It was my pleasure to lend you my mats for you to use. You know you can holler at me anytime you need props for your videos! o7

Thanks for the honest review. IMHO-this is part of why the older map sets
sell for a ridiculous price. The older sets seems to mesh together better.
The edges followed a specific pattern and used exact measurements for entrance/exits of roads and rivers.
The CGL ones are just made to be pretty on their own. I honestly haven't used the standard
sized sheets for decades but I was considering these. (I'm a Geo-Hex guy for terrain)
Friends who got these also said they looked good individually but together they didn't seem to work right.
Adding pieces to the sets to cover/alter the ends of rivers and roads would have been a big improvement.

Great review! Thanks for pointing out plus and downsides!

I think hexless maps were partly our own fault too. We got over excited at the time and thought they were a good thing while we also fomo'd everything when it was announced which gave them them a false impression it was something we fans wanted... it doesn't take much with the pressure through social media these days.

I didn’t buy any of the neoprene maps except for the blank field tech neoprenes for some of these reasons.
I’ve found that Alpha Strike is better suited to hex maps. It’s an abstract game on abstract terrain. And Classic rules for detailed terrain. I’ve even gone so far as to scan a couple old fada maps, enlarge them by 300% and have them printed on canvas used for outdoor banners. Added to that were model train trees and 1 inch thick insulation foam cut into the shape of the hills, with the 300% image adhered to the top on printed card. The end result looks fantastic, but costs a lot of time and money.

The BFM City Mat uses the same city maps but arranges them differently.  In your picture of the 3 HPG mats, the missing piece of the park is actually on the right half of the 3rd mat.  It needs to be cut in half into its constituent City Maps, and then the green triangle on the right half will fill in the missing portion in a 3W x2H configuration.

Watched pretty much all the videos on your channel, gonna play my first game this week. Cheers, great channel.

It might be that the old savannah maps do not really match, because they were kind of re-releases of old existing maps. And unfortunately they only tried to copy paste those apparently, but not improve beyond making the hex borders more clear.

For the city maps however I fully feel you. This was really a forfit chance ... again. :/

I live in a small apartment so I only need one map to play. My first map I purchase will be the space map. Thank you for the review.

I much prefer their 'BFM' mats that are 6'x4' and contain all the maps together, and if you want to play a smaller version you can roll the map up or block it off to contain the battlespace, seems like a much better investment than buying all of these and trying to slap them together, plus they are double sided.  The Grasslands and Desert (with airbase) BFM is great and likely a much better purchase than buying all of these, especially since you get both sets on either side of the mat.  Supposedly there is a Savannah and Urban BFM coming out at some point.

Also Aries Miniatures and games makes (they contracted out but these are quality) some good Hex and Hexless maps.  If playing Alpha Strike without Hexes, most other plain mats from competitors are better options.

Or you would have to use Battle Force Rules with it in order to have shorter ranges. Great job on the review!

Alpha Strike mat, we swear you need it and it's new!  Just ignore that we lazily just turned off the hex grid and printed a Battletech map...

Wow, just wow...  Really?!  

I only go the river delta/city ruin map because I have the paper ones and figured I'd like to try out the mats.  Well, guess that's the only one I'm getting!

Stratagem has a beautiful hex grid open field, and it's 4' x 6', and the Hex Tec (Thunderhead Studios 3D prints, or Gale Force resin) fits beautifully on those!

You're not crazy, CGL didn't do a very good job with those maps. We aren't talking about a 1-guy business like Robomaps or Rumpled Cat, where you can justify if maps aren't as compatible with each other as they could be. By now, CGL is quite a big business, and their products are supposed to reflect that.

I find it impossible to play on 2d terrain mats that size anyway. The game becomes a cartography reading practice. I prefer clean hex mats + simple 3d hills and trees, so I clearly see elevations and obstacles. These mats look fantastic, with lots of detail, just feel they're too messy to view from distance. I agree with you, especially with the Alpha Strike part - crazy they did not update the scale. Should've been a separate product, with proper 6mm features

Have no building classes annoys me. Actual said that to Randal

The HPG station has no excuse, but the Savannah mats are a legacy issue.  The original paper maps had the same issues if memory serves.

That is a lot of money there.

Eh, I agree fully with your assessment, but why would CGL care? They've gotten away with low effort offerings every other time, so why start striving for better now?