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 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

Swim?

 Tyranid Horde wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

Spoiler:

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

Swim?

I enjoy setting up our FLGS tables. I generally try to include at least 2 multifloor ruins in the corners, a big LOS blocking center piece in the middle, and then scattered terrain, craters, or barricades everywhere else.

I would love to make a full table with sculpted terrain but storage and transportation makes me go with scatter and a mat.

Here is a link to my blog with pictures of large modular hills that I made with a mix of realistic and still gameplay friendly slopes and outcrops. http://wargamingrebel.blogspot.com/2017/10/hobby-desert-table-finished.html



Everything is made in 3'' high increments for these pieces so they work as great LoS blockers and with the right amount of scatter and buildings can make a very interesting game table.

Here's the box the pieces go into with plenty of space for more:

Picture of a fortress for a campaign using some buildings to boost


Craters and rocks for a full desert


More urban/cliff mixes making interesting chokepoints and fire lanes

 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

That one is not mine, only last two examples were mine, those worst ones But all modular boards are made with the same technique - you take a rigid underboard (HDF preferably) for support, then sculpt the main bulk of your terrain with XPS foam and then add details and paint. There are a lot of examples on e.g. Pinterest and tutorials for that kind of stuff all over the web.

And how to play hord army on that? Well, slower But I don’t complain after having played dozens of games against gaunt heavy Tyranids.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
@arhurt: nicely dense terrain, I like it

A hint regarding storage space: some Necromunda players use hollow and stackable trays as the base layer of industrial tables. They are stored inside one another when not in use, so you only need the space for the largest one. I have contemplated doing something similar with hills but sice I have the space I did not bothered in the end.

For me, a big component of games has always been: Player A vs. Player B vs. the Environment.

A wargaming table should really never be "fair" or laid out in a symmetrical system. Tournaments? Do whatever you want. At that point you're not playing much of a wargame.

Unless you're running a strong narrative for a certain purpose, a table should present challenges. Didn't bring a versatile army? You should pay for that. Brought Knights to an urban center where you struggle to move? That's on you. Should have brought infantry support. Fighting over a bridge? Hope you brought some deepstriking troops or flyers/hover vehicles. Your army doesn't fit on the table space? That's also on you.

Terrain is the easiest way to limit spam armies, and to actually challenge list-building or general player thought processes. If you're into wargaming because you enjoy the fake spectacle of replicating historical or fake-future-historical engagements, you should learn to appreciate bizarre tables, and different terrain layouts. A difficult table is a tactical challenge in and of itself. Are you being forced along a bottleneck? Better hope you can find a solution. Perhaps you've got good units but need to cross a deadly open stretch of land an the enemy has strong defenses in place.

People complain about the terrain rules in 40K...mainly because they're lazy. Nothing is stopping you from introducing acid rivers/lakes (something we use frequently) , minefields, bunkers which provide additional bonuses, etc. etc. etc. There's no limit to what you can do if you have an opponent who's down for some fun narrative gaming.

Got bridges? How about control panels to move those bridges mid-game? Why not. Maybe there's a shield generator that prevents shooting attacks, so you have to get inside it in order to disable it (we've done this a number of times). Control panels inside allowing troops in a bunker to activate turreted weapons? Why not. Not a damn thing is stopping you.

My point is that, if you're willing to spend a tiny amount of time and energy - your table can be a hell of a lot more than a couple of ruins, a hill and some scattered objective tokens.

A sample of a fun table was this; the shattered remnants of a (soon to be renegade) Knight's household - being laid siege to by some Renegade Space Marines.



We used the water as an acid lake (move into, out of or through...each model takes an armour save or suffers a wound - deadly for infantry, slightly dangerous for vehicles/creatures). I didn't bring enough mobility (running a siege detachment from my renegade chapter). As such he won the game because I couldn't make any headway into the maze of bridges and madness. He stopped me cold by running Knights at me while his allied Thousand Sons kept most of the points. It doesn't help I blew up one of the main bridges by destroying his Knight (which exploded and we decided it was only right that the bridge disappear as well).

No reason to play on a boring table...none.

Ideally? Clusters that restrict line of sight and funnel movement so as to keep large segments of an army from wiping out a section of the opponent's army in a single turn of shooting.

What drives me nuts is finding out that the terrain has to have a flat top because of certain units, or a piece of terrain that looks like it blocks LOS but doesn't or vice-versa (thanks, Gloomhaven!

3D terrain interfering with miniature movement, including units hiding in a forest, can mean my making a 2D template to use when the 3D terrain interferes with the miniatures.

You'll definitely run into physical limitations, but that's always been the case for wargaming. It's why we have oddly stepped hills Having gone down the route of "I'll make it pretty, usefulness be damned!"...I found myself running back toward useful terrain. The pretty never outweighed the annoyance that more realistic terrain created.

Regarding stuff like forests, you're better off doing a mix of 2D/3D. Set a visual delineation, and then add forest bits which can be moved. On my tables I tend to use my raised hills as "forests". If your unit moves in, you can shift or remove the trees - their actual placement is irrelevant. "This hill is wooded", etc.

Yeah, I am definitely a fan of the individually based trees and scrub on a larger base. The only pain is what to make the larger base out of, to ensure it is durable and looks good.

With a bit of effort, even the most humble MDF building corner can come to life.

 Manchu wrote:
With a bit of effort, even the most humble MDF building corner can come to life.

This is what we do a lot of, but 3 side and less windows on a lot of them. Can put 20 buildings in a box as well mixed in with other terain and lots of little bits of scatter you can make tables look great without to much space, and We use Mats a lot as well. But we do have some wooden tables as well. But he mats are easy to store and i slide them under the master bed.

An extra question, what sort of gaming mats do you guys use for your terrain setups (if any?)

I am just starting to get set up again after a few years, but I am using Deep Cut cloth mats as they are easy to store and transport.
55 quid plus shipping in the EU is not bad, I think. They do mousepad material mats that are higher quality (no creases) but a bit harder to transport due to weight, as well as the traditional PVC mats.

I picked the most generic ones (concrete and grass) because I do not like having too much "drawn on" detail on my battlefield, I prefer it to be more universal.

 ph34r wrote:
I'm going to be building terrain enough to cover a 4'x6' or 4'x8' table, and go really custom/high effort/whatnot on it.

Sometimes terrain is a beautiful cathedral that is so full of rocks and pillars that it's hard to play with.
Sometimes terrain is an ugly L-shaped wall acting as a ruin or general line-of-sight blocker.


What are some terrain features, structures, general areas, that have a good balance of Functional Play Space vs Looks Good?

Functionally, each terrain piece should either provide cover or block LOS to at least an infantry model. Otherwise it is window dressing- there's plenty of scope for this but its frustrating to make a piece that no-one interacts with.
A piece of window dressing I use is square cakeboards modelled as pavement blocks. They are about 5mm high but they give context to a ruined building.


Consider 1inch -2inch risers for city buildings- urban hills that allow you to block LOS at infantry height but allow infantry to easily cross them into cover.

The issue with height in wargames is that no-one wants to spend 3 turns of a 6 turn game climbing something if they don't get an advantage for doing so. You either need to force demand - making walkways the most viable route (the floor is lava) or introducing enough los blocking terrain that height gives los advantages.Even then, people will prefer to park their heavy weapon teams in some perch in their deployment zone rather than commute to a perch.

Is an industrial facility full of pipes and tanks a good LOS blocker, or is it something that might as well just be a big rock?

I try to think the opposite way. A 2 inch high rectangular block (like a shipping container) is modular, blocks LOS and allows infantry to stand on top. A shipping container makes sense in the context of a shipping yard, but you could change it up- it could be a fuelbowser with rectangular bracing- a rectangular arrangement of barrels and ammocrates, a row of vent pipes, a large 'n' shaped pipe with a walkway on top to access controls. It could also be a small vending stand, a monument or a hab.

I've seen smokestack and crystal 'forests' and the classic ziggurat instead of hill.

Taking the basic shapes that people love because they are simple to use ingame and adapting them into something that makes sense in universe is a much simpler approach than looking at a photo of a city and deciding to replicate everything there.

 Ratius wrote:
An extra question, what sort of gaming mats do you guys use for your terrain setups (if any?)

The go-to gaming mat is essentially any of the quality Neoprene gaming mats.

1) They're durable.
2) They're heavy enough to lay flat.
3) You roll them up and often they come with storage bags
4) If you get one-sided mats, the underside is tacky rubber (it's literally a huge mouse-pad)
5) It silences dice rolling and protects models that fall over.

A good one will run you around $90-100 shipped, but this is something you'll potentially use for years and years. I prefer the following companies:

1) Deep Cut Studios
2) Urbanmatz
3) Gamemat.eu

In the states we have some popular companies who make them for slightly cheaper, but the art on them is complete crap by comparison.

 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

My group was lucky enough to get these fairly cool, chunky board topper plates from a historical gamer dude that didn't want them anymore, and form vs functionality was a huge issue with them. We had an awesome rolling hill desert board, but setting models down on it and setting up terrain pieces on it was a nightmare. Honestly, even with them being still around, everyone just uses neoprene mats.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

My group was lucky enough to get these fairly cool, chunky board topper plates from a historical gamer dude that didn't want them anymore, and form vs functionality was a huge issue with them. We had an awesome rolling hill desert board, but setting models down on it and setting up terrain pieces on it was a nightmare. Honestly, even with them being still around, everyone just uses neoprene mats.

We have two sets of those plastic GW boards, So much work to get them to where models wont slip down i think i could have just started from scratch with wood and been way more happy. Mats are great, and support lots of terrain. MDF boards are great for a lot of designs as well.
I think they are best for city boards where you have raised area, or something like roads.

The GW molded boards are legendary around here for being hugely annoying to use - and holy feth are they loud. I have to turn down games when people want to play at the local GW because I can't stand rolling dice on hollow plastic for a game.

I think the factors for terrain are:
1. Modular. Can the terrain be repositioned, reused, combined?
2. Impact. Does the terrain actually have a meaningful impact on how the game is played? So often I see pretty terrain that may as well not be there. See rock piles, rivers, ruins with open windows in 40k.
3. Ease of Use. Can i move models in and around it easily? See realistic curved hills vs playable stepped hills.
4. Replayable. After I've played 3 games on the board, does it get old? Related to modularity & why you might rarely see a fully sculpted board.
5. Price. Self explanatory.
6. Storage. I need to be able to.put the terrain away so it doesnt take up my dining table forever. How easy is it to.break down and put in tubs.
7. Durable. Wear and tear is expected, but how long before the terrain looks ratty and need a repair.

8. Looks. Self explanatory, but is basically in conflict with all of the other 7 goals. The best looking terrain would be a single piece fully sculpted landscape that you might see in a museum. But its going to be expensive, boring to play on, start to chip And break after dice start hitting it...

For my money, something like this https://ttcombat.com/collections/sci-fi-gothic/products/lgt-full-board-bundle fulfils 1-7 but it woefully lacking on 8.

Yep, Trasvi has excellent points all around.

For me, and a lot of gamers it's about hitting the sweet spot between versatile, robust terrain that can be easily transported (mine is essentially two or three rubbermaid bins and some rolled up mats). Would I love a beautifully scenic, 100% accurate table for a game? Sure....but that's really difficult to use/store.

 Elbows wrote:
For me, a big component of games has always been: Player A vs. Player B vs. the Environment.

A wargaming table should really never be "fair" or laid out in a symmetrical system. Tournaments? Do whatever you want. At that point you're not playing much of a wargame.

Unless you're running a strong narrative for a certain purpose, a table should present challenges. Didn't bring a versatile army? You should pay for that. Brought Knights to an urban center where you struggle to move? That's on you. Should have brought infantry support. Fighting over a bridge? Hope you brought some deepstriking troops or flyers/hover vehicles. Your army doesn't fit on the table space? That's also on you.

Here here! My take on that as well. And seeing 40k scenario rules it's clear symmetrical boards aren't intended.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, I am definitely a fan of the individually based trees and scrub on a larger base. The only pain is what to make the larger base out of, to ensure it is durable and looks good.

Masonite you've used a router on to smooth edges. Paint it green Stick your trees on it, and move them as necessary for models in the woods.


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tneva82 wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
For me, a big component of games has always been: Player A vs. Player B vs. the Environment.

A wargaming table should really never be "fair" or laid out in a symmetrical system. Tournaments? Do whatever you want. At that point you're not playing much of a wargame.

Unless you're running a strong narrative for a certain purpose, a table should present challenges. Didn't bring a versatile army? You should pay for that. Brought Knights to an urban center where you struggle to move? That's on you. Should have brought infantry support. Fighting over a bridge? Hope you brought some deepstriking troops or flyers/hover vehicles. Your army doesn't fit on the table space? That's also on you.

Here here! My take on that as well. And seeing 40k scenario rules it's clear symmetrical boards aren't intended.

It shouldn't be one for one literally symmetrical, but it should be equally advantageous. I'd even suggest not putting the large ruins in either deployment zone. Put them in the center to block cross-board LOS and have something to fight over.

 Skinflint Games wrote:

shout out to the daddy of hot glue and chipboard crafting, the one and only Wyloch!

Dayammmmm...
New background vid resource.
Thanks!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Apple fox wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

nou wrote:
By sculpted ground level I mean modular boards, something like this

I absolutely love this one. How did you build it?

Also, how the hell do you play a horde army on it?

My group was lucky enough to get these fairly cool, chunky board topper plates from a historical gamer dude that didn't want them anymore, and form vs functionality was a huge issue with them. We had an awesome rolling hill desert board, but setting models down on it and setting up terrain pieces on it was a nightmare. Honestly, even with them being still around, everyone just uses neoprene mats.

We have two sets of those plastic GW boards, So much work to get them to where models wont slip down i think i could have just started from scratch with wood and been way more happy. Mats are great, and support lots of terrain. MDF boards are great for a lot of designs as well.
I think they are best for city boards where you have raised area, or something like roads.

The best source for multilevel terrain like that are large molded styrofoam backing boards for shipping electrical stuff and breakable stuff. I used to see those all the time, when I was living in SK and if you keep your eyes peeled on the way past for instance Uni Physics building garbage bins for example, something will stand out and yo will say to yourself 'OK, this is a series of subpassageways arranged in concentric layers with a central common area,' and then 'OK, these walls can be broken off and roughed up and openings made and I can use the other one as a series of entrenchments now ruined...'


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
I am just starting to get set up again after a few years, but I am using Deep Cut cloth mats as they are easy to store and transport.
55 quid plus shipping in the EU is not bad, I think. They do mousepad material mats that are higher quality (no creases) but a bit harder to transport due to weight, as well as the traditional PVC mats.

I picked the most generic ones (concrete and grass) because I do not like having too much "drawn on" detail on my battlefield, I prefer it to be more universal.

Checking that out now...
How heavy are those cloth mats?
Do they tear easily?

Well, it's like a mouse pad right? So it's as heavy as a really big mouse pad, and tears like a mouse pad could tear.

Well, they have three different materials. PVC, which is the cheapest, is wipe-clean and is more prone to creases and so on.
Mousepad, which is the most expensive, thickest and most durable, and does not crease.
Cloth, which is what I chose, which is lighter than the other options (I wanted to be able to transport my mats easily), has minor issues with creasing (you can iron it) and you cannot write on it.
The cloth is not that thick or heavy, but it is reasonably tear resistant. It is not cheap, but it is also not like a heavy blanket.

 ph34r wrote:
Well, it's like a mouse pad right? So it's as heavy as a really big mouse pad, and tears like a mouse pad could tear.

We've had about a half dozen of the "mouse pad" style boards for the past two years seeing weekly to biweekly use and haven't had any get any kind of damaged. Been pretty happy with them.

the_scotsman wrote:

 ph34r wrote:
Well, it's like a mouse pad right? So it's as heavy as a really big mouse pad, and tears like a mouse pad could tear.

We've had about a half dozen of the "mouse pad" style boards for the past two years seeing weekly to biweekly use and haven't had any get any kind of damaged. Been pretty happy with them.

I think mine would be at least twice as old, and still in good condition. I guess it depends how much abuse they get.