Terrain Bases

Gaming has been a bit sporadic of late, both for roleplaying and wargaming.

We did have a few Dirtside games earlier in the year, but things have been quiet since then for that system. Mostly because it requires a lot of prep on my side, which I haven’t had time for. One thing I have been able to do is think a bit more about terrain for it.

Last time we played, we used some new forest and roads to flesh out the landscape. Something I’m now looking at are urban areas. The big complexity of a game like Dirtside is that the discrepancy between figure scale and table scale can be quite jarring.

For skirmish games like Saga, where figures are 28mm, the ground scale, though it’s different, isn’t so obviously different. So ~3cm might equal ~2m for figures, but the horizontal scale on the table might be 30cm is 200m, a 1:10 difference. However, unless you stop and think about bow ranges, it’s not too obvious. You can get away with thinking it’s all the same.

For Dirtside, 3mm might be 1m for the figures, but 25mm = 100m for the ground scale, so it’s closer to 1:100 difference in scales. Both figures and buildings are huge compared to the table size. For rural combat, it’s not too important, but for urban combat – and that’s where a lot of modern warfare scenarios are going to be concentrated – it can be jarring.

So I’ve gone for a mixed approach for Dirtside. I’m continuing to use the Kallistra Hexon Terrain, but I’ve got some untextured plain tiles and spray painted them grey to represent urban areas. Then I’ve drawn some roads and ‘built up’ areas directly onto the tiles.

Along with some (oversized 6mm buildings), I’m hoping that this will reasonably represent towns and small cities. Each tile represents 400m of ground scale, so those roads are huge, but they are representations which tanks can be moved along.

The rest of the areas are then built up, and count as difficult terrain for vehicles, being more suited for infantry combat. I don’t need actual models for every building, just a few as representative tokens.

I also have a runway, since capturing of airports will probably make a good scenario. At 1600m, this is a relatively short runway, but it could be lengthened or shortened by changing the number of tiles used. Again, buildings can be added to taste.

The plain brown tiles I’m using to represent fields. Again, farm buildings can be added to taste. Together, the new terrain pieces can hopefully make for a more interesting battlefield, and allow for more complicated scenarios.

Midgard

One game I haven’t played is Midgard, though a number of people have played it down the club. It looks interesting, but has required a lot of work for me to get into. The army sizes are somewhat larger than Saga/Lion Rampant, so trying to come up with a decent army has been tricky.

It also requires movement trays of a particular size. They seem to have chosen decent sizes, so single-based 28mm figures can be used. Warbases even sells trays of the right dimensions for the different unit types. However, I didn’t have any movement trays, so I needed to buy them.

I wanted to do something fancy with the trays, which turned out to be a mistake. They come in two parts (top and bottom), so you can decorate the top half, without getting flock or other bits in the slot.

So I did some nicely decorated tops, but after all the glue had tried, the tops warped. Trying to then glue the tops on the bottom half of the tray turned out to be a lot of work involving the use of bulldog clips and patience.

So after wasting a few months of getting to this point (not just laziness, but also down to weather since some of this is better done outside), I bought some more and just spray painted them in a two-tone brown earth effect.

This allowed me to glue them together first, then simply spray paint in a few minutes. Given the current heat wave, they also dried within a few minutes more. This approach is a lot simpler, and I think it looks good enough for casual game purposes.

I might reserve the first set of bases for special units that need something different.

So now I should have enough bases to do a Midgard army. I just need to put together an army of sufficient size, and find an opponent.