"Mountain warfare" Topic

Well, where to start? Wargaming tables are generally flat with some hills and woods here and there, maybe a river and some model houses. I played many games like these, or in the desert or the steppes, sometimes in the woods or the jungle, but never "on the mountains". I was thinking about WW1 Alpine Front and found this Wikipedia page about "Mountain Warfare":

link

There are many possibile situations from WW1 to Modern era, but I was wondering how to represent these battles? I don't know about specific rules for mountain warfare, do you? Can you describe a game of mountain warfare that you did? Do you make a 3D terrain, or mark contour lines? Your advices will be greatly appreciated, thank you.

I do a lot of terrain mountains are very important,the last battles in North Africa had rough mountain terrain,in Crete no one talks about the Gebirgsjagger but they did fight in the mountains there,mot to mention Gran Sasso,Italy in general,etc,etc…
I am trying to do hollow mountains maybe in styrene.
caves,tunnels,paths and bridges are also important.

I saw a documentary on the Alpine Front a while back and was amazed. They had interviews with soldiers who'd fought on both sides and it sounded terrifying. One soldier talked about how he couldn't sleep in a bed for years after the war because the sound of his pillow against his ear woke him up thinking that the enemy was drilling into his cave from below.

Scary, weird stuff. Modeling it would be a challenge, that's for sure.

Big chunks of thick styrene carved into hills. Lumps of the cork bark model railway folk use for cliffs.

Books or other suitable items piled under a ground cloth was the old school solution.

Yep, I assume you are modelling "unpassable" terrain here: so you reserve the "flat" spots for passes and such, and everything else is just eye candy steeps that can't be moved across (well, except by the single mountaineer figure). Junk under a cloth works quickly and cheaply. Styrofoam is the next cheapest and easiest; but what to do with the huge pieces when you're not gaming with them, is a good question to consider….

I always liked the hills and mountains from the Major General's site:

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Excellent! I'll be pilfering that idea too!

I've been working on an Alpine fort for my 28mm Austro-Hungarians, but so far I had been stumped on how to provide a suitable- and practical- backdrop.

gebirgskrieg.blogspot.com

Those card mountains are easy, cheap, and effective- remind me to ship off a crate of fine port and Havana cigars to the Major-General!

Apparently, he is the very model of a modern major general!

My mountains are also based on the Major Generals ones, very handy when mixed with more conventional hills. The mountains come out to play surprisingly often once you've made them. I did mine with polystyrene cores and card/paper/sand outer shells.

There was a lot of discussion on adapting SQUARE BASHING for mountain warfare on the RFCM yahoo group some years ago. Should still be in system if you Scroll back far enough

I read an article on Indo-Pak strife in the Himilayas. If you run from incoming shell at high altitude you probably die of heart attack. Common for victors to freeze to death on captured peak before relief arrives.

A mix of open sight and dead ground, almost impassable terrain with constrained paths and mule-tracks, various degree of slopes and foldings in the ground, woods or rocky, restrained line of sight in one direction and clear view in another. Perhaps at skirmish level with lot of terrain it may work, good luck!

For those interested in the Alpine front there is an excellent large format book with lot of photos and illustrations about the war on the Adamello massif:
link
tinyurl.com/lu6foq
It is out print, hard to find and pricey but extremely interesting (just look at the cover)

Beside Googlearth, the italian 1:25000 maps are online at
pcn.minambiente.it/PCN

Not perfect, but I tend to just use all my hills, close together in a fairly small area to make everything really hilly enough to sort of look mountainous.

link
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Tim

Amazing work Tim!
After all this work maybe you could cast them in resin or even white metal given the small scale.
I know I would!
could you suggest a good rule system for 40mm(1/48 scale)?
I have been producing for too long would not mind having a game I used firefly once but these were a bit dense.

For 25/28mm getting height is tricky and depends what you want to do. My hills:-

link

have a great advantage as when folded down they take up minimal space and yet are 60mm tall. As they are multi part, on the mating edges you can have a cliff patterns. Never produced (yet) the other bits ( 200mm squares) and curves but with these we have used them upto 180mm tall. The big advantage then is you can really start to get interesting dead grouns effects. You could still be modular with your own hill which would give you the oppertunity for more varid terrain.

Anybody desparate could contact me off list and I may be able to supply the other pattens but not with the best standard of instructions.

Plus look round the RPG site there are better looking hills and even cliffs made by others but they still have the space problem, so may not be any better than foam hills.

For off board hills we use flat card with film on the back at the edges and mark the position of units on the film on th back with temparary marker pens.