Making Multiple Kits Look Like One City: Basing & Colour Unity

One of the quiet secrets of a great-looking wargaming table is that almost nobody builds a city from a single matched set. Most of us buy a bundle here, a standalone building there, and a bag of scatter to fill the gaps. On their own, those kits can look like they came from three different worlds. The good news: a handful of simple, repeatable techniques will pull mismatched printed terrain into one cohesive skyline. This guide walks through the three biggest unifiers — colour, basing, and repeated detail — in a beginner-friendly way, with a few intermediate tricks for when you want to push further.

Why Mismatched Terrain Happens (and Why It's Fine)

Terrain collections grow organically. You might start with a big set like the 28mm Urban Cityscape Terrain bundle for its five buildings and four vehicles, then add a neon-soaked block from the Cyberpunk City Terrain Bundle when a new campaign calls for a grittier downtown. Because these are physical, unpainted printed kits, you assemble and finish them yourself — which is exactly what makes unifying them so achievable. The paint and basing stage is where a shared visual language gets applied, no matter which kit a piece came from originally.

Unifier #1: A Shared Colour Palette

The single fastest way to make different kits belong together is to paint them from the same limited palette. Pick three to five core colours and use them across every building: a dominant wall tone, a secondary trim colour, a metal, and one or two accent colours for signage and lights. When the same greys, teals, and rust tones reappear on every structure, the eye reads the whole table as one place.

For beginners, the easiest route is a slapchop or zenithal start: prime black, drybrush or spray a lighter grey from above, then glaze thin colour over the top. Because the underlying value structure is identical on every piece, the finished buildings automatically share a mood even if their sculpts are wildly different. An intermediate refinement is to reserve your brightest accent — hot pink neon, hazard yellow — for just ten percent of each model. Restraint is what keeps a cyberpunk block from looking like a paint-swatch explosion.

Unifier #2: Consistent Basing

Basing is the ground your terrain sits on, and it is the most overlooked unifier of all. If every building, vehicle, and scatter piece shares the same ground texture, they instantly feel like neighbours on the same street. You don't need to permanently glue terrain to bases — many players prefer freestanding buildings for storage and modular layouts — but you should treat the edges and footprints consistently.

A reliable recipe: paint exposed ground the same dark asphalt grey, add a fine sand or ballast texture in the same two or three spots (gutter lines, alley corners, vehicle tyres), then hit everything with one unifying wash. If you run a modular road system or a gaming mat, match your building footprints to the mat's tone so nothing floats. The same logic applies to scatter terrain: dumpsters, barricades, and streetlights painted with your core palette and grounded with your standard texture will tie the largest bundle to the smallest loose piece.

Unifier #3: Repeated Details and "Story Props"

Real cities repeat themselves. The same graffiti tag shows up on three walls; the same brand of vending machine sits on two corners. You can borrow that trick. Choose two or three recurring details — a decal, a poster colour, a specific rust pattern, a signature LED tone — and sprinkle them across kits from different sources. A pop of the same acid-green moss creeping up a Cyberpunk tower and an Urban Cityscape stairwell tells a viewer these buildings weather the same climate.

Scatter is your best friend here. A shared set of loose props — crates, trash, signage, hovering drones — scattered across the whole board acts like connective tissue. Kits such as the Cyberpunk Essentials Bundle are handy for this because their vehicles and smaller pieces can be salted between larger buildings from other sets to blur the seams.

Handling Scale Mismatches

Different kits sometimes come in different heroic scales — 28mm, 32mm, and 40mm variants are common, and many Northern Foundry bundles print in more than one. When mixing, keep door and window heights roughly consistent along a single street, since those are the cues players read as "human-sized." If one kit is noticeably chunkier, push it to the back of the table as a skyline backdrop where the size difference reads as distance rather than error. A shared basing height also helps: a couple of millimetres of consistent groundwork under shorter pieces evens out the eyeline.

A Simple Workflow to Tie It All Together

Here is a practical order of operations for blending any two or more kits. First, assemble everything before you paint anything, so you can see the full block and plan sightlines. Second, prime the entire batch the same way on the same day — same primer, same zenithal angle. Third, block in your limited palette across all pieces in one session so the colours stay honest. Fourth, apply one unifying wash or filter over the whole lot; this single step does more for cohesion than any other. Finally, base and add your repeated details last, working across kits rather than finishing one building at a time.

Painting in batches like this feels slower on the first building and dramatically faster by the tenth, because you're mixing each colour once and applying it everywhere. It also guarantees consistency in a way that finishing kits one-by-one never quite matches.

Bringing It Home

You don't need a single mega-set to build a convincing city. Start with a strong core like the Urban Cityscape bundle, layer in atmosphere from the Cyberpunk City Terrain Bundle, and let a shared palette, consistent basing, and a few repeated details do the unifying. Assemble in batches, paint from a tight colour set, and finish with one wash that touches everything. Do that, and a shelf of separately bought kits becomes a single street your models will fight over for years.