Well after 8 months pause I made myself get back into the swing of this game
A few little bits had been progressed over the interim - I got the 'correct' bases from Warbases, I picked up a few dice 'boxes' and decided that the figures where too small to loose lay so made myself a small town:
The bases was simply sprayed with the 'stone' spray used on the main board and the buildings stuck down with superglue gel.
I did make one key mistake though - I decided to add a bit of flock and grass tufts to break up the bare patches but I should have kept it simple not added these on. The tufts are the smallest I could find and dwarf the buildings (need to trim them down) and the flock colour ran within the super glue. I'll leave this on for now but not happy over the result - maybe I should add more detailing in to 'hide' the bits but to be honest it should have been plain all the way.
At the Scarborough show I found a set of laser cut squares and small dice on the Pendraken stand from
Minibits designed for hit markers. They come with three colours of die (white / red / blue) so I can have red = attack, blue = defence and white for troop casualties. Looking at the result of using the unpainted wood I may paint these black as spraying them stops the dice sitting correctly as it is so gloopy / thick.
I know the pic below is not sharp - its either flare / reflection or blurred 7mm dice today!
Before anyone asks 'how are these going to sit over the corner markers?' - I have dig a small hole / indentation in the centre of the board with a knife and wiped white glue on the area to seal it. This then goes over the gem and the board sits reasonably flat.
I decided that I will base the mountains using half square sized bases (OK rectangular is the word I should have used) and am currently waiting for the stone paint to dry solid over the next 48 hours.
Items that I still need to resolve are:
1) Roads and rivers
2) Trees - thinking of cheap plastic palm
3) Low hills - still tempted to use foam / felt as discussed to try it out.