Imperial Strongpoint; (sadly) not Forgeworld's Strongpoint

Hey all,

Thought I'd post some feedback about the Imperial Strongpoint game board tile I recently received from Forgeworld. Having already received and basecoated the plastic Realm of Battle board (which I'm really pleased with), I had high expectations of the expansion piece. Unfortunately, despite the great pics on the website, the finished article that arrived was really disappointing. I've not bought anything from Forgeworld for a while, due to previous let-downs, but really hoped they were on their game with this one. The first thing that struck me about this was that the construction, whilst more detailed than the rest of the RoB boards, was nowhere near as robust as the plastic sections. There is no reinforcement underneath and the board was a little warped (but not massively so...).

After cleaning it up with hot water and dish washing detergent, I let the whole thing dry off thoroughly for 36 hours. Before undercoating, I had to add a lot of extra basing material to better define surface edges, where things like walls and the tank defences in the picture joined the ground.

Another grumble was the quality of the cast around areas like these barrels that form part of the defence positions. When I spoke with the guy at Forgeworld yesterday, I said that they look as though they were hit by a Meltagun, as they're pretty saggy and have a lot of holes in. The surface of the board is quite different to the plastic sections, and once it was undercoated brown, resembled an Aero chocolate bar. Now I understand why the demo pieces shown on the FW site are covered in snow flock. Although the winter scheme looks good, it didn't really fit the 'Summertime-on-Ultramar' theme of the rest of the sections.

I crudely filled this ~70mm gap along the top of the blast doors with green stuff, with the intention of sanding it down with the multi-tool once it had set. It seems as though the resin along here was so thin that basically there just wasn't enough. Although I was aware of it when I first checked it over, I didn't appreciate the extent of it until I had primed the board.

However, even after all of that (which I would have tolerated to a point), the real killer was the fact that, even though I'd cleaned the thing before starting, the paint would not adhere to it. Just taking it in and out of the box caused it to flake. I'd used Army Painter Leather Brown, which I'd used without issue on the rest of the board.

I relayed all this to forgeworld and they reckoned that using non-GW/Citadel products may be the problem. However, after advising that I'd been in touch with Consumer Direct to check where I stood before calling FW, they quickly retracted that and then stated that they prep all of their stuff by using a high-strength kitchen cleaner and then undercoat with Halfords car body primer......

When I first got into the hobby, I had a conversation about painting with Jim in the Brighton GW store, during which I suggested using coloured car primers. With some scorn, he explained about the formulation of the different paints and suggested that using car paint would just clog up all the detail on the model. Fair comment. So I was amazed to hear that this is how FW prep their stuff.

However, at the end of it all it's going back for a full refund.

Now to chase up my Fortress of Redemption that's been on order for five weeks......