be 3 floors high, and a "6 floor" kit will actually be 8 stories high.

So I think I now have about all the buildings I will need to complete Sixmillopolis. Just need to get some more tiles (9 should do it) and get working. One thing I definitely want to do for the remaining tiles is include more flocked area, especially on the edges of the suburbs. Real cities aren't built by covering huge squares in concrete and asphalt. While that looks fine for the city-center (which even in modest-sized cities are essentially filled in) , I'm wanting the edges of Sixmillopolis to be more irregular, and blend more naturally into the mat I use as my gaming surface.

All the new buildings placed out with the existing