Hi all,
It's been awhile since I've been on here due to a job transfer and a move to a new city. At any rate, I've got my hobby area back up and running in a much bigger room now that previously. I wanted to show a few WIP pics of a project I've had in mind for quite awhile and tried out several times previously but never successfully. This time though I think I've figured out how to do it the right way.
The basic idea is that I wanted to be able to play a model wargame that had the ground scale of a board game, so that it wouldn't just show one battle with limited tactical options but rather the day or days leading up to a final clash, a war game with context as it were.
What I wanted was to come up with a version of War Artisan's battle mats that were zoomed out so that I could play with the brigade as the basic unit but have the brigades only be 20mm in frontage. At the same time, I wanted all the main and secondary roads to be available so that players had a lot of options for movement to contact.
Here's what I came up with.
First, I printed off some pics of the Ferraris map and zoomed them so that 20mm is equal to 300m. I didn't try to use the map as a direct example but rather to keep the road network I was working on basically in line with what the European countrysides road network would have looked like at the time (In Belgium anyways…). I then tacked down a piece of rather fine canvas to a 24" x 18" piece of foam core so that there would be no issue with glue and paint shrinkage.
The first step is to use an olive green paint to create a rough network of the roads. No need to be super neat here, in fact its better to be sloppy. The biggest purpose here is to give a nice green edge for your roads so that when you flock you won't lose your mind trying to get the white edges around the road sides to disappear. This step is super important!
Next, add in the actual roads in a lighter color, like so.
I decided after I've added the roads that I wanted to experiment with making a river a la War Artisan's mats, since this would look good running between a series of hills on either side. There's no better way to make a river than right into the mat. Now, having the river built into the mat will ultimately make your terrain a bit more "rigid" since you won't be able to move it, and since it will to a greater or lesser extent influence the elevation contours around it. Still, there is simply no better way to do it so I decided to add one. At this stage it was still pretty simple to fix:
After that, you just flock with some watered down glue. I use Tacky glue, the stuff you find in the gold bottles at the big hobby shops.
Here's what I have done so far:
When I'm completely done the mat will show 15 square miles of European road network and rivers. I'll then use tacks to pin it down over top of cotton batting and other materials to create accurate elevation lines which will allow the player to know exactly what he can and can't see. Due to the terrain scale this means that the players will get to chose the battle field, instead of having it be chosen for them like in most tactical war games. Although I'm using a European map to base this on I believe that I could just as easily use it for ACW games as well. My goal with this mat is to be able to work on a new sort of war game where the players focus more on intelligence and bringing their forces to bear within a larger context than just on the big, final tactical battle itself. For example, on this map I could ALMOST fit both Jena and Austadt together on the same table, with all the pertient elevations, villages and copses of trees between them.
Anyways, I hope you can see where I'm going with it. I'll post more pics when I get more done on it. My goal is nothing less than to do in 3mm what War Artisan does in 10mm.