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Sooo... I dont really know how to start this, but I wanted to share this project we are working on with you...

My friends and I are in love with Hail Caesar, and for 2017 our plan was to create a big table, with some big features and at least 1500 figs to show on them... We need this table to be on the spot on the first show of the year here in Belgium, at Gent, Warcon. And I thought maybe sharing this with you might ease my conscience as this is:
1. becoming rather expensive
2. a danger to my relationship with my wife
3. going to kill me in the end

Sorry if I am going to bore you to death with this...

The mision was the following:
Table:
Create a table of 6m by 2m or 21ft by 7ft (if I can count well). The table should be based in european style, meaning green with patches of brown. We wanted a castle and a town and preferably a river with bridges of some sort. Needed were also fields, a windmill, trees and other features omnipresent in the medieval european theatre such as hedges and low walls.
As the table was going to be rather big, the castle needed to be big enough to have a visual impact on the table, but also it was decided that it needed to have a use other than the aesthetic.
A plan was made for the following items to be acquired:
1. Trees
2. hedges/low walls
3. fields
4. windmill
5. bridge
6. town with at least 20 buildings
7. Castle
8. table

1. Trees: For a table of this size we would need a lot of trees, but not so many as to create to much clutter for troops to pass trough. We thought that40 - 50 big siezed trees would be enough. We have these already as we use trees on a weekly base in our games and they still look well enough for our table.
2. hedges/low walls: The same here as for the trees. But the only difference was that we dont have enough hedges for every field on the table... So some more were needed... More on this later.
3. Fields: as we need some fields around the city, I need to go to Ikea to buy some straw carpets to transform into fields. More on that one later
4 -7. Windmil/bridge/town/castlel: Ah, now we get to the point where we need to look out for some new stuff... I grouped all these points together as it seemed best for us and also for the way the table would look that most or even all of the buildings come from the same manufacturer... So the search began...
As we already had a lot of stuff from Grandmanner, and he also has medieval town buildings, we were looking at purchasing from Dave and filling the table that way. Grandmanner is a bit expensive, but the quality of his buildings is absurd! But he did not have a stone bridge, nor did he have a ig castle...
Next we tried Warlord games, as they just brought out their wonderful new plastic castle, which, apart from being modular, was also cheap (something the misses approves) and I really like the look and feel of it. But the problem was again that for the other parts we would be missing buildings or they would all look too much alike or would need some extensive conversion work.
4Ground was also an option, but I dont like the look and feel of mdf buildings and I hate the corners of the 4ground buildings...
In the end we arrived at tabletopworld, where we already had bought some small pieces and which were very beautiful, but rather expensive also. But they have a bridge, a windmill, a set of buildings but no castle. But they did have walls and a gatehouse. So it was decided, we would make a walled city. To know what we would need to order, we made a mock up in paper to see the size of it all.


In total, the city would be 2m20 on 1m and would contain approx. 22 buildings, including a square.
The mill and the bridge would be set outside of the city walls, closely to the fields and the river.

8. for the table we needed something that was easily stored, easily transported, and not too big, and decided to go for the solution we used before, a big carpet which we paint and treat and in the end delivers well. I will make a seperate post about this!

So I ordered some samples of carpets and drapes to make the tablecloth out. We received them, and chose one half haired, which after some tanning and special treatment with paint will make us a fine table. I will try to get a picture of the sample asap!
We are now going to order 8m of cloth, 2m wide to give us a nice big table. Also on the scenery planning are now 60 additional trees, as we only have around 70 28mm trees and we need a lot more of them.


Miniatures:

Now, the second part of the project, and even more daunting was the miniature part...

Having moved houses last year, a lot of my painted figs were still in moving boxes. And making a big table also required big armies and we would need about 1500+ models a side to fill the table and make a really big battle. I always wanted a big macedonian army, and with the 3 for 2 promo warlord games did during the summer, I ordered about 16 boxes of phalanx and macedonian troops to make a nice alexandrian army. But this would only give me about 800 miniatures, 26 units, about 8 divisions...

Not enough for the table...

So I used some of the spare time of my holiday to make a trip to the attic to see what I have laying around. I found a lot of my old warhammer armies, a full roman legion (about 300 figs) and a lot of other stuff that could not be used for ancients.
So, coupled with the armies of my mates, we had about 1000 figs that were painted... And with the macedonian I ordered, that would still only give us 1800 figs.
And then, one evening, while drinking some beer on a terrace on holiday it hit me! Why not use all those warhammer figs? True, Hail casear is not a fantasy game, and there are no stats for those weird fanatasy figs, but why not give it a shot???

Now, stay with me, don't start accusing me of heresy... My mates needed some convincing, as will you probably, but let me explain my "plan".

We all have different armies... Our club, just like other clubs has people collecting armies of all times, but often they dont fit together historically. Romans fighting Vikings can still be convincingly shown as picts or germans, but romans fighting crusaders or french war of the roses era armies look a bit weird. That was a problem we even had before we started on this table and this project. And now I even wanted to include fantasy armies... Sooo, and I dont know if it was the beer making me think that way or not, I had an idea. What if the battlefield they were fighting on was an astral plain or some kind of battlefield of the gods, were deceased gods fight out their quarrels using armies that died on the battlefield. This would give us the opportunity of putting all those different armies against each other.
Now we need a background story that will explain it all and make it fun, and a lot of new army lists for all those fantasy figs...
The army lists were copied from existing army lists, without adding units from other lists, because we didn't want to bring unbalance to the game. So I made an excel where I put all the existing units from the Warhammer world and transformed them to nice HC units.
The background and details I am still working on, but I can tell you it works! I even started putting my warhammer figs on HC sized bases so the unit frontage is the same for all units. We tried it last weekend to see if it works and we had a lot of fun!!!!
Pictures of the battle can be found below:

https://goo.gl/photos/A99nvQBqiQMCrfP9A