"Forest stands - Trees attached or separate?" Topic

I'm building out some 15mm forests and I'm curious how other gamers build them.

Do y'all prefer to have the trees attached to the forest stand?

Or do you want the trees on their own little bases so they can be moved around the forest stand?

I'm leaning towards the second option, but I want to know how everyone feels. Thanks.

I like separate trees on a patch of dark green cloth. At the scale I game, the trees mark a generic wooded area. I can move them to make way for units. Very functional and looks nice.

You gotta keep them separated…

How else can you move troops through?

Sabot bases.
Simply make the trees on the inside base and then flock all the same.
Move the trees away but leave the base in place to denote the wooded area.

A hunt around the MDF suppliers will show bases designed for scenery as well as skirmish troop ones. The first are simpler to build as the trees require less work as they are on one big base but the skirmish one allow you to reuse trees when you want the odd one or two.

Yes, we too use a green cloth with separate based trees which move Ent/Huorn like around the troops as they march through!
So…

Much depends on the scale of game you play; skirmish actions you may want trees near the corresponding height of the figure, whereas figures based to represent large formations you may want trees one scale smaller. With 15 mm figures, we use N scale trees.

Our trees are mounted two, three or four to a base for two reasons; trees are spared the gradual loss of flock through constant handling and more importantly you need less time to clear a table.

link

Had extensive forest to build recently and it was suggested to outline the forest area and the center clear. My trees are pins so I can nail the felt to the board.

I had mine individually mounted but found they fell over too easily and, as timurilank mentions, suffered a gradual loss of flock from rubbing together.

My compromise is to mount them two or three to a base for stability and protection then use an area marker to define where the actual wood is for game purposes and move the tree bases out of the way as necessary.

I used the same approach for my orchards.

Another advantage with this approach is that you can make a bit of a diorama of the bases with bushes, rocks, tree stumps and, for the orchard, foraging pigs.

smallitalianwars.blogspot.com

Like Midlander, I mount my trees in clumps, usually of three

The individual ones just fell over all the time

I mount my trees like Midlander. Although I also have a bunch of individual trees for towns, etc.

I would like to add a bit of blasphemy- The floor of my woods (as with the bases of my group trees) is brown, like forest floors. How did using green get started?

I template with cloth and use bases like Midlander65. I try to have enough trees to cover at least a square meter of table (actually a lot more)

I have been basing mine on 50 mm squares of MDF/plywood. Just finished basing another 70 trees, ordered from wish.com – cheap!

I found a fabric pattern, with various tree types on it, at the local fabric stores. I used my wife's Serger Sewing Machine to cut it into various sized, ovals, with a finished edge. I lay down these cloths, often overlapping them to create larger forest regions. Then I plop down some tree models. The fabric denotes where the forest starts/ends, which is where the mini's pay/stop paying the extra movement costs. When models move into the forest region, I just move the tree models aside. Works well for me, and my local gamers.

I read, on TMP, I think, that you can spray the trees with a cheap hair spray, usually Aqua Net brand, to help the foliage stay on the trees. Got a can of it at Wal-Mart. I suspect any inexpensive hair spray will do the trick, but Aqua Net is very inexpensive, and usually easy to find, in the USA.

Hoping that the heavy application of Aqua Net will eliminate, or slow down, the Tree Pattern Baldness my previous trees have suffered. They must all be male tree models… Cheers!

Pan Marek makes a good point about the ground under real forest trees not being a neat green lawn.

This is something I thought about when I was re-basing my trees onto these group bases. My idea was do make some more brown leaf litter to scatter directly under the trees but I came up against some problems with that.

My wargames mat is a pale mottled green made from a sort of compacted static grass and all my figure and scenery basing is done to tone with that, with matching static grass in patches over a pale brown ground colour. For area features like woods, broken ground, scrub, etc. I cut shapes from the rubber backing of old carpet tiles and apply the same basing method, just with more bare ground. The picture below shows this before I got tired of my trees falling over and re-based them!

I found that the darker brown leaf litter I had made up just looked wrong – too strong a colour contrast with the underlying area markers – so adopted the compromise of leaving the area directly under the trees as paler brown bare ground. My justification is that, whilst more dense woods with a complete or near complete canopy don't have grass, wargames woods are quite sparse – not much more than parkland with a few trees – so having a mix of grass, bare ground and bushes looks reasonable. Also it is quite difficult to reach in under the trees to apply any sort of scenic effect.

Most of my trees are the bottle brush style with two strands of twisted wire trapping a load of bristles that are then coated in flock. Fixing these to a base is always a bit of a faff, entailing untwisting enough of the stem to bend round and glue down as well as needing to make the twisted wire look a bit more like a tree trunk. With experience, I would use a different approach. I would buy enough tubing to provide a trunk for each tree, stick those in place, texture them and do all the ground scenic effects (including some paler brown leaf litter and debris directly under the trees) then just plant the bare twisted wire core in the tubes with a bit of glue.

Orchards, of course, are typically much more open and generally do have grass beneath the trees.

Regarding Tree Pattern Baldness, (which runs in my leafy scenic family too) I've sprayed the trees, hedges and bushes with a good soaking of Woodlands Scenic's Scenic Cement (then, as a cheaper option, dilute Mod Podge Matt). It seems to help but not completely eliminate the problem.

smallitalianwars.blogspot.com

I have separate trees on heavy bases so they don't fall over and mark out the wooded areas.

I game 28mm fantasy. I have various size oval and kidney shaped area bases ranging from 6x4 up to 14x11 that mark a terrain area. Then I put model terrain on top to depict the type: trees in this case. I did individually base them and took care to make the bases stable/bottom heavy enough that the trees don't fall over. This does allow moving trees aside to let troops move through.

Hmmm … essentially the same as Midlander65 except I don't finish them in green static grass.

However when I prepare more trees, they will be two types:
- smaller (1 scale down as timurilank suggests) in clusters of 2-3 trees. I can always add a single larger tree to better depict line of sight.
- single, larger 1" diameter trunks for RPG gaming, with branches that allow placing miniatures in the trees, and removable foliage so players can see their figures.

Pan Marek:
The floor of my woods (as with the bases of my group trees) is brown, like forest floors. How did using green get started?

I wonder about that too. Although I compounded the problem by grass-flocking some of my tree bases, before I had thought about it. But my terrain area bases are textured/painted brown/darker green to imitate forest floor or swamp; when I use them with boulders to mark rough area, the color is a little off but no one objects.

Midlander +1

I have done single based on large washers, 2 or 3 trees on on larger single base, and I use small hills with larger groups of evergreens with corridors to move through them. I probably have over 200 trees based so I have allot of flexibility this way.