Wargaming Terrain

[TheAmishStig]

That's a treasure trove of info right there...I'll have to read it again later tonight to really get a feel for it!

The one thing I do want to touch on quick is under-scale terrain. The subject came up with the Bolt Action guys at an event in the spring...one of them nodded knowingly, one asked if it was a game where ground scale = mini scale, one got super-excited at how the minis would look "larger than life"...and the fourth looked at me like I'd just kicked a puppy halfway across the room, stressing the importance of the finest details.

Personally, I love the idea of pairing under-sized terrain with hexes, as it would play up the "You're looking at a commander's holo-table" mini scale / ground scale mismatch. For rulers-and-inches terrain, I'd want to see it in action (as well as carefully review the Ogre Minis rulebook) before committing...get a feel for exactly what I'm committing to.

So I figure it's worth asking what you guys think of the stuff, get a feel from the perspective of folks with more experience.

[Cat]

For a skirmish game like Bolt Action, I find it important that the doors and windows are reasonably to scale with the figures, and enough interior height to place figures inside. Scrunching down the footprint below normal building sizes is fine for fitting more terrain on the battlefield where the ground scale isn't 1:1 anyway.

For 15mm Napoleonics, I've scratchbuilt buildings to a hybrid size for Waterloo. The ground scale is big, so I scrunch the footprint as much as I can and extend wall heights and use very steep roofs so that marching figures don't have their bayonets poking up higher than the roof of La Belle Alliance.

For many 15mm mass battle games, our local club uses 10mm buildings, sometimes even 6mm for built-up areas.

For my kaiju games with 4" tall kaiju and 1/285 ground troops, buildings are also scrunched, and with a sliding scale for height, so that the tanks don't tower over small houses, but the skyscrapers don't reach to the ceiling.
http://community.sodapopminiatures.c....php?f=9&t=297

For Ogre, I'm following Desert Scribe's footsteps and using Monopoly buildings!

[Knockman]

The decision on Under-Scaling really depends on what game you're after.

In something like 28mm, if it's anything like a skirmish that ranges small numbers of men & materiel against each other, then sticking with 25/28mm terrain probably works best. After all, a lot of folks are actually trying to put a war film on their game table.

Under-Scaling really comes into it's own when ground scale can never get close to a sensible parity with figure scale. It's meant to be representational, in that the figures are over-sized so that you can distinguish between troop types and nationalities, and on equipment carried and used - and that the ground scale is bedded into a set range of distances laid down within the rules used.

So to keep it fit for Ogres Miniatures, and with the 'holo-display' theme in mind, it pays not to overdo the specific terrain types. I actually have some plans on this myself that I have yet to start (other RW stuff on at the mo) but when I do get started on this in October, I'll happily share with you so you can see the direction I'm going in.

[TheAmishStig]

A facebook post this morning got ideas percolating as well, and I can't remember Knockman's name in the FB groups to have tagged him there.

http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/6mmSF.../B300-701.html screams "Strongpoint!" at the top of its lungs, but as a 6mm building it makes for a conundrum with how I was thinking a day or two ago.

I think at this point I'm going to have to get a bunch of plasticard, a new cutting mat, and just go to town building little mock-ups at various scales to see how they look with minis, with each other, and all together.

With a day and a half to dwell now, if I'm parsing correctly the common thread in all those replies seems to be "If it's a meaningful object...a specific thing in the game world that individual minis can interact with, keep it as close to minis scale as is practical...use unrealistic footprints, not a different scale, to get more stuff in the same amount of table"...that mixing and matching should be saved for games designed around scale mismatches as a way to clearly and visually communicate the difference between "This actually exists at this location" and "These aren't literal and should be treated like trees on a forest template".

Which in the context of Ogre Minis, has me now thinking about using 6mm buildings as "This is something you can shoot at" vs "This is what is present within these borders" Which also keeps to the "Items of significance scaled up on a commander's strategy table" theme.

[Cat]

Sounds like you've parsed it all about right.

At 6mm, cutting and taping some index cards will do the trick for mock-ups.

[TheAmishStig]

Playing with scraps of paper...I'm really tempted to suck it up and buy a bunch of genuine imitation monopoly houses from thegamecrafter.com, since in packs of 100+ they're a whopping 3 cents a pop.

I'd like something nicer...or smaller scale, my favorite 'house' so far has a 3/16" x 3/8" footprint...but that's getting into "Get a 3D printer and spend time in a CAD program" territory again.

[Cat]

If you go the Monopoly route, the Gamecrafter price is good, but also check ebay. I got a huge lot of mixed houses and hotels and odds and ends super cheap. I also picked up a separate lot of Monopoly Cities which had a bunch of very interesting urban buildings.

If you want to go the scratch-building route, sheet styrene sidewalk tiles are your architectural friend! Evergreen Scale Models makes them in a wide variety of scribed square sizes. I think I used all of their sizes for various buildings when I was doing my Boston layout.

It's super easy to score lightly along the grid and snap to size. Scoring makes it easier to snap, and ensures that you're snapping along the line that you're aiming for.

For making the gabled ends of houses, I snapped the height of the end walls to the height of the peak of the roof. Then marked the center line on the top, and used the knif to chop from the centerline down to the grid line for the bottom edge of the roof.

After scoring and snapping, the edges are already half-way bevelled along the molded in sidewalk lines. A light scraping with the XActo to bring the edges to 45 degrees, and the corners of the walls fit together very nicely.

They have a 3/16" x 3/16" grid which scores and snaps easily to 3/16" x 3/8". The 1/16" x 1/16" and/or 1/6" x 1/6" grid would also work well for your desired size. Mixing it up and using different grid sizes gives a better visual of size variations. And with all the sizes you can choose varieties of lengths and heights.

https://evergreenscalemodels.com/col...yrene-sidewalk

[TheAmishStig]

Next dumb question!

Anyone have any preferred vendor for a scroll-saw lookalike hot wire cutter? I've been making a new Car Wars arena fence with the score-and-snap method. Dimensional tolerance is WAY tighter and cycle time way faster than I was getting by running wood through my table/compound/band saws, but the vertical edges aren't square [because the box cutter isn't always plumb] and that's driving me up the wall already.

When I get around to an Ogre Minis build, I'll probably be working with a lot of foam, so will need better tools than I have. Saw this, but no idea how it stacks up: https://hotwirefoamfactory.com/K03PV...ll_Table_.html