"Ferraris map board experiment" Topic

Hi everyone,

So, the other day I finally got around to picking up some foam boards so I could try out my idea to print out some of the Ferraris maps at a known scale and then play war games on them. Here are the results:

First, there's the 20mm=~130m board. This would be for games where every 20mm base equals a battalion.

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I think that the utility of the Ferraris maps as a tactical gaming surface are pretty clear. You'll notice the woods I placed down in some of the photos. That's an idea I had for a hybrid gaming surface, where you can place terrain over the tops of the maps, either as a reminder of some in-game mechanic, or in this case to transform the battlefield somewhat by "replacing" the villages with some woods.

It would be a lot of fun to do up, say, 6 boards like this one and then put them all together in order to do entire corps at this level.

Where the maps are really interesting though is when I zoomed out so that each 20mm base is equal to 200m of frontage. This allows you to play with entire corps and, with two or three panels, whole armies:

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This pic shows how much useable terrain information is available even at this zoomed out level:

Same thing here. Notice the Austrian grande battery set up only 200m outside the village. It could easily have over 100 guns in it yet it doesn't dominate the playing area and is confined and committed to one very specific area of the battlefield. What I like about the maps is that they present you with infinite tactical choices even at this higher level of command. The trick that I'm still figuring out is how exactly to easily read the maps for wargaming purposes. It's possible that the maps are best used annotated (on the computer prior to printing), or with markers placed on them to identify the in-game effect of terrain.

I hadn't been to the Ferraris website in awhile and was quite shocked that they've switched to a new tool for navigating the maps, one which doesn't allow you to go into full screen mode, which is previously how I got my screen shots. I was at a loss and even emailed the museum to complain (they sent me a polite reply but basically said there was nothing they could do) but after messing around with it I realized that its much, much better than the previous version. The biggest improvement are the direction arrows that allow you to advance a set distance in any direction, which makes copying out a large section of the map a lot easier- instead of guessing and using a free drag tool to move the map around you can just click and copy say 3 or 4 screens in a square pattern and you've got your map. Not having the full screen option was annoying at first but I found that I was able to use the screen capture "box" feature on my mac (shift+Cmnd+4) feature to good effect. Overall I'ld say that the re-design is a good thing, and will allow me to make more and larger maps faster. If I can just get some more arty and cav together I could try out a few actual games using different rule sets to see how they work with the terrain. I think that there will be issues with many of them as the real terrain is a lot more complex and active a factor that in most war-games. It should be a fun project at any rate!

Looks incredible good.

Have you placed hills beneath the hills on the map? I think making this a relief map would greatly aid your use of the terrain as a "general"

Cool, how are you printing these?

Hi all,

Well, the pictures I just took down to Staples and had printed. I got 24 pages printed on good paper in color for $10. USD All 24 pages aren't in the pics above though. I already had the more zoomed out map printed off, for starters (the second set of pics). The Ugies map (the first set of pics) I printed off at two zoom levels, the one you see above and one at an even closer zoom but I didn't do up that larger version yet.

So, on the Ugies map (the more tactical one) you're looking at 6 pieces of paper printed with bleed-over so that I could match the pics up. I use the program SplitPrint splitprint.virkkuset.com to get the right bleed-over. SplitPrint generally makes it easier to print everything because it tells you exactly how big everything is going to be when you print it off. Best and most importantly if you have a large image file it will break it up into several pages with bleed-over instead of trying to resize it or only giving you part of the full sized image. It also helps to have your own printer, black and white, so that you can test a page or two against your model bases to make sure that everything will be in scale when you print it out in color.

History PhD- that'd be awesome, and I'm sure you could do that… in fact I know that you can, as anyone whose seen one of those plastic relief maps knows. They seem to make those by printing the map on plastic and then using a vacuum pump of some sort to pull the plastic into the desired shape. I honestly wouldn't have the technical know-how to make something like that. I have created some flocked hills using sculpy that I can toss down on the elevation lines though. What I'll probably do is use annotations and markers to show how far arty can shoot from a certain hill, what blocks its LOS, etc. The end effect will be a hybrid of a chit-based war game and a model game. I mean, there is a LOT of information on those maps and for any game to work on it there will have to be some means of reading it consistently. Thus annotation seems like the safest bet. This could be added via text boxes and with arrows prior to printing, or else with chits placed on top of the map but beneath some plexiglass (I think this seems quite promising as far as aesthetics goes). You could even use those colored sticky notes you get at office supply stores, numbered pins stuck into the maps, etc. It might also be useful to use pins and string to mark the streams off, for instance, or to call attention to them. You could do that electronically as well. That's more for the zoomed out boards- on the tactical boards the terrain is pretty clear-cut. You can even show the fightings over specific buildings if you wanted (red ones are stone, black ones are wood, btw).

Also, as far as relief goes, you could cut the maps apart along the relief lines and then glue some litko bases underneath them, then place that back down into the foam board- instant elevated relief!

Also, bear in mind that if you want you can use Google maps and street view or Google Earth to aid in the annotation of the Ferraris maps, if you really want to get all the micro-terrain that you can, you could use a computer to check the LOS of almost any spot you want on the maps. The basic contours of the countryside haven't changed quite that much, even if some fields are now suburbs. Even more interesting though is the idea of creating the maps as its own function in a new kind of war game, similar to what a dungeon master does in an RPG. If I came up with a set of rules for using the maps I'd make annotating them central to the game and have a website where people could create scenarios and upload the maps with starting positions and terrain annotations typed up right onto them. The idea would be that people could just log on, download the battlefield and scenario they wanted, print it off, tape it up and the get right down to playing without having to mess around with reading the map overly much.

Excellent!

I work for a cartography company, so I can say for sure that before plastics, etc, older relief maps and globes were made by sculpting hills out of clay, papier-mâché, etc and gluing it down to the globe. The moistened map was then laid over the "terrain", which had been painted with a thin coating of glue, and then the map was painted with a glue/water mixture. There's no reason you can't do the same with your terrain boards before you lay the maps over them.

H_PhD- An interesting idea… I may have to check something like that out. You'd have to go slowly to avoid tearing the paper. I don't see why it wouldn't work though. Foam board would be out though, as it seems like that technique would warp quite a bit. But if you had a thick styrofoam base I don't see why it couldn't work.

So now you just need to create some 28mm boards.

Very impressive – my hat off to you Sir !

FMS, that's really pretty cool. The trees/forests are excellent. Hills in the same detail level would make the presentation even more impressive. Since you are using foam core, you could actually carefully carve out a river bed and fill it with blue gel or resin. Same for deep ravines, but with a brown fill. Wow, so much to offer here. Awesome.

FMS, gator board is also out. It tends to warp in cold or damp. That's what we use now for mounting maps, but it does take well to being painted with glue.

@HistoryPHD

Would it be possible to take these maps and color code the elevation levels?

Fantastic work- Which rules do you use? How does the Ferraris terrain influence movement, line of sight, and control? We use an umpire.
Best,
Rob

LGQG-
A ref may be required here, but I'd like to find a way to make that unnecessary. I think that having a website, or even a yahoo group, where people can hang scenarios along with annotated maps would be cool. People could even annotate them for different rule sets.

One tricky thing here is that these elevation marks (the dark swatches across the maps) aren't exactly giant hills. If you use google map to get directions from "Babelom, Be" to "Hoksem, Be" you'll be right about in the middle of the more zoomed out battlefield I show above. There aren't any really big hills anywhere around… although since we're using maps here there's no reason that you couldn't just say they were bigger than they really were. But that's why I like the maps so much- they are showing, or trying to show, what would have been important to a general at that time. That being said, not every tactically significant undulation in the terrain is shown either- a quick look at google maps will rid one of any notion that they show everything, especially the LOS across the open fields on the maps. That being said I think one quick look at them shows how much terrain is missing from the average war games table. Another thing that's interesting is to try to find a place on the maps that'd be big enough
for two armies of the period to face off at. It's harder than you think- a lot of the Belgium countryside was dominated by small villages and suburbs- I wonder if a lot of the terrain wasn't dissimilar to Leipzig, which was also fought in the suburbs around a city? Anyways, just random thoughts there…

As far as the sculpy hills, I can try to take a few pics with them later on. They were made to order for use on these maps, so I hope they look right. My idea was that the hills, woods and buildings would simply sit on top of the map as markers to important features.

What I really need to do is get a proper game in on the maps, something I haven't actually done as of yet. I'd like to try out FPGA with some modifications I've been kicking around, although if I wanted to do a full-sized battle I'd need to print out another map zoomed out even further, or else have two map boards side by side under some plexi glass. I have a feeling that FPGA would work as it is, with a few mods. I think that Sam's abstracted CVs may end up being one of the best ways to illustrate fighting in the terrain once you zoom out past the full-on tactical. And as far as most tactical level rules go, I think that the terrain and realistic ranges (plus absolute ground/time scales) might stretch some of them out to the point of absurdity. But then, who knows? I haven't actually played a full game on these yet. I'm more of a theorizer…….. : )

If you have a table that supports such terain variations, you can get some real choices going for the players who now have to think like Napoleonic commanders when they deploy their troops.
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Nice!

Crispy, I don't see any reason the elevation levels couldn't be color-coded

well done a brilliant project.

I revisited the Ferraris website, they sell digit copies of the maps but for a lot of money, which is why they don't allow easy downloading of maps, a shame when profit comes before historical research, I would be happy to pay for the downloads but for a more reasonable price.

you mentioned google earth, so I had a look, if anyone is interested I picked a place at random, Cambron St. Vincent on the Ath map, and then found it on google earth and found the church and started walking around in street view, brilliant, tried to find the lone house down rue de Parc but obviously long gone.

has anyone questioned the accuracy of the Ferraris maps, was there really that many hedges are has he just used them as boundry markers, also all the tree lined roads?

I bet 24 pages would cost a lot more in England.

Graf-A good question. I'm not really sure about all the hedges and trees. For the purposes of game play I would rule that the "open" hedges would not block LOS and the "closed" hedges would.

For those who are interested, here is a legend:

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And a very long, detailed academic paper on the maps and legend. I need to contact this prof…

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FM, that's some beautiful work there, you're a man after my own heart when it comes to this scale. I admire the dedication and your particular brand of 'OCD'! Very well thought out and crafted.

Not sure if you've seen these guys:

solidterrainmodeling.com

If not, I'm sure you'll spend a few minutes drooling over the possibilities..if you have a few thousand dollars to spare..

Please keep up your inspiring work.

My Best,
Bob

Many thanks Bob.. that's a great link… now I'm late for work! :)

FMS nice work. Reminds me very much of the Kriegsspiel.