Progress was slow: I wasn't entirely happy with the design, and didn't want to commit materials to something I wasn't 100% sure of. So last year I was very happy to discover S6 Engineering and their small-scale (6, 10 and 15mm) road system. very quickly I junked my old design and began planning a new system, mounted on 18mm MDF boards.
I've just recently started laying out the city. Here are some photos of the initial design:
The road and junction sections will be glued to the board and will be permanent. The block sections will be removable; each one will have a different building or terrain piece mounted on it, so that while the basic layout won't change, the city will be different for each game. This also means that we can replace destroyed buildings with ruins.
One thing I'm quite pleased about is an idea I had to put a small piece of plasticard under the block sections: this will raise them slightly above the roads, creating a raised pavement which is quite effective (and also makes the plates easier to remove):
The design has two "hard edges" where the roads end, and two "soft edges" with junctions that stick out over the edge of the board. I will be putting a defensible city wall along the hard edges: if another board is placed next to these edges, then they will be interesting terrain features, but if not, then the walls will prevent the city just stopping, which looks a bit weird. The soft edges will allow for another board to be linked in to the city on those edges, so we can have a sprawling metropolis over several board sections, which will be pretty awesome!
The current plan is to spray the road sections with Rust-oleum Aged Iron Textured Spray, as recommended by Robin of Gruntz fame. You can see the 15mm board he created using the S6 system in this video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsQMeKtqOjk?rel=0&w=640&h=390]
More to follow.