"City Fighting with miniatures....how to do it????" Topic

I like fighting for built up areas but I have to ask…what is the best way to does this? The most practical way is to do it with 2d buildings….but that doesn't look as nice. Add nice buildings and now you are reaching over them to move figures and they block your view. Is there a better way? So many wargames can benefit from city fighting…from WW2 to the Zombie Wars to Dropzone commander. New ideas??

I favor shells, with partial 2nd stories. I made mine from cardboard boxes, using the corners, mostly. Cut out windows, glue in partial floors above, add stairways/ladders, if you want.

For intact buildings, I went with rectangles, 1st floors only, doors and windows cut out. These give a top-down view, allowing movement to be made easily.

Both approaches work, but they have compromises, of course. That is the nature of the beast: no matter what approach you take, you will be forced to make compromises of some sort. Cheers!

Like kyotebluer said, depends on your scale. I've put together enough urban ruins from various sources (O-scale model trail buildings, Amera plastics, and others) to cover a 6x4 table. I usually do 28mm WW2 with them, some post-Apoc stuff.

Keep the terrain as simple as possible. A lot of detail looks really good, but it can look cluttered and usually makes placing miniatures a nightmare. You want to find the right balance between functionality, and aesthetics. I make foamcore buildings where each floor is essentially a box that lifts off to allow access, but does not disturb the figures inside. As the game progresses you can leave the floors separate for simplicity, or re-stack them as you please. I scale the buildings to be roomy for my 1/72 figures so when used for 15mm there is lots of extra room and can be used for 28mm in a pinch.

Are you going to make the fight inside buildings or just outside?

If you are going to make an interior fighting you could make floor tiles to represent each floor inside the building. The taller the building, more tiles you will need.

@times: right now I want to focus on street fighting.

I've done some near future sci-fi gaming with a foccus on urban combat (strongly inspired by Blackhawk Down).

One of the battle reports is on Neldoreth's web site:

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Overall, the approach for the buildings was like Corporalpat descrobed – kept it simple and versatile. My buildings are all foamcore and cork and most are simple boxes with lift-off roofs. Several buildings are a bit more complex, but are really just a set of simple boxes with doors that line up (which can be handy because they can be split up to provide smaller structures when the scenario needs it).

My rationale for simplifying is that complex buildings quickly get difficult to play in and I figure it's OK to abstract a bit. For a small dwelling, I assume when a unit moves inside they clear it, so the interior walls are not needed.

If I was playing a game at real skirmish, where you're down to seconds of time per turn and die rolls represent shots or bursts, then maybe detailed internals for buildings would be the way to go. In that case, I would suggest using an old dungeon-builder's technique and making the interior walls only half height – it shows where they are, but you can access the figs and move them fairly easily.

I can say, it was a long process building my urban terrain – basically 3 months of weekends in the garage – but I've never regretted it. The terrain is versatile and I can set up pretty well any scenario I want to play. It was a good investment in time and urban combat games are DIFFERENT than open field battles. Give it a spin!

It's difficult to do easily, or well.

Since most cities have multi-story buildings, that makes it even more difficult.

If I were going to do this, and I'd like to, I'd be inclined to use solid buildings for the display, and have the fighting outside of them.

For interior battles, I'd use templates without walls, but showing where they are, e.g. major structural walls, as well as internal ones for the different rooms in a building, doors, windows, etc.

They would be placed on a separate table, or separate part of the table, and be numbered and lettered for easy identification, for which building they represent, and which floor, etc., e.g. building C-1, C-2, C-2, for building "C" and floors 1, 2, and 3, with 1 being the ground floor, and the others the additional floors above.

In most city fights, it's frequently suicide to walk down a street, so you'd need to blow or knock "mouseholes" between the buildings for covered movement, through the adjoining walls of the attached buildings.

Fighting will be room to room, in close, like it should be.

To the fold flat like this.

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and this

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The windows are big enough to get 1/72 figs through the windows.

On the more more rural buildings the roof hinges open for access to the top floor.

You can make the same thing from cerial boxes, that how we started. These buildings are not big enough to make real insides. They are for street fighting.

In street fighting remember if you are inside and too close to a window you can be seen. You hang back but that restricts your view. Always walk down one side of a steet not down the middle.

Although you cannot get it perfect with 10 or twenty buildings you get a decent urban area and get the right feel of limited lines of sight.

This is why we have fold flat, lots of buildings takes lots of storage space.

I've built terrain to simulate Berlin in 1945, and one advantage to that scenario is that much of city is essentially ruins, rather than multi-floor buildings any longer. I only have a handful of buildings that have more than one story in effect, leaving most, but not all, of the fighting at street level. Here's a picture of one game we played.

My buildings are from a mix of sources, some of which I can't even name. I think I posted the information to an earlier thread, but I can't find it now.

Oh ! Very Nice work there !

I like a city tables with LOTS of buildings. All of my buildings have no roofs or removable roofs. JR miniatures makes a ton of good 15mm damaged buildings. Hope that helps.

U.K.

It depends on the rules. For my 15mm Crossfire version of Stalingrad the buildings are shells or have a flat ruined upper floor. Troops are either put in a single-storey shell or on the top floor of a multistorey structure. I have a house rule to the effect that the taller the building, the more troops I allow to occupy it.

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