"Village Base - What is your approach?" Topic

II have tried lots of options for village bases artistically. My workaday option is just a bit of grey card used to provide a fixed base for my 1/144 houses, a necessity for a dense housing area to prevent accidental drift. The roads are sometimes laid on top loosely mainly to indicate thoroughfares and road size. They do tent to drift a bit but this has no practical impact on the game. I have also printed the roads on the base which fixes the drift. However it does not match my other card roads so it really does not improve looks. I have glued sections of roads on the base, so they match the rest of the roads but it's a pain and only a bit of an artistic improvement, probably not enough to justify the effort.
Then there is the base, I have tried simple patterns on the basic card, but I am not sure I feel they look better for this. To be honest some in my club have bought a battle mat clearly to represent an urban area and placed buildings on it. However it to me does not make much of an improvement, but some.
There is the option to make a proper base for a single village configuration with the pavements curving correctly and all the paving stones of the walkways accurately aligned with the road, but frankly that is WAY too much work as I have a LOT of village configurations.
So do you make it perfect at a huge cost in time or do like me just make do with less than perfect for expediency? Have you got a trick or a secret Jpg that makes an ideal looking base with minimal effort? Where do you stand on this issue?

When I use a module with a village map, I make a photocopy of it so we can mark it up as needed. I base my PC's out of a decent sized, laminated JG map of Tarantis. I had two laminated copies made at OfficeMax. We mark these up with water-erase pens.

Business supply stores offer both B&W and Color copying, with enlarge/reduction options! They offer lamination, too! I copied the JG Tarantis maps, with lamination, for <$10 per copy!

I would suggest gluing a photocopy of your village to foamcore, color as needed; lamination is optional. You can use colored pins for PC's moving about. For combat scenes, break out miniatures and a Chessex vinyl mat, terrain is optional. Cheers!

The options have to be set by the rules. If they involve shooting through windows and coming in through doors, the buildings have to be fixed, which can be tricky. But if the whole village is the garrisoned area--or a single "rough terrain" area--my preference is a single sheet of something, with the buildings themselves decorative and moved as convenient. Top choices are textured masonite painted black and dry-brushed gray, which hints at cobblestones or flagstones, or felt in either cobblestone gray or dirt tan, which is much more forgiving over any irregularities in the board. Textured paper from some place like Hobby Lobby also looks nice, but generally has to be painted. Individual cobblestones to fix the place of a house seems like much too much work to me. Maybe for a convention game, but not every year

Tbh I mainly play grand tactical games so I just use templates with moveable buildings as scenery.

If I'm doing something skirmishy, I place individual buildings and they don't move around.

robert piepenbrink – Textured paper seems interesting, but does it stay really flat. I could glue it onto card but it would not stay flat I suspect. I use glue on card OK but large areas would make me suspicious. I could perhaps use the paper and spray it, that is what I do with roads and that stays flat. Worth pursuing.

I use fixed bases (crude, simple, quick and Fold flat of course). They are needed as houses are representative, so need to line roads and convey limitations in fire arcs and ranged fire. They need to be fixed at this scale as movement at this scale of only millimetres makes a difference. At 1/72 far less so. Far to few for the ground scale but we can usually map a small village at ground scale to get most if not all roads but at the sacrifice of gardens due to ground scale to model scale variance.

Sgn Slag -Alas the photo bit does not work, the models are 25 time (by area) than the photo hoses at table scale.

Seems a plain base is a common standard just about what pattern. I guess nobody has a preferred jpg to use as the base texture. piity it was one of my hopes.

I'm sorry UshCha. I answered generally, forgetting your gaming preferences. Overall, I'd say your boards are pretty abstract for dealing with individual flagstones, and Masonite--fibreboard to you, I think--is probably too thick. So I'll double down on textured paper, but mark the building outlines with a fine black line and, if your board permits, pin the paper in place. If you can't pin, second choice would be rubber cement or a spray cement of some sort. Second choice would be gray felt.

UshCha,

Do you have any photos of your villages, you can share? I just lay my buildings separately and loosely. If the rules require town blocks, I use grey material or cobblestone paper, used in model railroading and still just place the building (s) on it. I never mount them rampantly on anything.

Are 3D printed villages an option?

Old Contemptible : couple of pictures:-

NOTE all buildings are 1/144 scale (about 12mm figure size).

The 3 story building have a Hybrid structure a two floor internal structure Fold flat but with a detachable 3D printed support. The building slips over it so you can place troops on the appropriate floor. This uses a plain baseboard.

More typical village except it has half buildings to sit against the Backdrop.

79thPA – 3D printed is out too much storage required. All the buildings fold flat. If they did not there would be no room for me in the Mancave

Ah, yes, I forgot that you use folding houses.

For 28mm skirmishes with single figures, a house is a house. A tree is an immovable object. Streets are as wide as I make them, and if something doesn't fit, it doesn't fit.
No "templates", as in 15mm AK-47. There the unit and figure scale are very different.