"What type of battleground is most common in 15mm" Topic

So, what is the most common battleground people are using for 15mm, rural or urban? Rural is quite easy to do and on the pocketbook. However, an urban setting seems more difficult. The density of buildings one would need seems rather large. How do some of you handle this type of battlefield? Are your urban areas full of man made structures? Or only a sprinkling?

With urban settings you can also play around with empty space or sprawling structures.

If you're fighting in slums there might be an empty lot here and there, a junk or scrap yard, an old warehouse, etc.

In better neighborhoods or city centers than can be squares, parks, large parking garages and lots, and so on.

Old Glory has some nice resin science fiction buildings and with the Old Glory Army discount they are a bargain.

Regardless if you want an urban setting you could just go with regular 15 mm modern buildings, HO Guage Railroad buildings (yea better for 20 mm but it works) or I have seen many 15 mm Sci-Fi players just use 15 mm middle eastern buildings for that edge of the space frontier look. Of course the best inexpensive method is to just scratch build using any number of easy find and purchase materials such as electric junction boxes as a start for your form. Our old friend electronic Styrofoam packing could provide some quick down and dirty urban buildings with a few bits and bobs glued on to make it look like a futurist office building, apartment dwelling, or what ever. Also don't forget industrial centers that would be lots of open tarmac for shipping/landing with large hold tanks and warehouses scattered about. Go to a local fabric or upholstery store and buy enough yardage of grey fake leather to make a 4 x 4 or 4 x 6 area that is completed asphalted over. Man I need to start a blog on this with pictures.

So far our urban setting have been more edge of town or a small complex. Roads can be made using roofing shingles or do as I did, I actually cut up a cheap, thin, black rubber welcome mat. Worked great for roads.

One thing to consider is will future other world or this world settings look that much different from today? You could show a mix of architectures.

Urban, and as alien as possibly.
link

Old Glory discount? What would that be?

Urban can be a lot less dense than first thought. Parks, parking lots, and streets with more than one lane each way all lighten up a board. A single lane using modern US assumptions is going to be at least an inch-and-a-quarter wide. Add a modest central divider and parking lanes and that urban four lane street is eight inches across. A robust center divider allowing for turn lanes and separated parking lot lanes (not common, but a useful tool here) with four lanes of traffic is closer to 14 inches across in 15mm.

(Google Maps (satellite mode) the intersection of Shattuck and Dwight in Berkeley, CA for an example.)

With a main street like that, lots of alleys, off-street parking (including rooftop) and decent sidewalks, you can fill half of an urban board with just roads and other paved surfaces.

Then realizing that two-story buildings with full institutional ceilings are still only three inches tall gets all but your important buildings down to a reasonable size.

I do urban, but of the low density variety with mostly 2-3 story buildings and a fair amount of ruins.

With the plastic building kits from Proxie models and some generic MDF buildings it really isn't expensive.

I just started in the wonderful world of 15mm sci fi TTWG. My locales are going to include a military museum, an ice station, a shantytown, a small village, a small farm, and some "open country".

To get started, and get some pieces down on the gaming table, the skirmishes at the "military museum" will mostly take place around the airfield, the apron, the motor pool and the parking lot. I'll probably use one quonset hut and some suitable fake tarmac for those four (or more) engagements, as if they are smaller skirmishes within a larger engagement.

My next hardest-to-make locale will probably be the ice station, for which I'll use several mail-order bunkers, turrets, and shelters, laid out in various patterns on a fleecy fabric remnant for which I paid like three bucks. Again, a series of engagements will take place, possibly including joint training exercises.

From there, I'll work my way towards more the involved locales. Cheers.

Well it depends, for my Post Apocalyptic stuff it is a mix of urban and rural ruins.

A lot of thought for my SF stuff is a mix of urban and Corridors Think a lot of stations and Asteroid bases and the like. I am seriously considering doing a Lunar surface set which is most industrial and craters…..

Honestly I build a lot of smallish terrain, I like the Flames of War large bases for small dioramas and buildings, and slightly larger CD's for the rest of my houses and small businesses.

darebear,

The Old Glory Army Card gets you a discount on your orders from Blue Moon.

I do both, open terrain is really easy to set up, and urban areas a little more set up, But as Gypsycomet said a good part is open areas of streets, alleys, parking lots, and shipping yards, these areas I like to clutter up with vhicles, equipment and in general urban debris, you can also add fences and walls as well, I hate clean streets and shipping yards on a table, and hope to fix that with posts on my blog though I'm only just starting it up hope you can find stuff there to help build up your table

silo1313.blogspot.com

As many types as possible. The beauty of 15mm is that it's small enough that you can store lots of buildings but big enough to look brilliant.

My 15mm gaming has been mostly rural, or somewhere using Arabic/adobe architecture…

I'd love to start collecting scifi buildings, but I've recently read a highly amusing story that would let me re-use a lot of the traditional rural buildings with just a few scifi touches. link

It's a "high-class rebranding of the concept of 'rural'", where everything is made to look as if it's a quiet town. Well, with a few exceptions. There are small solar farms lining most of the roads that automatically track the sun, any ditches have miniature hydroelectric setups, and some of the houses have solar panels on the thatched roof.

dear lion

I think you pasted wrong link?

regards

MMG

I have a paper mache town like Umpapas, with shanties I made.
Fighting is usually on the edge of town or on the town square or near the old abandoned nuclear power plant.

MMG:
No, he didn't. I believe I can see the inspiration behind the idea.

Besides, in some places rural villages like that do still exist, though some new structures and infrastructure will have been built in the meantime. Some places do less well at avoiding a schizo tech look, though you can still see the original structure underneath all the dodgy modifications; but some places are so well done that the only difference between then and now is that the stables are gone and the driveway now contains a car.

I'm going to be doing some PA gaming, so I have a slowly-growing collection of ruins and wreckage building up; as well as SF, so there will be whatever environments I can think of, currently something all-natural, with a colony upon it, for whatever purpose. This could mean Arcadia, steppes, semi-arid, everglades, tundra, Mars, or simply rocky wasteland or desert.
I'm leaning towards semi-arid, forest, everglades or steppes, as Arcadia is too much the default in tabletop wargaming, and the others will limit my collecting too much if full environmental armour and powered suits are the only way you can leave the house.
Not that I won't have any of those.
But, if you want a lot of armour, cities aren't exactly good tank country.

@MMG: Nope, that's the hosting site for a translated "light novel" (read as: teen lit, though lots of adults read them on the way to work on the train).

It's an interesting concept, and frankly I'm surprised someone hasn't tried it yet. What was it, 300 yen a liter for the water in the fields, a bunch of grapes for 30kyen (~$300), and some seriously high-end sake was 50kyen (~$500) a cup, to give you an idea. But almost everything was intentionally concealed so as to not spoil the appearance of 'rural'. motion sensors with fatally high voltage nets to stop intruders, electrostatic pollen traps to prevent the spread of designer-genetically-engineered pollen, you name it.

It at least gives you a quick and undo-able way of recycling your terrain.

Here are my tables: link

link

Since we play Trek games, the setting can be anything.

I usually prefer urban, but I have a problem with obsessively making buildings. I have been trying to make things more rural, though, as it's nice to have a bit of both.

Rural

Urban

Both of these were cheap to make. Most of the buildings are paper. Painted matboard, rather than cardstock, though. Cheaper than plastic or cork and it comes in a variety of colours and weights from the art supply store.

The rural mat was also incredibly quick to make (notwithstanding drying time).