"Village design - The tough one" Topic

Yesterday I was designing yet another village. To me one of the tougher Jobs in wargaming. Anybody can plonk a few houses down and call it a village. However we have a number of design contraints that make it one hell of a job to create a plausible looking village that meets the requirements below.

- For playability there is a notional limit of about 15 houses max. Many more and the game can become tedious, more houses does not mean more tactical challenges.
-There should be no easy through routes that can be used to split the village by Machine gun fire, this makes the problems far too simple as its relatively easy to split the village making it much easier to take.
- The design should be such that an external weapon or Mahcine gun has no easy access to the houses internal to the village, so just shooting up the houses say with a tank parked safely out the way and then storming them is not possible. Either the Grunts do without the support or they have to escort AFV's in.

Now I appreciate in some places in the world, like the US many towns and villages are built on the block system, about as boring as it gets wargames wise. However Europe, particularly places like Normandy have interesting complex layouts so a decent design should not look too out of character.

How do you cope with village design?

If before, or during, 1998:

Get RAF to drop a WE.177 – 200KT should deal with any pesky villagers.

I don't know what a "grunt" is. But armour ought only be utilised when it is absolutely necessary. Clearing a small village is an infantry/sapper job.

Grunt = infantry soldier

Sadly, one starts with economics and overall geography. Fishing villages are not shaped like market villages at crossroads, and villages at fords or bridges are different again. In especially flat terrain, villages are on the high ground. In hill country, they're in valleys. But you are going to have to decide whether you want the village which is most tactically interesting, or the most realistic for the time and place. Can't help you with that one, but I was intrigued to note that all your specific requirements were focused on tactics. Not your normal approach.

Stoppage, they taught me that "no armor in the villages" bit too, but when Creighton Abrams was driving to relieve Bastogne, he was clearing villages with teams of one rifle company and one medium tank company. Descriptions of Germans clearing us out of villages are similar, though there was agreement that the "big cats" were not suited for such work. I don't think there's a universal rule, but we may be making such hulking great monsters of "medium" tanks these days that they mostly won't fit where a Sherman or a Panzer IV would have.

I usually base village layouts on maps or the ones used in training manuals in the 'how to clear villages' section.

Curved roads and staggered junctions prevent excessively easy inspection by fire, and extensive foliage on the outskirts and/or a core of buildings around the village square or green with an extra layer on the outside prevent too much external fire.

It is far easier to do these layouts with BUA templates than trying to model all the individual buildings and walls though. You can always subdivided each template area into notional 'houses' for the look of the thing.

The village in 'Infantry Fieldcraft and Training' is a simple crossroads with buildings radiating along each road, but it still takes a whole company to clear it, allowing for cutoff elements etc.

Failed to mention building materials--and me an ex-contractor. Makes a serious difference whether buildings are wattle and daub, adobe or big stone blocks, so what works in East Anglia won't always get you far in the Cotswalds. When I was with the 101st, the breakpoint was whether or not a .50 cal would go through the walls.

If we're designing our village around tactical considerations – then we ought also consider whether prepared defence versus hasty.

Q1. Would a 0.50 go through 12 inches of sandstone walling?

If so then I'd better start digging!

Q2. Is three layers of overlapping sandstone tiles (each 36 x 18 x1 inches) proof against mortar fire?

If not then I'd better start on my OHP!

Q3. Re 1944 inf trg: Baggsie I pull the string of anti-tank mines across the road directly in the path of approaching armour.

@UshCha – You can be in the road-side-ditch next to me and play "gruntie" by placing the sticky-bomb/gammon-bomb actually on the armour :)

Assuming that you don't have an actual map that you want to copy, I may design the town around the scenario.

Would one find walls around some European villages?

Sewer or tunnel systems would add uncertainty to the attack, especially if the attacker did not have intel about this feature.

Canals or small bodies of water such as streams would complicate things.

I don't know if that is what you are looking for, but they are challenges.

Usually build villages around roads – often crossoroads – and use 5 – 6 buildings or so plus or minus a woodlot or two and some fields

robert piepenbrink I was intrigued by you being intrigued by my approach. As a wargamer the primary aim is to fight interesting battles.

A boring village however artful would be an utter waste of a good night, so Tactical design seems to me to be a paramount requirement.

Certainly in the flat lands I live in flat villages are not uncommon so some plausibility is maintained.

Now in the UK we do have Towns built on very steep slopes probably as High as 15%. However that would be difficult' Hexon II has a slope of about 25% but designing houses to sit on the slopes at various angles would push the bit count up beyond what was practical even for fold flat buildings so that is a none starter. It was bad enough having to generate tree bases to stand on the slopes.

As an after thought, could you 3D print some sort of halfway decent base capable of holding a building at complex angles, while looking at least vaguely plausible as a bit of a sloping bottom story?

Integrating hedges into the system to help is not really one I have actively investigated. Yes I have used them but perhaps have not spent enough time and thought on better integrating them into the overall village design rather tan just an ad hoc add on. Great idea. Thanks.

Hmm. I'm sure you could 3D print some sort of base to deal with slope. But I bet you foam and a knife--or Styrofoam and a hot wire--will get you there a lot faster.

We ALL want interesting games, UshCha. But I'd have expected the guy who tracks ammo loads, worries about the number of rails on a gate and won't play over 1:1 to be more concerned with how villages are really laid out than with designing them to make them interesting to defend or attack.

Surely the way to get interesting games is to use the geography of a real village rather than contrived to "make things more difficult"?

Google Maps is your friend …

UshCha, the problems with your constraints are that the factors of concern to you are not of any concern to the people laying out the footprint of a village. So, in that regard, you can do whatever you want to do.

In answer to quite a few of the same question. One to one even is not possible. Your say, 1/72 sacle figure, the ones I did the study on, take up more groundscale than a real person so actaully even real 1:1 is not possible. Threfore at whatever ratio of figure scale to ground scale ratio you use there will be issue. Therfore some level of approximatioin is required. Currently our games use 1:144 scale figures/vehicles and 1:1000 ground scale a ratio of 6.944 :1 Approx.

For area scale items like buildings this gives a 48 to 1 area ratio. Meaning 1 house model reopresents 48 Houses (roughly).

Now at that groundscale you can represnt (admittedly oversize) most linear features, hedges, roads, ditches ect. without too much obvious distortion. You can and I have for some larger villages used real village plans. You can gwenerally get the road layout approximately right, usually as they are narrow roads. However its impossible to get the houses and gardends represented. At
baest you can get Houses, sans gardens in the road network.

This then gives a scale to the required approximations. Now given that even our Hexon II has limitations both in scale and bulk to accurately reflect real complex terrain in some cases you can see the limitations creeping in.

As I pointed out, with the house on a slope that you seem to have missed. Sculpting a foam base in an individual basis is impractical for us. I have neither storage capacity to store the near infinite number of bases required to cover ourone or even two ganes per week. Fine perhaps for those who play just a few times a year.

Similarly trolling maps to find a suitable village, simplify the contoures, manufacture village bases at a rate of 2 per week is just not credible. Faffing colouring and making terrain is not my, hobby fighting battles is.

Hence folks you really have not considered the practical scale of what you propose. I have done it in the past and it dopes use huge amounts of time but as a one off it counts as resarch so is an acceptable use of time. This gives some experience as to the range of the plausible, both of the configuration of the real world and the limitations of real world to wargame scale modelling. This informs my village planning so that waht you get is something plausible, but if used wisely is more flexible than a real world desighn so reduces the work load somewhat as it may be reused in diffent setitngs reucing workload.

And so we have failed you once more. Sorry UshCha.

Don't worry UshCha – RPPB is pulling your leg.

PS. There is still space for you in my ditch – there is some SPAM boiling up on my primus to go with our brew.

robert piepenbrink – As usual I seem to plough a different furrow to many. But different ideas can trigger different ideas that otherwise I may not have thought of, like better integration of foliage into the design concept.

" However that would be difficult' Hexon II has a slope of about 25% but designing houses to sit on the slopes at various angles would push the bit count up beyond what was practical even for fold flat buildings so that is a none starter. It was bad enough having to generate tree bases to stand on the slopes."

Use yarn for contour lines (on flat terrain. Yes, you are giving up visual "height", but your ground scale is probably so out of wack it shouldn't be noticeable anyway. Hey, it works for maps…)
Place buildings on the tops of hills instead of on slopes (unless you are fighting in Los Angeles, where quite a few people build on hillsides.)
Use a sand table. The terrain can be easily stored in sacks between games, and doesn't take up as much storage space as many believe. Plus, tree foliage can be stuck in almost anywhere.
You'll figure it out… ;-)

Zephyr1 Sand table "really" in the UK? ;-). It would weigh an enormouse amount, 200kg about 440+ lb. Getting that up and downstairs and the loft ladder at my age and down again. I struggle with 20lb loads ;-). A few sacks? 120 20lb sacks may be a few to you but its lots to me!

Plus sculpting a load of sand to a pre-defined map looks one heck of a job, but less than trying to map a sand table configuration to a map. Mind you there may be an opertunity for AI driven model soldieres to do the survering, as long as the labour rates are minimum.

Contour lines, We did consider that but our contour reading fu is not good enough to work out sightlines across complex hill systems quickly, key to a decent game.

What we have done is modular. I take a square or rectangle with about a 300 to 600 yard footprint, in scale. [about 6 inches on a side] I determine how many troops could occupy that area and leave those base sizes clear and build houses etc. around those base areas. Obviously, there is no house scale etc. Just a BUA that looks good. If I need a larger village, two bases, etc. Between the long and square village footprints, it allows for a reasonable shaped village. If I just have to have a round or curved base, I make one. This saves us all the hassle of trying to fit stands in or around our village base and provides a way to build the village of your dreams… I mean needs.

So finally I have taken pics of the village I was trying to design while this tread was on. I was not at my best at the time and the design is a bit poor.
Front picture shows a clear sightline through the houses allowing an enemy to isolate a section.

Attacked from the Church end it's not too bad with some protected houses to make the attackers life hell.

Again not too bad from the end opposite the church but the road through is a definite weakness. Ah well maybe next time I will do better.

Last pic just shows how we can have troops on ground or first floor and the house stays in fixed position, vital with 1/144 scale models.

You could always use an old map.

Mark J Wilson _ ground scale differences make that impractical. In reality my house (more or less my house the "semi" in these pictures has a bigger garden than the house. The house represents 25 houses on area scaling so there is a massive disparity. I have looked at modelling gardens at model scale but even if you do, you can't get the figures inside the hedges, and small buildings and in my garden's case a very small 5 person WW 2 air raid shelter. So to compensate and get the very limited sight lines of an urban area you close the houses up a bit.

We did model a real small village close to us and we could get the road map about right but obviously far to few buildings. However real villages like real terrain can be not that challenging, too easy to attack so you can end up with a boring game. To be honest searching thousands of real villages on say, Google maps to find a good one would make watching Paint dry look like a blockbuster movie.

"To be honest searching thousands of real villages on say, Google maps to find a good one would make watching Paint dry look like a blockbuster movie".

Ah you're one of those people who's not really committed to the hobby then :-P

Mark J Wilson + Clearly I am a faild wargamer, spending far too much time playing instead of what wargaing is really about, endless hours of painting and dreaming of games, very bad form I appreciate to actually play and even worse to play every week. ;-)

UshCha, I'm the real failure because 20 plus years ago I realized that I wasn't that interested in playing/winning I was more interested in the historical research and developing systems/rules.

Mark J Wilson, I hung on, still like plkaying but the rules thing is vital, most sets are so "simplified" that thay fail give a credible game. Reasearch is what makes the game fun. This is a real issue, how do you solve it, manuals rearly are helpful in real world situatings which are not the oversimplified situations in manuals. I would be intereting to know what your take is on rules for this period is; key drivers etc.