Terrain's Effect on a Battlefield

The last time I went flying I made a few remarks on how the quality of the photos taken were not really that great because of my lack of terrain. Well that has been an issue that has been bothering me ever since then. Very recently I was poking around the Baccus forums and happened to come across a post on making cheap and easy hedges for 6mm miniatures. After reading the post I decided that I was going to begin looking for cheap and easy ways to bring my battlefields to life. I am not going to go into the hedges but I will go into what I am poking around with for creating C&E (Cheap and Easy); roads (paved and dirt), rivers, streams, hills, and anything else I can find a good substitute for. If you want to see what I am talking about with the hedges go HERE. Other wise keep reading to see what I am up to, plus to look at some of my latest pictures.

Two batteries stationed in a hedge grove.

The first thing any wargamer needs in a place to fight his (or her) battles on. Most people use tables with stunning details. And honestly I have seen some awesome tables that make me drool buckets however, I am a realist. I am in college, living the space saving life. So instead of a table I make use of the floor. But unless you live in a place with green carpet you are going to need to a gaming mat. However those usually cost about $30. Solution go to your local craft shop and find a bolt of the right green color cloth and have them cut you the sizes you want. Simple, way cheaper, and easier to do. As you can see from my pictures I have a camo color cloth at the moments, I intend to get a few green ones sometime later.

Over view of my latest escapade.

Besides a gaming mat and a place to play on, the next thing needed is terrain. So far I have managed to hit on what I think will be a pretty good idea for hills, dirt roads, paved roads, rivers, and streams. My next focus is on bridges, fords, towns, farms, and buildings. For this post however I will just show I what I have come up with.

There for in all of my searching for C&E terrain I came across this stuff called "Foamies". Basically it is sheets of foam ranging from 3mm thick to 2mm thick. It comes in lots of different colors and for my purposes I chose Green for hills, Brown for dirt roads, Blue for rivers, and Gray for paved roads. The stuff is easy to cut (I just used scissors) and you do not have to worry about deforming the stuff because it is already pretty flexible. Biggest bonus is, it is dirt cheap. The above picture is maybe $10 worth of the stuff. How you want to cut it is dealers choice, my only advice is save your scraps. I found in the hour I spent cutting what I wanted, that I ended up using almost all my scraps for one thing or another.

Massed Allied Cav on a hill

Austrian Inf crossing a stream a bridge and fords

Austrian column on the move

Russian Light Cav crosses the ford and begins to tangle with French Light Cav

Russian Artillery pounds the French

The Russian front line on the move

Austrian Light Cav tries to flank the French left

Wide shot of the Allies

French heavy Cav on the move

A new French Cav Corps commander

French 2nd Div on the move

French meeting the Russian advance

French Center

Napoleon with his Old Guard

French right flank

A French Div deploys to meet the Austrian advance

A Grand Battery pounds away

A few other things I am going to look into. Cotton balls for smoke and I need to figure something out for trees. The other problem I am having is 6mm houses from Baccus are going to be too big for the scale of battles I am going for here. So I need to find another way of handling towns. I may have to go with the bridges from Baccus though, unless I can find a better way of doing bridges.

Center of the battlefield

French rear

The biggest change I noticed from adding even this cheap terrain was the inclusion of a sense of order to my battlefields. Formations now have a purpose and troops a have obstacles to surmount on the way to the enemy. I look forward to seeing how much more terrain I can come up with in the near future.