JT's Plog o' Plod

[juicytomatoes]

And here I thought I was the cheeky one.

Ah but you are, you are...

Well, it's been a while, but what do I have to show for it?

More halflings!



So I've finally gotten down to assembling these and they're ready for painting...

[Daniel36]

You can never have too many halflings.

[leonmallett]

More Ashigaru! I really hope we get to see an army-level picture at some point.

[juicytomatoes]

You can never have too many halflings.

Indeed, you can't

More Ashigaru! I really hope we get to see an army-level picture at some point.

I'll get down to doing more painting and I'll take one.

So I've been busy making and painting some terrain for a 40k game I had with my friends. We wanted to have a modular necromunda-esque/saving private ryan feel to our games and decided to start doing a dense multi-level cityfight style urban terrain for more FIBUA style games. Here are the results so far:




Some highlights from the games (I proxied my fantasy daemons for 40k daemons to test them out. Looks like some re-basing is in order )

[juicytomatoes]

Here are the boards and ramps I painted, in all their modular glory...

[HereBeDragons]

Wow! Nice work! Looks like a fun table to play on. Good luck painting all the buildings that'll take a little while lol I take it vehicles would struggle though? Or is it intended primarily for necromunda?

[juicytomatoes]

It's actually intended for 40k, and yes vehicles would have a harder time getting through the entire board, but that's relatively speaking. One thing it does keep vehicles generally safer because of LOS. It makes for more thinking during deployment, and transports are now really delivery vehicles rather than support fire. We see vehicles finally using cruisiing speed (well, can't shoot at anyone, no LOS) and then have troops pour out of it to take up positions on the flank. Suddenly, flanking in 40k makes sense.

We were pretty psyched with it because it added quite a few new dimensions to the game. Like skimmers and jump packs suddenly made more sense. Warp spiders could do their flip out/flip in thing sensibly, cover saves gave non MEQ armies survivability. Lanes of fire became important. It's a lot of dimensions added to the game that made it fun and the solution was a simple one thought up by my buddy and we did the terrain together.

I wish I could recommend it to more people. For years, my friends and I felt 40k was strange, because things like 48 inch range lascannons could kill anything on the board because it had LOS to practically everything. Restricting movement and LOS through the terrain made the game a lot more fun.

I have to agree though, that the buildings will take some doing

[leonmallett]

Love the simple but very effective multi-level boards.

[John Wernkvist]

The board looks amazing! And all built from scratch you say? Very impressive indeed. I've never played 40k because of some of the points you noted above but I gotta say I could really enjoy testing a DH force on this table.

[Thalenchar]

Those boards look great! And seem simple to make too. My mates and I occasionally go back to playing Necromunda as well as playing 40K, so I might have to make a go at doing boards like that myself! Would add another dimension to our games for sure! (ok, technically that'd just be the same dimension, only more pronounced, but you know what I mean)

Thanks for the inspiration!

P.S. You're right. 40K 5th becomes a whole lot more fun and a better game if you just place the proper amount of terrain on the table, and use terrain of the proper size. LoS blocking terrain is a total must.

[Daniel36]

I almost feel like going back to my 40K army...
If anything, we will make it a club project to build as many new segments as we need to reinstate the few CoD segments I still have. The way you are describing things it DOES seem to make more sense that way.

If anything, I never really understood why so many armies would insist on choosing the open ground anyways. You either attack or are being attacked, and it usually means one of the armies is on familiar ground. But that's just me.

[juicytomatoes]

Love the simple but very effective multi-level boards.

Thanks mate!

The board looks amazing! And all built from scratch you say? Very impressive indeed. I've never played 40k because of some of the points you noted above but I gotta say I could really enjoy testing a DH force on this table.

An easy way to test it out without having to spend any money first is to use the ole GW suggestion of books. Especially those large university textbooks that ever only get used for decoration (who studies from them anyway? ). Just get a few and stack them on a 4x4 table, try it out with a 1k army. It will give you the look and feel of things. We basically also added the rule that infantry cannot climb up those walls and have to use the ramps. For coming/jumping down the walls without the ramps, we imposed a dangerous terrain test that increased in difficulty every inch of height the model was falling by. We made it easy to tell as we used the 1 inch and 2 inch height foam boards.

This evened out the effect of infantry being able to outrun vehicles on a board like this. With this rule, suddenly vehicles also make sense! We had games where taking out the enemy wasn't as important as racing to the objective.

Those boards look great! And seem simple to make too. My mates and I occasionally go back to playing Necromunda as well as playing 40K, so I might have to make a go at doing boards like that myself! Would add another dimension to our games for sure! (ok, technically that'd just be the same dimension, only more pronounced, but you know what I mean)

Thanks for the inspiration!

P.S. You're right. 40K 5th becomes a whole lot more fun and a better game if you just place the proper amount of terrain on the table, and use terrain of the proper size. LoS blocking terrain is a total must.

Wow, you got to try this in double quick time!
It is more fun with the proper amount of terrain indeed. I'm glad you found a way to enjoy your games more. House rule a few things that add some flavor to the game (like the restrictions to infantry I mentioned above as well) and then suddenly the it's a beautiful game again!

I almost feel like going back to my 40K army...
If anything, we will make it a club project to build as many new segments as we need to reinstate the few CoD segments I still have. The way you are describing things it DOES seem to make more sense that way.

If anything, I never really understood why so many armies would insist on choosing the open ground anyways. You either attack or are being attacked, and it usually means one of the armies is on familiar ground. But that's just me.

I think the open ground concept is a GW thing. If you look at the pictures in the rulebook, it's actually quite open. We are visual people, I think, and we do tend to take the GW pics as a benchmark. Our table looked relatively 'unreasonable' in our eyes, where terrain was concerned, when we first 'playtested' it. We quickly found it very much to our taste.

I guess for people who are used to it, they want their heavy weapons to immediately fire and destroy stuff. For us, we found it more exciting that the heavy weapons didn't seem to be firing as much, BUT suddenly, crossing parts of the boards were not such a good idea because you would expose your unit to the heavy weapons fire. It's a relative thing. If you are on a a board that has less terrain, you are in the open anyway, so you will move your troops. If you are on a board with more terrain, the terrain acts as not only cover, but blocks LOS. You'd rather not risk your troops through that if you can help it.

We were happy with the fact that you can control the lanes and prevent your opponent's forces from joining up or flanking your force without having to fire your heavy weapons

Of course, we do sometimes take the risk and run the gauntlet out of sheer desperation, but that's what makes it even more exciting! If the first transport gets knocked out, it's blocking the route of those behind and it will slow the entire group of reinforcements down because now they have to either go around the destroyed vehicle, or disembark the passengers and footslog it there, if the road is now blocked up. We thought it added a touch of realism that was fun.

The other thing the boards did was to bring out the flavor of different armies. With marines, you're walking around in the open with your 3+ power armor save. They really had the 'walking forward implacably while laying down a regular hail of withering fire' feeling because it we had really little 3+ cover save terrain. The eldar were hugging terrain, leaping around, in and out, fleeting forward, very acrobatic and not dying so ridiculously easily to opposing fire after all that impressive prancing around. Daemons were not appearing out in the open field or desert, but in interesting places all over the board, and the scatter roll for deep strike REALLY mattered. I had situations where I placed my squad in a prime position, rolled the scatter dice, and then scatter to an unfortunate place where I had to either cross a bridge and then walk down the ramp (which would have taken about 3 turns!) or jump down 3 inches of wall and risk losing troops to get them to where they were needed.

Well, just my thoughts. Sorry for rambling, you can probably tell I'm still quite psyched by what the terrain has done for our 40k games. We're still gushing about what other type of terrain we now want to add to our games.

[wreiro]

Hi, the board looks awesome. I always enjoy games with more interesting terrain to move around.

Cant wait to see whaat else you come up with.

H

[Tzarinchilla]

That scenery is awesome JT. Nice and modular, also flat, but you have still added the details like the cracks and impact hits. Quite impressive.

[juicytomatoes]

Hi, the board looks awesome. I always enjoy games with more interesting terrain to move around.

Cant wait to see whaat else you come up with.

H

Thanks! I'll be playing another game today, so I'll see if I can't cook up a batrep.

That scenery is awesome JT. Nice and modular, also flat, but you have still added the details like the cracks and impact hits. Quite impressive.

Thanks Tzarinchilla. We made the boards grey and dull mainly to show the miniatures up better. Hopefully, it worked.

[Putty]

These are really cool!

Looking forward to seeing them done!

[Calarax]

those battle boards are awesome im makin one. perfect for small battles that dont take forever and easy to store. i have a 4'x6' that i made and its a pain to move around and worse to store, made the "L" frames that hang from the ceiling in the garage and the board slides into them so not so in the way now. but these smaller boards would be way better.

[juicytomatoes]

These are really cool!

Looking forward to seeing them done!

Thanks Putty! They are getting some love. I'm aiming to finish them for this month's Tale. I've been jokering way too often now...

those battle boards are awesome im makin one. perfect for small battles that dont take forever and easy to store. i have a 4'x6' that i made and its a pain to move around and worse to store, made the "L" frames that hang from the ceiling in the garage and the board slides into them so not so in the way now. but these smaller boards would be way better.

I'm glad you find them useful. Indeed, they are easy to store and because of the various levels, we found that we can play 1.5k easily on a 4x4, which is great! It kinda expands the battlefield vertically rather than horizontally. It's really fun.

Well, I've made more add-ons to the terrain... here are some linkways I built and painted to join up different sections of the board:

These are made into roads, coz well, I felt that bridges were meant to make a shortcut from one place to another. I felt that it would be exciting to be able to speed up transports to do things like ferry troops to reinforce an area or to seize an objective. Here are more pics:




I'm working on another few pieces of terrain at the moment. More pics to come!

[Thalenchar]

Awesome stuff, man. Great idea and well executed. I especially like the cracks. How do you make those?

[HereBeDragons]

Nice! I'd like to see them with the rest of the board! It'll be good to see them in context. Make sure you get some pics next time you play!