Back to Italy - Empires at War 15mm villa first steps

Made a start on the Empires at War Mediterranean villa, as I need it for an upcoming IABSM.

So...

On the up side, pre-painted MDF and thickish card and, even better, what I guess are vac-formed plastic pantile sheets plus carefully engraved dowel for the ridge tiles. Mediterranean roof tops are hard work, so this is a big win!

4Ground style interlocking corners, which hold the walls together well (but see below). Also some clever work using the pre-coloured sheets to slip in some exposed brickwork on the walls.

Nice card inner walls that give you recessed window frames. The instructions suggest fitting them after the exposed brickwork, but it's much easier to fit the inner walls then glue the brickwork to them through the holes.

On the down? Ohhhkay. First up, the sheets for the inner walls on my kit were cut the mirror reverse of what they should be to have the painted side visible. Not a showstopper, but a shame - also the courtyard walls are a single layer, not two back-to-back like 4Ground do for most of theirs, so they will need painting, which probably means I'll have to paint everything. Can't complain too much about that compared to most of the recent Saxon and late Roman stuff!

Second, the floor is just stuck on the bottom of the walls, so it provides no help at all in squaring up the building - even Warbases' floors fit inside the walls and do give some help. The same appears to be true of their 28mm buildings, of which the club has a boatload.

Third, the card particularly is thin enough that it can de-laminate (with the coloured layer coming off) as you pop it out of the carrier - fixable but cosmetically annoying.

Last - the inside floors are miscut - they're the right size to fit inside the walls IF you don't include the inner walls. I haven't decided what to do about that yet. [NOTE: this has been fixed in newer revisions of the kit.]

To summarise - lovely looking kits, some great design ideas, the pantiles are awesome. Let down by some slip ups in the design, none of which are irredeemable. Now, I've had this kits a while, so it's very possible they may have had the flaws fixed since [see above], but it'd be good to check. I'd still buy it, because no-one else makes this nice-looking a range in 15mm!