"WW2 6mm gaming..terrain or maps" Topic

Just wondering if there are people here who game in this scale and use maps instead of DIY terrain?

I do not have the time or patience to make terrain. I'd rather throw down a hexed based map and go.

Anyone else here do this? Have any pictures?

Thanks

To be honest, to me wargaming is all about the terrain. But like you I do not like making it much, so I buy mine.

But the hex maps from Commands and Colors or Memoir 44 would work pretty well.

An upgrade from there would be to drop the coin for Kallistra Hexon.

Terrain. I only use maps for cardboard counter based gaming.

I play "Memoir'44" and "Battle Cry" on a 5" hex mat from Hotz Artworks with 15mm scale minis. I made Xerox enlargements of the terrain hexes from the original games and place them in my 5" hexes. For 6mm scale, you could just use the original game board and terrain tiles. I am currently thinking about using a 3" Hotz mat with 6mm scale troops. I like having hexes as opposed to using measuring tapes and such. But I have friends who don't like hexes, so diff. strokes for diff. folks.

I'd never consider playing on a map. I don't have the time to make terrain either so I buy it.

Definitely terrain!! What I can't make, I buy

Have you thought about printing large scale posters of satellite imagery?

For a long time my club used a google map with hex overlaid for WWI aerial battles. One of our members had his GIS guys do it up for us.

Another fellow ran a lovely D-Day game at the club with minis on a blown up map,. I quite like area-based games as they simplify a lot of things (LOS, movement, orientation) but tend to build small terrain pieces to sit on my hex mat.

Just wondering if there are people here who game in this scale and use maps instead of DIY terrain?<?q>

Yes, but then I play Megablitz with a ground scale of 1:50,000 on Ordnance Survey maps …

Terrain. When I think of maps for gaming then I'd want to use counters/chits.

I use a bit of both.

I've been using Google maps printouts of city regions mounted on 6"x4" board to represent city and town areas. Looks great.

It may be sacrilege to some but to me terrain just needs to look reasonable. We don't play 6mm the smallest we get is 1:144 (12mm). To me then Hexon II is perfect. It would be great in 6mm. We use the two high stuff but for 6mm you could use the single height stuff, cheaper and less storage requirements. You will need lots of buildings so why not make crude card versions. We do fold flat simple buildings in 1:144.

link

Provided there are 10 or more in a group they look fine. Detail is not important when there is a lot of stuff. in 6mm you would need even less detail and simple boxes would do fine. Terrain need to be functional, card roads are fine, card buildings. Trees are a pain but at 6mm I have seen simple lichen covered plates raised up to clear the vehicles work fine and they add the fog of war by hiding them from you and your opponents eyes. Simple painted pipe cleaners work as hedges. What you want is a reasonable 3D presentation to tell you what the terrain looks like. beautiful buildings do not necessarily make good wargames terrain.

No picture/map will be as good as crude terrain as its difficult to understand the 3D nature of the battle field from them.

In this scale, the houses and hotels from the classic Monopoly set work great! I bought a pile of them at a yard sale – painted and based they made perfect 3d targets for my Wings of War games

Nice work !

Yep, I made 6mm terrain boards and it was worth the effort IMO. It was a lot of work though…

more here
6mm.wargaming.info

Cheers
Kieran

Yes, I have used maps on occasion, but generally for operational level stuff rather than tactical.

Actual maps or drawn interpretations based on militarily significant terrain features. My 1930s era military map reading manual gives some quite good guidelines on how to translate real maps into representative military features suitable for operational planning.

Real terrain is quite complex.

We regularly play the various command & colours games, but on Hexon terrain using toys.

That is some awesome terrain!
What material did you use to hold down that flock, btw?

I agree about the difficulties of real terrain. I've done it with 3mm Pico armor figs and it can be tricky to get everything right. I've often thought about using maps with 3mm bases. To me it's really the only proven way to get both the detail and the scope for very large games with dispersed forces.

The problem with a map of course is that you need to go over the entire thing and figure out what kind of in-game effect everything is going to have. If you have a topographical map, then what slopes will be moderate, difficult, impassible, etc? How will you figure out LOS on a map? It can be done if you're trained in reading a map but it could definitely lead to some disagreements /delays during game play.

One solution I've come up with is to place clear overlays with information on the terrain printed or drawn on it, for instance elevation lines to more clearly show the effects of terrain than the map itself does. These overlay diagrams can be color coded, or can show the LOS from a hill or other prominence. Once the overlays is down I place a piece of plexiglass overtop of everything and the 3mm units are then put down on top of that, along with tree bases and buildings to mark wooded areas and BUAs. You can make a map-based wargame look pretty good if you take the time. The key thing I think is the plexi-glass, presentation wise.

Here's a Napoleonic example:

I don't know how those ACW figs ended up in Belgium. But at any rate you can see just how fine a representation of terrain you can get on a map like that, even over a much, much larger area than any modeled battlefield would allow for. The trick of course is to make sense of everything on the map. In the above examples this would require some work. Although it might be interesting to play a game like Black Powder exactly as written but to use these fine tactical maps, taking every piece of terrain as literal.

What it does let you do is represent very large battles over a very large area with the smallest units represented, yet you can still zoom in to a very tactical level. You'd be hard pressed to do something similar with model terrain, and of course it won't be very portable!

EDIT: If you want to make any map a hex based map just upload it into the free Hexel program you an download free here: hexraystudios.com/hexels

After that you can add a hex grid like this:

link

You can then print that out as a poster or as panels that you then tape together. The original file of that map is over 3 foot across, which is big enough to game on. Printing out poster sized things used to be a hassle but now here are programs out there for six bucks that will allow you to print an image of any size from your home printer. They just cut the imagine into chunks and print them off one at a time. Personally I dislike hexes, which is why I'm trying to come up with a non-hex way of reading a map like the ones above.