"Climbing NWF Hill sides" Topic

After looking at the fab report TMP link I took to wondering (sat here at work on my lunch break without rule book at hand) about how climbing hills is handled. I am just cutting some blue styrofoam hills and was thinking about the need for paths and access routes for when I get home. Do I need to bother ?

link

I would not think so. The reduced movement rate for rough terrain includes (in most rules) accounting for paths.

Thanks for the link,

Need to get home and see the pictures.

Depends on how the game organizer classifies the hills (i.e., rough terrain) and whether paths are there to mitigate the penalty.

Jim

CAG 19,

Yours is an excellent question! But one that IMHO can only be answered by each individual wargamer -- or, more specifically, each "Gamemaster type who builds most of the stuff for everyone else to play on" -- by him or herself. Needless to say, whatever you choose to do, that's the right way at your place!

For myself at my place, I am a bit of a psycho obsessive-compulsive perfectionist type when it comes to terrain, and I have settled on a compromise with regard to the somewhat profound "paths or no paths?" question, which comes into play a great deal in the NWF and Afghanistan…

I make a point to provide at least one path capable of supporting figures moving between contours -- HOWEVER, depending on the size and scale of the game being played, it is not always necessary to actually USE THAT PATH in order to move between contours.

If I'm laying out hills for a small, more "skirmish"-y feel game, I will likely tell the players that their troops can only advance up or down the hillsides/mountainsides via the visible stepped pathway provided -- but if I'm setting up a big refight of the 1879 Second Afghan War battle of Charasiab, with multiple battalions of Brits & Indians assaulting a dug in Afghan regular army supported by tons of tribesmen in the high hills South of Kabul, I will allow troops to advance up or down contours from anywhere, so long as they spend the required movement penalty for going through "Rough Terrain."

This means a bit more tedious labor for me when I build my hills, but in the long run, for me, it's worth it.

Here's a pic of one of my 2-contour rocky frontier hills, with some 72nd Highlanders poised along the stepped path leading from the first contour to the second…

Here's one with some tribesmen poised on the rocky steps between the base of a smaller hill and the top of its contour…

My hills have paths that lead to the crown of the hill. In the game above, the unit had to follow the paths to get to the top. Some of the hills had a number of paths so you could go up one, move across the top and decend down the other side of the hill. Other hills had one way up or down.

Thanks for the responses. TSATF is so forgiving and one of the reasons I have gone back to "old school" single figure basing.

"Paths" seem to be the way ahead. Off to the garden centre to look for some bark

Excellent work Mad Guru. I am copying the photos for future reference.

Okay, now been defeated by three major DIY stores whose Bark is worse than their ……

UK Supplier of "proper" pieces of bark or am I going down the Cork root?

Thanks for kind words, Whatisitgood4atwork!

@CAG 19: Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble finding the appropriate sort of woodchips in the UK. Cork bark is excellent for the same use. Here in the US it is substantially more expensive. A single "large" piece of nice cork bark will cost about twice as much as a 5lb. bag of woodchips, which -- after you add in a great many hours of labor -- will cover something like 25 to 50 times as many contour edges. But if you don't mind spending the money, or if you only plan to build one or two such hills, cork could be the way to go.

Don't know if you've ever visited it before, but you might want to check out the "Wargaming With Silverwhistle" blog, here: link

The gentleman who runs it is an amazing painter, who does some great conversions, and built the hill from Isandlwana using woodchips. Needless to say, he lives in the UK, and his woodchips look just about the same as the ones I use. My guess is that if you leave a comment asking, he'll be happy to tell you where he got them. Hope it works out.