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Post by paintdog on May 5, 2020 0:50:06 GMT
I finished a Highland village for my ECW gaming; adding texture & painting especially to the base board.
The village features a ruined church & some black houses, a bit of walling and some cheval de frise.
A word on wargaming terrain for those who don't wargame. This is not supposed to be model train terrain ie ultra-realistic.
The point is that it has to be practical. Thus, everything is removable from the base. This is both for ease of storage & to allow flexibility: I'm not stuck with one setting.
I should also mention scale. I like to use what I call "big" 15mm buildings to go with my 20mm figures. This is because this is not skirmish, 1:1 gaming. Each figure represents 33 real men. Thus, these buildings are actually overscale. I go with what "looks right".
donald
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Post by minuteman on May 5, 2020 21:58:26 GMT
Very good buildings and atmospheric photos; you can almost sense the calm before the storm.
I am not an active wargamer these days, but I do have a collection of scenery and buildings from my wargaming days which is stashed away in the loft and which I am planning to get down and rummage through soon. It does feature some resin buildings (barns, cottages) that I bought as a job lot with several hundred metal 15mm ECW figures 20 + years ago, and which I have never used. Pressing them into service for 20mm: 1/72 sounds like a good idea. They might, amongst other things, work well as background scenery for small dioramas and photos.
Regarding scale of buildings: Yes, entirely agree, and I think I first realised this when I was first introduced to figure scales, and that at 1: 30 the Airfix Waterloo farmhouse would swallow an entire brigade of defenders + a battery or two quite easily; so much for a single battalion of KGL Lights.
Do you make your own buildings or buy commercially available ones?
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Post by paintdog on May 6, 2020 0:34:21 GMT
Very good buildings and atmospheric photos; you can almost sense the calm before the storm. I am not an active wargamer these days, but I do have a collection of scenery and buildings from my wargaming days which is stashed away in the loft and which I am planning to get down and rummage through soon. It does feature some resin buildings (barns, cottages) that I bought as a job lot with several hundred metal 15mm ECW figures 20 + years ago, and which I have never used. Pressing them into service for 20mm: 1/72 sounds like a good idea. They might, amongst other things, work well as background scenery for small dioramas and photos. Regarding scale of buildings: Yes, entirely agree, and I think I first realised this when I was first introduced to figure scales, and that at 1: 30 the Airfix Waterloo farmhouse would swallow an entire brigade of defenders + a battery or two quite easily; so much for a single battalion of KGL Lights. Do you make your own buildings or buy commercially available ones? I both make terrain & buy it: depends on what it is.
Re: scale of buildings, I think Don Featherstone proposed using 6 mm buildings with 20 mm figures. I know this sounds crazy but that way a large town or even a city would not take over the table. Clearly you couldn't fight in the BUA but prior to the modern era, this wasn't often part of the battle or you could have a separate table with parts of the town in a larger scale to wargame that aspect of your battle....perhaps as a skirmish?
At any rate, he had photos of these great little vignette towns & they didn't look out of place.
donald
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Post by grumble on Oct 17, 2021 19:01:36 GMT
I agree completely with the idea of having buildings in a scale smaller than the figures. In WW1 WW2 and ACW I use 20 mm figures and 15 mm buildings or even smaller, because of the figure scale of 1 figure = 20 men (ACW Johnny Reb 2) or 30+ men (WW1 and WW2 Command Decision 4 TOB).
Even for skirmish ACW where 1 figure = 1-2 men, I use 20 mm buildings with my 28 mm figures, because 1" = several yards (Brother Against Brother). To accommodate figures in these houses, I make a template of each building (or each floor) indicating doors, windows and loopholes if any. The figures are off the table. Worked very well in a game I ran recently at Barrage 2021.
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Post by davidmac on Oct 20, 2021 20:48:48 GMT
It seems to me that the only ones who do/should use buildings in the scale of the figures are 1:1 skirmish gamers.
For most large scale games I tend to use buildings at a much smaller scale, so that one or two fill the space of a metropolis.
On the other hand, Flames of War, which is not really skirmish but pretends to be one vehicle to one vehicle, uses buildings that are at about 1:72, while FoW is at 1:100 (15mm).
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bessiere
Aedile
Painting my way from Vienna to Moscow
Posts: 70
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Post by bessiere on Oct 25, 2021 17:29:55 GMT
The scale issue is something most who are new to gaming only discover later on; often after buying a collection of lovely buildings that are now thought too large for the table. I am speaking of myself of course. Now I have a good set for a railroad table anyway. For 20mm figures 15mm buildings "look right" to me.
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Post by lunch on Oct 28, 2021 5:41:12 GMT
Unless it’s a diorama, using over scale pieces is the way to go, otherwise you just have gigantic buildings on your table 😂
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Post by paintdog on Oct 28, 2021 7:08:16 GMT
The Great Donald Featherstone, in one of his many wargaming books, used really small buildings to make towns for his 1/72 Nap. figures.
They were 10mm, maybe, or 6mm even. The concept was that if 12 figures represents a 600 man battalion, this was more in keeping with the ground scale.
This probably sounds odd but it actually looked OK. The towns were little masterpieces of dioramas & units garrisoning them were simply put off table & a marker used.
donald
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Post by lunch on Oct 28, 2021 16:27:44 GMT
There was a Napoleonic war gamer on ets who used 6mm/tiny buildings for his games and they looked perfect!
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