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Hey fellas, im starting a DKOK army at the moment, and what is a DKOK army with out muddy trenches, torn to shredds no mans land, burnt and blistered trees, barbed wire, and mine fields, and in tact and destroyed bunkers and hide outs!
Im looking for ideas, pics, and how to ( if you can provide it!) im on a relatively cheap budget so i probably wont be going out to buy a lemun russ to cut it in half and have it sinking in the mud.... if you catch my drift.... The ideas could be funny ideas, ironic ideas, or just plain awesome! when im done with this project ill be sure to post many pics.
Few topics to get you going
cheap source of making:
mud for the whole board
trenches
craters
casualty models and skeletons, find a cheap way of doing this and you get a medal! lol probably not from me though, im broke ....
I know DKOK are not funny and not ironic in any way but i figured why cant the terrain be!

links to awesome dioramas and pics or trenches of 40K and historical are very much welcome!

thanks for reading and responding!
Tony A.

Google is your friend, but here's a link to something I've been contemplating for awhile: http://www.instructables.com/id/WWI-Trench-Model/#intro

thanks buddy, those look great!

Questions do not belong in the Tutorials section. Please read the sticky before posting.

~~~~~


I did have a link for a really good (and relatively cheap if i remember properly) trench system. Let me see if i can dig it up for you.

Best way for you to get skeletons is just to go out and buy a box of skeletons. I believe Mantic games does a big box of Skeles for a good price. That should give you enough to litter any battlefield with corpses.

And as Matney said, Internet is your friend. Try searching for what you want. It's usually quicker then relying on others to do your dirty work for you. (See what i did there... huh did ya? War torn battle field/Dirty work... get it get it get it.....? *sigh* I'll be in the corner not talking)

Barbed wire, get some pipe cleaners and burn the crap off them (outside), they look like barbed wire.

For the trenches, get balsa wood at art store, also dowels, these materials are cheap and go a long way. For sandbags, get fimo and bake it (lots of tuts out there how to do this)... will be cheaper than using greenstuff to make it.

For mud, use spackle from hardware store.

Skeletons, cheapest way I've found is the wargames factory ones. You get a box for $20, and it provides many skeleton parts in plastic and they are naked skeletons, without extra bits on them you have to pick off. modelling casualties can get very challenging and/or expensive if you want to model actual dead soldiers in uniform and mutilated as they should be.

^ Ditto
Kreig are trenchers above all, giving them trenchs (count as aegis defence line) and see them roar.

thanks fellas!... these are great suggestions!
@snrub sorry bout posting the question.
also i have been looking online, just checking if fellow gamers have any ideas they which might be better.
Thanks again fellas!
Tony A.

Theres also options of using tamia terrain kits that you can find out at hobby lobby or any hobby shop you have near you. they have a couple different options when it comes to sand bags, brick walls and the like. You could even use a 1/35 scale tank kit as a burnt out super heavy. Just walk around and see what comes to mind. Sometimes I can get some pretty decent ideas just by walking around a shop.

A tall hill with a pillbox bunker at the top, and rows of trenches cut into it. Fight your way to the top, and use the trenches for cover/ambushes.

Or you could model a beach, with hills and coastal defences, and trenches behind. D-Day landing stylee.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
A tall hill with a pillbox bunker at the top, and rows of trenches cut into it. Fight your way to the top, and use the trenches for cover/ambushes.

Or you could model a beach, with hills and coastal defences, and trenches behind. D-Day landing stylee.

Sounds a lot like Planetstrike to me.

nothing wrong with planet strike, im definitley liking the hill idea... DKOK are know for wasting thousands of men trying to take a minor objective from what i have been reading so far, so that sounds like a good objective to me! lets take the hill!
Tony A.

Look up a P&M Blog on Dakka by DoubleT (called "Muddy Times," if memory serves). He does some fantastic work on his bases that, while perhaps a bit too involved to be useful for covering an entire board, should serve as great inspiration. He also has a tutorial in there for DIY barbed wire that looks infinitely better than scorched pipe cleaners or the wire-wrapped wire you can buy from GW or GF9, as well as detailed instructions for his mud recipe.

Terraformer (of 3T Studios) posted an in-depth tutorial on making realistic craters, if you want to take yours to the next level. For basic jobs, old CDs make great round crater bases, while MDF can be cut into more irregular shapes - just build up the sides with some insulation foam or air-dry clay, cover in spackle, then paint with PVA and sprinkle with sand/gravel.

Another cheap and characterful option for little scattered obstacles are "Czech hedgehogs" - tank barriers made from welded angle iron. Model makers like Tamiya sell them, but you can easily make your own on the cheap with a pack of angled styrene and scraps of flat sheet for the gussets. Dragon's teeth style tank traps are also dead easy to carve out of insulation foam. Neither one is quite as appropriate for WWI as WWII, but they don't feel particularly out of place, with the prevalence of tanks in 40k.

Trenches can be a bit tricky if you want to use them as scatter terrain instead of making a full board (even a modular one), as you need to build up around them in order to have material to be dug down into. Whether you raise the rest of the board's surface or build hills with trenches cut in, you'll want to pick up some extruded polystyrene insulation boards. If it's thick enough that you don't have to double up to achieve the required height of the trench walls, two sheets is enough for an entire board, plus plenty of scatter terrain. It's not free, but you won't break the bank, either - you get a lot of mileage out of the stuff.

^^ What the man said.

Proper trenches are nearly double the height of a man. This can only be got by laying down a good thickness of foam as a substrate. The parapet and parados can be built up with putty on top of strips of foam. Planks, boards, corrugated iron and duckboards can all be got from plasticard or by making them from matchsticks and so on. Sandbags can be bought in 1/48 or 1/35 scale or made from putty or sculpy.

It should be possible to design a table in one foot or 18-inch square sections and made the trenches and streams match at the middle of each board so you can ring some changes on the setup.

Barbed wire, bunkers and blown-up trees are pretty easy once you have cracked the main terrain build.

It could be a really awesome table.

Yeah I forgot, I think terraformer did a good tut on the barbed wire too... made from a screen door mesh I believe.... didn't try that but the pipe cleaners comes to mind as being cheap, plentiful and requires less fiddlyness to create. And that crater tut is awesome!

Having seen a few trench boards my vote is for the kind that's deep-cut into the board. I would use the thick pink foam for that and either cut into it with a hot wire cutter or cut all the way through and make the floor out of anything rigid (another board of thin foam, foam-core). Three sections is plenty, or one whole board if you want something for display. Make up for the lack of variety with other moveable stuff, like craters, lines of barbed wire, bunkers, etc.

yeah cut into the board was the way way i planned to go... i was also thinking of doing bunkers that were dug in as well and not sitting about the ground.
thanks for the ideas fellas!
Tony A.