Terrain and Figures - inversely proportional costs!

[JArgo]

After listening to the latest Combined Arms Podcast I wanted to put down something which has been frustrating to me and yet there isn't much an answer available or even necessary.

The new Gangs of Rome game which is imminent requires a handful of figures, yet requires a significant amount of investment in terrain to produce great looking games worthy of the designers and gamers.  Not to mention the amount of storage required for a 3x3 Roman suburb.

I'd love to get in on this but I find the need to produce and buy dedicated (and arguably) single use terrain prohibitive.

The same with Frostgrave.  Great figures, interesting setting but producing a snow covered cityscape is a challenge and a half.

Shadow War Armageddon and the new Nexromunda likewise.

A big selling point of these games is the low figure cost and reduced painting time.  But if I'm going to create appropriate terrain that benefit is largely wiped out. I'd have to be really committed to doing that - like I was with building half an Old West town for Legends of the Old West, but I can't do this with half a dozen settings.  Which means I won't pick up the game.

I play a lot at home or perhaps in a moderately sized FLGS which cannot hope to hold all their stock and terrain for a game which might shift a few hundred euro/dollar/pounds.

Great looking terrain is a must in our hobby so if I can't have that I sadly have to decline the start collecting particular games.

Am I alone in this...?

[Ogrob]

Certainly you should only try to "sell" someone on the games if that person does not have to provide terrain. Playing at a club that already has Mordheim terrain makes Frostgrave very straightforward to get into, but doing what I have and getting every single monster in the beastiary and scenarios and making terrain to play is certainly not cheap.

So I would very much say it depends on your circumstances.

[Aerendar Valandil]

I play mainly at my club. For most games we usually play, we have either club terrain of terrain of individual members who take it for the occasional game. Personally I have a generic terrain table at home. Modelwise I use what I have. I do not have qualms about playing FG with models with green bases. None of us has. That we have a nice white setting for FG, is because a member has created one.

Be flexible, these are games of imagination.

[Happymcclap]

This is one of the main reasons I stopped playing in 28/32mm and switched to 15mm for these type of skirmish games, as the terrain is so much cheaper and easier to store, and despite having access to a load of great scenery at my club, I like to be able to put on a game at home so I have to have suitable scenery to hand.

[DS615]

Make your terrain rather than buying it.  Much cheaper.
You still have the storage problem, but then again, when don't we?

[Cubs]

I play mainly at my club.

I'm not a gamer any more, but I'm forever pootling in and out of Firestorm Games in Cardiff, delivering or picking up back and forth for Bad Squiddo Games and Great escape Games. I am always stunned by the vast array of tables and beautiful terrain they maintain for club members. Presumably members also provide a lot of the stuff and just store it at Firestorm.

[Sunjester]

You could just stick with adapting what you currently have. I have an extensive mixture of ruins that have been used for various games from Pulp Lost Cities to Stargate or LOTR. So my Frostgrave is a bit more defrosted and I use mostly stuff from my existing collection.

I would not have bothered to create an exclusive layout of a frozen city to play Frostgrave.

[Dr. Zombie]

I think it is part of the package of this hobby. If you want to play mass battles you don't need a lot of terrain, but you have to paint lots of models. If play skirmish, you have to paint a lot of terrain but few models. Overall the amout of work for a game is more or less the same.

I try to have a lot of somewhat generic terrain. I have 3 types of tables I build terrain for. A green grass type table, an arrid type table and an Urban type table. And I try to build scenery that spans multiple genres and time periods. Natural features such as woods and boulders and the like can be used for all time periods and genres. And then I use what I call time travel clutter. An example for my arrid table I have some adobe type buildings that I use for Mychenean gaming but when I add satelite dishes to the roofs and some oil barrels and banged up cars to the streets they can also be somewhere in afghanistan, the middle east or north africa.

In the same way half timbered buildings/ruins can be used for gaming anything from fantasy, medieval to wars of religion and can even be somewhere in germany during WWII or even Cold war. just by changing the clutter you but around them.

[has.been]

Generic scenery is useful. My Frostgrave is based in Egypt (Dustgrave is what some of the locals call it)
as I have a lot of fish tank ruins, and I could not be bothered to make a snow covered ruined city.
On a similar vein, for my gangster games it is:-
a cabin in the woods; an isolated farm or a gas station on a quiet back road.
I would love to place it in a rundown docklands, or the mean streets of Chicago, but can't be bothered to make &/or
store it.
You pays yer money & you makes yer choice.

[FramFramson]

You could just stick with adapting what you currently have. I have an extensive mixture of ruins that have been used for various games from Pulp Lost Cities to Stargate or LOTR. So my Frostgrave is a bit more defrosted and I use mostly stuff from my existing collection.

Rather like the Welsh quarry in Dr. Who

[horridperson]

So much of it comes down to whether you think building terrain or painting models is a task or pleasure.  I look at models as being the big investment and prefer painting low model counts to the best standard I can manage rather than painting armies.  Crossing genres involves different investments in terrain but many objects can be scratch built if you have the time and inclination.  I'm just getting my feet wet with terrain building and find it as enjoyable as miniature painting.  My gaming interests move around so I don't mind my terrain building projects do the same;  All in time I will build the sets eventually and enjoy the journey. 

One thing I think is critical is having certain universal elements.  Set/ focal pieces may mostly be confined to specific eras of gaming but much dressing is universal and has applications in many games.  Time is my principle investment in terrain but if I can find it and enjoy the time spent I consider it a win.

[eilif]

I would suggest that your first order of business might be to pick one project (ideally something that is likely to be played locally) and concentrate on that.

I love making terrain so it's not a limiting problem for me.   I go multi-use for all my terrain and I build most of my terrain so the cost is not as much as an issue. 

For something like Frostgrave: I just play in a non-winter setting. Doesn't really affect the game at all and my medieval village and countryside terrain can be used just as well in Frostrgave, Song of blades, LoTR or even WWW2.  If you really like the idea of a 28mm Roman city, go ahead and build it and you will probably find that it works great for fantasy skirmish games like Frostgrave.

Regarding Necromunda/ShadowWar, etc.  I build alot of fairly modular industrial scenery.  It's definitley not the new official GW stuff (though it works great as classic necro), but it looks good and the same terrain works across a multitude of sci-fi games.  Components of this end up not just in Necro/Shadow but also in my big urban mech games, 40k, and others.

The end result in 28mm is that I've got a Sci-Fi'ish urban/industrial terrain set, Desert terrain set and a Fantasy/European Village/City and these 3 sets cover virtually all the games I'm interested in.

All this said, there are some games I don't undertake but it's probably more of a matter interest and deliberately limiting the number of projects rather than rejecting a project because of terrain requirements. 

One final advantage that not everyone has is that in our club we have a fair number of members who have done terrain sets that others don't have.  One member has a Contemporary American Urban setting (superhero Post Apoc, etc) and a classic Japaneese style village.  Another has Jungle and Dungeon and tiny scale naval.  I have the ones above. So, we can game almost any setting we would want.

[sonicReducer]

When I started my latest project (which thankfully is fairly far along), cost and storage space were big priorities. I look at 28mm producers like 4Ground and Grand Manner - their products are amazing but honestly out of my pocket and I have nowhere to store a dozen biggish buildings. I also have 3 small kids and any of them getting at £400 of terrain wouldn't make me happy.

I went for 15mm sci-fi. My buildings are made from foamcore - the white looks fine with some splashes of colour, very cheap and easy to build seeing as I kept with basic shapes. I picked up a few mdf buildings that fit as well and it all goes into a single plastic storage box.

I'm only playing skirmish so all the minis cost a pittance and they all fit into a single plastic hobby tray.

Future projects may need more thought but I agree that terrain is often a more difficult issue than minis. Games like Infinity like to advertise you only need 10 minis or so a side, but then you still need dense 28mm terrain and if you want more than blocks you need to be prepared to invest.

[Codsticker]

Great looking terrain is a must in our hobby so if I can't have that I sadly have to decline the start collecting particular games.

Am I alone in this...?

Probably not... but I am not in the same situation. For me making terrain gives me as much satisfaction (perhaps more) than painting minis and although o don not a have a big house now that both kids have grown up and left home I suddenly have more time and space to store terrain. If you play with a regular group possibly one of you like to make terrain; if you pool your space and time you could each store some specific set ups (right now my Mordheim table and terrain is "living" at a friends place while the Sci-Fi and more generic terrain is here).

[Aerendar Valandil]

When price is an issue, you could think of paperwork terrain, graffam models f.e. and there is some free stuff on the net. It's cheap, not really a lot of work and looks really nice. And if really in a pinch storagewise, you can throw or give it away (and keep the documents on your computer to remake them later).   

Concerning the space issue: you could look at fold-up systems, such as: http://wars175x.narod.ru/wargameprint/build/scifi01.html (this is both fold up and homeprint). Some other systems have, f.e. a system wherein the buildings fit into each other, like a russian matrushka, limiting storage space. If not homeprint it is cardboard and not very expensive.