"Buildings as Game pieces." Topic

I have only been in the business of buildings as serious game pieces since about the Rise of Stargrunt II. This was the first game that too me began capturing elements of urban warfare in a credible way. Along came our rules in 2008 and urban warfare was well on its way to being satisfactory. We had buildings with 3 floors, ground, 1st and 2nd floors and a flat roof. We considered this a good practical limit in terms of stability in play. At that point access was not an issue, being 1/72 based figures. Figures could be placed in the relevant spots from the windows which were cut out. The style was a deliberate Homage to Lional Tarr's Starlingrad featured in Featherstones War Games. Lower 2 story buildings had a 1st floor accessible by lifting the roof of the buildings, we had already created our Fold flat style of buildings though not at that time were they available to buy. By 2010 we were not happy with 1/72 miniature's they did not really allow realistic deployment of armour, the ground scale to model scale being distorted beyond what we considered acceptable. We then sampled all the available scales at that time, 15mm (much of which was nearer 20mm than 15mm), 6mm, and at the time a very new scale 1/144. For the next 14 or so years our gameplay focused mainly on rural battles with small local urban battles which has been great fun. We still maintain a small 1/172 scale set of mintures but they are rarely used as 1/144 does almost as well as a replacement and is far better in other ways. However in a recent encounter we were discussing post game how we might do a 3 story building playable with 1/144 miniature's.
This poses 2 key issues, access s to place the miniatures and monitoring the position of the mintures within the building.
Taking access first, there are as far as I can see, two possibilities (but please chip in if you have any other experience.
Noting separately what the kit is on a separate piece of paper already been rejected as a methodology, as cumbersome and time consuming and against our ethos of requiring all records to be "on table".
So our options are some layered model with removable sections each giving access to a floor. This looks cumbersome, in that you need to remove too many pieces and is far less compatible with fold flat buildings, key for storage space which is limited given the vast number of buildings we need to store.
The second option is to have the building as a sleeve over a separate fee standing internal structure. Such a free standing structure would need to be at least in part a 3D printed support to maintain the structural integrity of the internal structure, However it may be possible to make this removable so maintaining the option for Fold flat terrain so beloved by us. What is your opinion?
The other issue is monitoring.
We have some "artistic" 3 story buildings but the absence of any form of internal structure invalidates them as gaming pieces. Cutting out the windows of these bigger buildings would allow visual monitoring of the mintures position, key in some aspects of game play. However they would be artistically different to the lower buildings that have a window pattern drawn on. Again what is your opinion?

PS sorry if this is worse than normal but I am recovering from heart surgery, not all of which went as smoothly a I would have hoped.

I would simply draw a footprint of the building and note which troops are on the various floors, but I don't think that is your style of gaming.

Anyway, I was getting worried about you and I was going to start a post to see if anyone has heard from you. Here is hoping for a smooth recovery.

instead of using a lift off roof, perhaps a fold away wall to allow access to the interior? You might need long tweezers to reach troops on the far side of the building or you could have different walls that fold away.

79th PA, thankyou for that. Recovery is very slow but making progress, should even be back to mriding a bike in a few months.

79th Pa thinking takes time at the moment. However having though aboutt your idea it is potentially not as quick and efficent as it first appears.

1. even three story buildings can vary significanttly in height. So you need to record the actual height of each floor depending on the building it depicts. This could be cruitail if trying to see over diffrent buildings.

2 You would probably need a sophisticated dry wipe floor plan. I don't know about you but my opponet rarely if ever decides to conform to my battle plan, so I usually have to re-depoly to the other flanks as he got his positioning wrong!

3) Plus the base can be a bit crowded when you are trying to depict 3 sets of elements, roughly life size to avoaid stupid troop dencities, one above the other.

All in all the time it apprently saves is not what you thought.

You can get to "fold flat" I think--but the price in time and realism may be too high. Easy to make interior walls fold flat and place them on a floor/ceiling. But now your 3-story buildings require three fold flat sets of interior walls, four floors/ceilings a fold-flat roof and a removeable skin--nine components, four of which might easily fold flat when you don't want them to--and coridors and walls at right angles will create difficulties for fold flat even then--a problem which I fear will also defeat your hopes of a complete fold-flat core. I would certainly have a very robust prototype before committing to either system.

Plan B would be a free-standing interior, a built roof and a removeable skin. Trickier to store, but only three components, none likely to fold up on you.

Plan C would be to build each story complete: floor (which will be the ceiling of the next floor down) and walls with windows and possibly doors, and separate roof units. Give or take a church, this will give you villages but not cities. In the interests of wargaming efficiency, the buildings should have the same footprint so any ground floor works with any higher story which works with any roof for rapid assembly and takedown--assuming all exteriors are a uniform white or beige, of course. I think this might be your best bet, but it's going to cost you a file box or two of storage.

Cold truth is, the sort of detailed, track every man game you want for urban comes at a price either in detailed record-keeping or in bulky terrain. Note that you don't seem prepared to pay that price for woodlands: doesn't look as though you keep track of which side of a tree an infantryman is on or whether someone is up in the tree. Neither way is wrong, but you may want to be consistent.

Anyway, rest and get better. Good luck, and keep us informed.

Hmm. Regarding cities. As late as the last years of the Cold War there was discussion that, while villages remained pretty much as they had been in WWII for combat purposes, no one had really done house to house fighting in modern cities with their high proportions of glass and steel, and no one was really sure how this would play out "when the balloon went up." Played hob with terrain analysis.

If you actually want to do cities, you'll need to be sure where the city is and how it was constructed at the time of your games--and it would be very helpful to find accounts of someone fighting through similar construction in the various post-Cold War conflicts.

Is there enough information publicly available to actually model modern urban warfare?

Where is the info on:
* Grozny
* Iraq
* Syria
* Ukraine
* Gaza city
* Lebanon
* etc, etc

Are training manuals available for Ruzzian Federation, IDF, various and assorted nasties, etc?

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I seem to recall that – on creating a strong-point – a lot of shoring-up of floors and ceilings using timber, bricking-off of entryways, filling volumes with danert-coil, mouseholing upper storeys, grenade-proofing firing points with tables and sand-bags, digging into cellars for ground-level emplacements. And hiding all the vehicles in barns with the aerials poking up in adjacent buildings.

The above, of course, was part of a planned defence in a semi-rural context (North German Plain). As RPPBK points out – how would one fortify a western-european steel-framed building cased in glass – if at all.

And, of course, good fortune with your recovery.

These are useful toys during (and after) convalescence:

* BHF – Pulse oximeter

* BHF – 6-lead ECG monitor

* Archive – UK Infantry training 1944

Soppage

The distric nurse comes with those gedgets when needed, much less hasstle.

Some issues are covered by WW2 experience. Russians on the third floor in Starlingrad wew protected pretty much from mortars as the bombs go off on the roof.

Similarly troops on higher floors were protected from Anti tank rounds as the tank could not get far enough away to elevete the gun to hit the 3rd floor.

robert piepenbrink, our buildings are an approximation, typically too small a footprint to allow actual internal detail. to allow the level of detail you imply,so would make the buildings too far from ground scale, as it is the basic troops are 7 to 1 lineear scale out from the ground scale.

Not sure of the physics but this discrepncy seems to get more noticeable for larger structures.

In our case the buildings are styalised so that its just about, with some BIG compromises, to represent an actual urban road plan foe relatively small conerbatios.

It never was or will be an aspiration of ours to to model detail down to the size of a tree trunk, be it furnature, or tree trunk.

Abstraction of detail is always a key bone of contention in the real world as well as in wargaming. I would love to have a glib one liner on this but it depends criticlly as what the designers objectives are and what constitutes minor detail and what is key data for the model.

There are roumours that multi sory car parks can be the new fortresses due to ther inherent strength, being somewhat resistant to even modest size bombs and artillery rounds.

OK, then the question is what level of detail are you seeking for the buildings? Do you need story, or where on the story each soldier is? And if you need to know where he is, is a quadrant sufficient?

For "in the building" you don't really need anything. The old Charles Grant exterior and rubble foundation work fine.

For story, my inclination would be separate stackable stories, and accept the loss of space against ease of set up and takedown.

If a quadrant is sufficient, I'd go with floor, cross-shaped divider in two parts, then another floor. Add skin and roof and you're in business.

But I'd also keep in mind that there are many places where the homes are not seven Piepenbrinks wide or deep--mine, for instance.

What needs to be recorded is.

1 Story, ground,1st,2nd floor or flat roof.
2 Position along the long face of the building (it may be 200m ground scale).
3 The arc of fire within the limitations of the building. I assume this is what you mean by arc. Left flank, right flank etc.

large buildings are scaled down to minimize the Ground scale to model scale discrepancies. On that basis detailed interior layout is not possible.

That has got to be one of the longest run on paragraphs I have ever encountered. Brake it up into more paragraphs and make it easier for people to read.

If thais was aimed at me.

"PS sorry if this is worse than normal but I am recovering from heart surgery, not all of which went as smoothly a I would have hoped."

@old C.

For difficult passages I sometimes cut and paste into a text editor and then format it to my own taste.

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Re: Brake/Break. I've noticed – among US writers – confusing usage of these words. Brit usage of these two words:

Brake: I ordered 2 platoon to put the brakes on their advance so they wouldn't out-distance the covering mortar fire.

Break: You can break my rules by not reading and comprehending them properly. Do not disturb me during my tea break. For success during the defence you must apply firepower to break-up the enemy attack.

Soppage, do yopu consider it normal and "on Topic" to give un-asked for engish language lectures for no good reson?

Now back on topic. Deespite the hadicaps, I have made good progress. One 3D print adds sufficent strength to the internl structure of the building that it operate perfectly well. The support can be slipped out to allow a standard fold flat system to work. Vital for me as I need so many buildings, an 8ft by 6ft board may have as many as 3 small villages on it so 40 to 50 houses, That would take masses of storage space I don't possess.

I may be able to get picyures tomorrow of the buildings on a base.

Now how do you feel about modular villages? i.e putting 1/144 villags on bases that can be organised in diffrent patterns. Never been keen myself, but the 3 story buildings do seem to be crying out to be on a seprate base that can be integrated with more common buildings. Have you any experience of this? I put 1/144 buildings on bases (but of course fold flat bases) as the house patterns can be massively changed if a house moves even a few millimeter from it's opposite numbers during the coures of a game.

Anybody got any tips or tricks on this?

@UC

No – not normal at all – I don't like being picked-upon by grammar/spelling bores either.

Old C put the boot in and then tripped up on un-tied boot laces. Careless.

I've played and run a lot of StarGrunt II in conventions and non-convention settings (maybe not a lot: probably 50 or so games over about 10 years). Most scenarios involved some amount of buildings, from parts to cities, to the areas around space ports, to corporate campuses.

I've always used 25mm miniatures for StarGrunt. I never thought about other scales. The scale for ground, buildings, and vehicles is "it looks OK". I've never measured a shoe box to determine whether it should be 2 or 3 storeys.

I never put a force larger than a reinforced company on the table. That would be something like 3 or 4 APC-mounted infantry platoons (of 2 or 3 squads each), an APC-mounted company HQ, and an on-table artillery element (rockets or mortars). That allows the players to use the "transfer action" (terrible misleading name) rules very well.

Forces were usually quite a bit smaller, such as a platoon attacking a dug-in squad, or a squad ambushing a platoon.

Buildings were usually made of boxes, particularly shoe boxes, thick paper food carry-out boxes, and plastic food product boxes (especially tofu, for which I thank my Chinese wife). The carry-out and food product boxes often have nice textures that look great with a little dry-brushing. Shoe box lids are nice flat roofs with a low wall. I've made a lot of roof greeblies, from HVAC to radar dishes (and a few door or other wall greeblies).

I just leave the boxes empty inside. I may cut doors and even windows. I wrote rules for movement through doors and windows (and other breaches) and within buildings, and for shooting into, out of, or within buildings. I put in a die type shift for close assaulting from outside of a building.

Combat inside buildings is thus somewhat abstract. I just assume that there are walls and furniture and whatever, which make movement slower (especially for armored troops) and make combat more difficult.

As a grognard, I of course made tables for all of this (and integrated it with the original movement rules, which don't cover buildings).

All troops that are in a shoe box are in the shoe box. It doesn't really matter if they are on different floors. I'm not going for the level of granularity of SPI's Sniper from the 1970s.

All troops in other types of boxes are on the roof with a counter indicating that they are inside.

I also wrote rules for buildings catching fire, which has happened more than a few times.

I put boxes into other boxes as much as possible to store them. I don't hesitate to throw them away when they get dinged up or if I run out of space.

Oberlindes Sol LIC . Seems reasonable to me. We all have different aspirations. We moved on from SG2 for various reasons it ranging is SI FI so can't criticise that, but it did not work for us in the progressive move from SI FI to Modern. Almost all our are a minimum of a re-enforced company so the pre-urban battle often features to a greater extent. That's just personal choice.

Stoppage you clearly seem to feel like you have a right to inflict your Language pedantry on others regardless. So be it, but it wins you no favores from me.

UshCha: I think we're on the same page about using what works for the group.

I should also recommend Dirtside, which I have played a few times, for battles with larger units. It is also a GZG product and the mechanics are similar to StarGrunt. It does not address buildings.

GDW's Striker and Striker II provide a lot more granularity in designing vehicles and weapons at different levels of technology and have rules for demolitions and combat engineering as well as their own approach to command and control. They are intended for 15mm miniatures, with the fireteam (typically 4 troopers) or individual vehicle as the basic unit. The terrain rules don't address buildings.

Oberlindes Sol LIC. I did play Dirtside for a while. However it's 6mm but by then we were less impressesd by SI FI it lakcked the real world bits like small vehicles and as you state, was becomming too broad brush for us ,like no buildings not suitable for our needs. After may mods to SG2, it had some great innovations, but alas for us some definite steps back in places.

Hemce after much soul searching we started out from almost scratch to write our own rules (Maneouvre Group) which we have played for the last 16 years. However our rules were inspired by the advances I fist saw in Stargrunt 2.

The new buildings in this thread are down scale's as far as is prectical from those we used For SG2 all those years ago.

First best wishes on your recovery.

I have encountered many of the same issues with buildings on the tabletop.

I have not entirely solved the issues with either the physical models or game play involving buildings.

Any model terrain, including buildings, needs to allow us to place the bases our model soldiers are on in the proper locations. I have a few buildings with disproportionately wide balconies just so I can fit the figures there.

I hate jumping back and forth between a separate floor plan, or removed and set aside upper story. It doubles the space required and it disassociates the model from the battlefield.

And then there is storing those bulky, rigid boxes. Even in small scales buildings are big!

So as promised some pictures of the new models.

The first two are of the outside, with 1/144 models to give an idea of size.

The last one shows the cover removed to show the separate internal floors.

Note in practical trials the outer cover of the building, with the roof and the figures placed on it can be removed without disturbing the positions of the figure on the roof.

The internal floor system is a Card/3D print hybrid a first for me. The 3D print support quickly pulls off allowing the floor system to fold flat. Similarly the outside walls and roof can be folded flat by simply raising the roof and then folding.

As the buildings need a bit of pressure to hold them flat, card is a bit springy, it's hard to show them in their compressed form.

However in the middle picture at the back you can see the troop box, its a bit proud of the table top. In that gap is 3 more identical buildings in the fold flat state. Shows how much space is saved,

It only occurred to me today. The 1/72 model version does have a WW2 Skin as well. As they are the same size the outer skin could be replaced with one looking more WW2( ish).

You will have to forgive the awful base in the picture but my Artistic Fu left me today so I could not settle on a decent layout. Hence use of a crude base just to show off the building.