"Skirmish terrain in dense forest (Hurtgen Forest)" Topic

The Hurtgen forest would make for some great small scale skirmishes, but I can't find how to represent dense woodlands that look decent, but still is playable. I play mainly in 15mm scale.

Has anyone tried to do that?

How about treat everything as dense woodland and only model the clearing,roads etc.and use blinds to simulate unidentified troops.

That is exactly what I did when I played scenarios from The Big Hurt from THW. Scattered a little bit of flocking out to show that it was wooded and then made it a little sense are the edges of where open areas were, putting in longer grass for the clearings.

I make my woods to be "Light Forest" and "Dense Forest".

For both: I buy RR model trees that have a stump and separate tree trunk. I mount the stump on a metal base and flock. This works great for a shell burst that would fell a tree or chopped down tree for roadblock, etc. From there, I make an exterior outline of the forest with tree bases an inch or two apart. I then randomly fill in the area with additional trees.

Light Forest: As above filled in with a smattering of trees.

Dense Forest: As above with more trees in interior plus some lichen thrown in as ground cover.

For both: Obviously your rules should reflect a difference in moving, sighting, combat, etc. from one type to another.

How skirmishy are you wanting to be? Is a single tree trunk cover?

Actually pretty easy. My wife picked up several large pieces of cloth at Joanne's or one of those sewing and craft stores. You can use different shades to model light, medium and heavy woods. The material looks quite a bit like fallen leaves. Cut various sizes and place on table. The edges define the edges of the forest for things like line of sight. You can then lay any roads or trails on the cloth.

NOW take all those trees you have and use to provide a 3 dimensional look. The nice thing is you can displace the trees slightly to move units but unlike many games where you use just lichen and tree models you dont end up with a mobile forest!

Ends the endless arguments about where exactly the forest edges are. Is line of sight blocked. Did that portion of the forest used to be in a slightly different location when the game started :)

<q?How skirmishy are you wanting to be? Is a single tree trunk cover?

I use Easy Eight Battleground rules. They have a modifier for light woods and heavy woods, so individual trees don't matter.

To play reasonably conveniently, you need to have fewer trees than in real life, so you can see and move the troops in the forests, so just space the trees as you prefer, and can afford, for your games.

Alternatively, I guess you could go with denser forests that have liftoff tops, and that just leave tree trunks below when you do that, spaced at the true scale densities required.

There are a few tutorials around on how to do canopy woods that look absolutely amazing for smaller scales, where you just lift entire sections of the canopy supported by just few sturdy piles. I think it would also work at a pinch for 15mm

There is a balance between how realistic you want your scenery to look vs how playable it is. I have seen the method Marc33954 uses a lot. I even use it myself if I'm playing against over-competitive players who will argue with you about where the boundary to the forest is.

I more visually appealing method is to use single trees spread out in an area for light forest. Sprinkle lichen in and around them for additional ground cover and this can also be used to mark the boundary since bushes primarily grow around the edges.

For heavy forest you can mount several trees to a base and scenic the base up with stumps, fallen timber, bushes or whatever to show it is impassable and place these around the heavy forested area.

You can move the trees, heavy forest bases & lichen around inside the forest area to make way for troops since the individual placement of trees doesn't matter.