By Samantha Webb
Alongside our full review of the existing Hardwar line, we wanted to introduce some new environs on which to do battle. Later on we plan to bring back the sci-fi moon bases and the evergreen ruined city terrain pieces that you may have seen in the original range, but for this new launch we wanted to take the fight into some less commonly seen tabletop battlefields and perhaps give a hint of our future plans.
Chris and Jon batted around some ideas and the first they decided to take forward was to evolve the classic image of an American farm, but in space! With initial inspiration from shows like Love, Death and Robots, the image of a bunch of rough and ready home-grown farmers piloting their weaponised farming gear into battle against marauding raiders or corporate big business megafarmers looking to take out the competition was solidified.
Jon started by listing some ideas for the sort of buildings and structures you would expect to see on a medium sized farm, with some key pieces including farm houses, barns, chicken coops and grain silos needing to be included, but scaled up for mech sized combat (always try to keep a large building between you and your enemy hardbots!).
With a bunch of ideas and some concept pieces and screen grabs for reference, work passed to Sean in the 3D team to bring the farm to life, adding all manner of extra ideas and pieces to create a modular and customisable terrain set of your dreams.
Sean - For the Farm I figured most of the structures would be older, but modified over decades (similar to a real farm). So I took old-style farm houses, barns, and stables and thought about how they would be modified over generations. Adding solar panels, water tanks, room expansions etc all give a "ramshackle" feel.
The building with the mech repair bay is a good example of that. The farmer would have built his own repair facility using whatever parts that could be scrounged up. The crane taken from a damaged tank, extra robotic parts, supplies lying around, etc.
The remote turrets are modified from smaller water tanks with weapons “borrowed” from various mechs and vehicles, since there's any number of critters farmers might need to protect themselves from, or even roving gangs of thieves.
Some of the structures, like the Grain Silos, are from Industrial-scale farms. Those were modified to have a robotic fill-station that giant drone tractors would use to fill the silos with grain.
Some extra ideas were thrown in by our terrain painter Julian as he got to grips with creating the farm of our dreams.
Julian - I was given a fantastic opportunity to work not only on the background terrain but also on the terrain box art itself for the first time.
This was a wonderful project because I was slightly involved in the development of the farm. I received the very first drafts to work on and was able to suggest improvements to the models, making the painting experience more enjoyable. It was a great example of teamwork.
I was granted complete freedom while painting the farm and drew inspiration from various series, films, and games featuring sci-fi farms. I divided the entire farm into three areas, each with different colors, which together formed a small farm settlement. This project was incredibly rewarding, and the best part for me was seeing the book artwork created based on my ideas.
The upcoming kickstarter will include a chance to pick up various bundles to build the farm of your dreams, mixing and matching parts and sets to create a small farmstead right up to the corpo megafarm or your nightmares.
Thanks to our creative team for coming out swinging to ensure this update and relaunch of Hardwar is presented with a shiny new updated coat of paint. Their efforts have ensured we can bring this exciting range of 6mm figures back to life and hope you will enjoy hobbying and gaming with them.
We’ll see you on the battlefields.