"How do you model the impact on the game" Topic
12 Posts
All members in good standing are free to post here. Opinions expressed here are solely those of the posters, and have not been cleared with nor are they endorsed by The Miniatures Page.
Please don't make fun of others' membernames.
For more information, see the TMP FAQ.
Back to the Game Design Message Board
Areas of InterestGeneral
Featured Hobby News Article
Featured Link
Featured Ruleset
Featured Showcase ArticleIt's probably too late already this season to snatch these bargains up...
Featured Workbench Article
Featured Profile Article
Current Poll
|
Please sign in to your membership account, or, if you are not yet a member, please sign up for your free membership account.
UshCha | 13 Nov 2016 2:28 p.m. PST |
Hills be they small or large play a key role in warfare from a very early age. Wargames are always going to struggle with there representation. Here is how we do it currently and some unpublished add on bits. How do you do it? OK so typicaly we cheat and assume the footprint of a hill is fundamentally based on the ground scale. However we assume the vertical scale is that of the models. To simplify things our hills in both 1/72 and 1/144 are standard heights. This means that typically hills of only about 3 to 6 contour say 18 to 484 ft can be covered. This can make it tricky if you have a 3 story building on the board but it is not usually a problem. The defined edge does let us define dead ground for say troops using the crest as cover. The design of the hill leads them to have a well defined crest line all round the edge and a flat top unless there is a second contour. Troops not on the edge cannot see down. Large very shallow hill sides are ignored generally as at the scale we play. Just assume some bricks under one edge to give it a tilt. Now sometimes you need to represent a crest that is outside the normal table scale. We have with some success, put a sheet of card vertical at the table edge representing the "hill" again representative of the vertical scale and again noteting that very high crests are not practical. Now the abstraction comes in. The crest is defined as say 1 km to the rear and the ground between it and the table edge is below the table edge. Troops looking/ firing from the crest are marked on the rear side and there field of view taken as that from the appropriate point on the table edge. Not geometrically correct but easy to establish and still gives the potential for dead ground on table. If the u it moves to the table edge it is assumed to do so out of sight untill it reaches the table edge, a b ain not perfect but has not been a major problem. While it may not be perfect it captures some of the requirements. For example some long range missiles can if time and terrain permit fire some 3.5km whereas normal gunfire is more typically 2000 or less. Such weapons need to be off table but not given implausible fields of view. What are the key features you need to model and how do you do it? |
Weasel | 13 Nov 2016 2:48 p.m. PST |
I must be honest and say that, mainly as a skirmish gamer, all terrain is assumed to be the exact height it is on the table, to permit "true" lines of sight. That reduces them all to gentle lumps of dirt rather than real hills but is far less head-ache inducing. For larger scale gaming, I think indicating some sort of height-levels, board game style, probably works best. You cannot see through any hill of equal or greater height level. |
Herkybird | 13 Nov 2016 3:10 p.m. PST |
|
Extra Crispy | 13 Nov 2016 8:09 p.m. PST |
In my bigger games 1"=100 yards. In that case I use true line of sight from the model base not the model. For gentle rolling ground I use "ridgeline" terrain which is a line of flock. No movement cost, blocks LOS across unless higher. |
(Phil Dutre) | 14 Nov 2016 12:40 a.m. PST |
Several points: - assuming the vertical scale of hills should be at figure scale is indeed assuming you are only modeling lumps of dirt – not hills. - "vertical" hills at table edge or even in the middle of the table have been around for a very long time. I think I encoutnered the idea in one of the 70s wargaming books – mainly to allow off-board artillery to be deployed in the surrounding hills. - if you want to do hills correctly in the military sense, we should really model military crests, not the real hill crest. There is a difference ;-) |
etotheipi | 14 Nov 2016 5:47 a.m. PST |
One of the best ways we handle this is we model crests. For flats (paper, felt, etc.(, we put a crestline on the terrain piece, for 3Dterrain, we lay a piece of string (cross stitching floss is great for this – visible yet unobtrusive) to be the crestline. For an "ideal circular" hill, there would bet two perpendicular crestlines through the center, half a radius on each side. To give interesting terrain, hills aren't circular and the crestlines aren't regular, perpendicular, or necessarily the same length. Nor do we necessarily use two crestlines; maybe more, maybe fewer. If a figure is two bases away from a crestline (between one and two), it gets +2 to its defense, and -1 to its attacks with respect to figures on the other side. At one base away, it is +1 and 0. These effects are cumulative, making shooting across two crestlines near (but not always) impossible. (Greater than two bases, no line of fire; same side, no effect. Though we do also use -1/+1 movement for going uphill/downhill.) This allows figures to tactically use the ridges and crests as cover, yet still be exposed. And it's fairly simple to remember and adjudicate. "Two and one at two, one and none at one." |
emckinney | 14 Nov 2016 11:06 a.m. PST |
Big question is what scale and era you're talking about. At largish scale and 20th century, hills are even more important as artillery OPs than as firing positions. No idea why you would put vertical scale at figure scale if figures are way out of scale with the terrain. You end up with gentle slopes that look like cliffs. Take a look at the design diary for The Guns of Gettysburg for important thoughts on hills and maps. Start near the bottom with the oldest entries. link |
UshCha | 14 Nov 2016 2:28 p.m. PST |
Emckinnley, thanks for the link. Very interesting and has very valuable insights on mapping ground for ease of interpretation. However ih our 1:1 troop representation the "hills" have to be modelled with a disparity in vertical and ground scale. In a consistent scale the hills would be in the range 50% to 25% gradient. The both would be impassible to many road vehicles when fully laden. As it is the gradient, with the disparity in ground scale still means they are in the range 3 to 7% which is passable to all vehicles (just about). |
Ottoathome | 14 Nov 2016 2:48 p.m. PST |
Dear UshCha What scale, what period? It makes a difference. I model hills as unitary objects. I model my terrain on plywood hexes with scenic effects on it and a geomorph system for ranges and ridges. The slope of a hex is at below the tangle of repose (30 degrees) to allow bases of troops to stand on it and not slide off or topple over. Everything in war games is so out of scale with regard to space that it's fruitless to attempt to give it even a nod of recognition. The method is far and away more realistic than frittering around with scales. Stand at the little clump of trees at the high point of Gettysburg and you are hard pressed to see you are on a slope at all. Stand at the start of Pickett's charge and look at the clump of trees and you can see a very gentle but definite slope up to what is called Cemetery Ridge. But that it's called a ridge is simply a generality. It's not like a razor back ridge in Atlanta. Similarly we often tend to interpret a "hill" in words as an "Alp" in our mind. Kennesaw Mountain is an Alp, Cemetery Hill is not. It also depends on the military usefulness at the moment. The old question of Little Round Top versus Big Roundtop is another. I'm not primarily a Civil War Gamer and work mostly in the 18th Century. I just use the examples above because they are known and accessible. Look at most terrain up close and personal and it is nothing like what we represent, simply because the forensics of doing so eliminate it as a significant piece of terrain in our mind. Second there is the PHYSICAL difficulty of climbing up a hill. (Moderate in the case of Little Round Top, non-existent in the case of Cemetery Ridge, Major in the case of Cemetery Hill, and then there is the PSYCHOLOGICAL difficulty of ascending a hill when we know it is held by formed troops in line with guns ready to meet us. Thus the tendency to wish to flank a hill. |
Rick Don Burnette | 15 Nov 2016 1:52 p.m. PST |
Yes, the offensive and defensive values hills give varies by many factors, some already noted. There are other factors such as air burst artillery shells, the lack of other hills(such as in the Western Desert WW2), the slope (such as in Korea) and so forth. The value of hills is quite variable |
Anthropicus | 16 Nov 2016 10:13 a.m. PST |
Great discussion. Another point that's often missed is, if you've ever tried to fence downhill, you'd quickly realize you're not as much of an advantage as you'd think. Your legs become more of a target and it becomes a farther distance to reach your opponent. Despite this, I always see the generic +1 in nearly any skirmish ruleset. A steep hill can also make it impossible to charge gracefully. But I rarely see these things addressed. |
Ottoathome | 16 Nov 2016 2:02 p.m. PST |
Good point Anthropicus. Same with other terrain, Forests seem to be great defensive points, until you've actually tried to walk around in one that's not a manicured game park, and you realize how treacherous the ground is under foot and the amount of foot-hamper you have to be careful of like small pot holes, unsteady rocks, and branches and bracken that seem to cling at the ankles. Likewise buildings and even trenches loose their benefits when the enemy is in them with you and its not always a benefit. Few will doubt or can call into question the protection from fire that they often give, though in the modern period shells set to burst on impact at the treetops and can create far more shrapnel from shattered branches, and a prolonged treatment of barrage on even a forest can be far more dangerous than to take the barrage in the open. The benefit in earlier ages from hills and woods may well have been their "invisibility" that is, the difficulty of seeing what was in or behind them than any physical cover they gave. This was forcefully demonstrated to me on a trip to Valley Forge about a decade ago. I had been there many times as a callow youth and still thought of 18th century battle as a rather more colorful version of modern war. It is not. When I was looking at the drillfield at the park where the Colonial Army put itself through Von Steuben's evolutions and learned to be soldiers, it suddenly struck me that it was a long field between two wooded expanses and that it was almost exactly the distance that a battalion in firing line would advance, and I suddenly realized that any space between two obstacles less than 300 yards was considered "a defile' because it interfered with the passage of such troops in formation. Before that "defile" conjured up something like the Khyber Pass or Thermopyla, not these rather wide expanses which nevertheless were an obstacle. The point is that in war games we tend to focus all too much on the small or the very tiny, that is the evolution of a platoon, rather than whole battalions and regiments. When you take it from that point, "Terrain" assumes a far more homogenous and large scale effect. Few at all ever consider the "flypaper" effect of terrain. In the 18th century generals feared that if they put troops in forsts and houses they would be hard put to get them out again – the very concrete opportunities for protection would make the troops loath to leave the protection they had, and also there were opportunities for desertion. In the modern period I suspect when the air had a high iron and lead content, soldiers were loath to leave what skimpy protection they had. |
McLaddie | 16 Nov 2016 3:32 p.m. PST |
Terrain has a wide variety of effects. It all depends on what is seen as important. Woods were far more of a hindrance defensively for linear warfare. Far more insidious during WWI and WII. [See all the fighting along the Ruhr and during the Battle of the Bulge. Woods and hard objects like rock outcroppings/rough terrain, brick and stone buildings and the like could fill the air with flying splinters of wood and stone from cannon fire even during the SYW/Napoleonic wars. Such dangers were well-known during the ACW. Terrain has a variety of possible effects on: 1. Movement 2. Unit cohesion 3. visibility 4. Fire combat 5. Close combat 6. Communication 7. Psychological: e.g. Otto noted the 'flypaper' effect. SYW and 19th Century officers used that in rallying troops, fence lines, roads, hedges etc. became rallying point, even though they didn't necessarily offer any protection. There could be a very rich and complex set of traits from just the seven above, where even less or more or no impact in each of the #7 could be represented. |
|