Starting up wargaming from scratch: what essential terrain?

[vodkafan]

I have decided I am going to go for it. Although I am not a wargaming virgin,  (haven't played for 6 years though!) I have always before managed to play on other people's tables.
I have decided that the biggest table for 28mm gaming I can accommodate is 4 x 4 feet . That is the easy part. I started thinking this morning about what essential basic terrain I will need.
The list has escalated alarmingly already.

Hills (I plan to make these myself using the modular method shown by Matakishi in his teahouse)
Roads
A River
Trees

The road and river I plan to get from S&A scenics. I am not keen on their trees though.

This is not even thinking about buildings. For the VSF scenario I plan I will need to build a defensible Lighthouse and Post Office ....

 Appealing to the experienced wargamers on here, is there anything I have missed from my basic list?

[sukhe_bator]

It very much depends on the sort of games you plan to cram in that space. I only realistically have the same space to play with when I colonise the living room table with two sheets of MDF. One side is hex painted for 1:144th WW1 aerial battles , the other side plain for wargames on terra-firma.
If you go for DBA style battles where single stands of figures represent companies or regiments, then terrain features are more abstract concepts and can be rendered very simply and to ground scale NOT figure scale.
For skirmish games and slightly larger, the scenery often counts as cover and for LOS so has to be rendered at the same scale of slightly less so as to suit the figures used. In 15mm you can get more bang for your buck so to speak in a limited space

For medieval skirmishes fences, hedges, cornfields, corn stooks, dry stone walls, ditches etc. can all make or break an ambush or assault. Many historic battles often hinged around a seemingly innocuous terrain feature like a ditch or fence...(plus they look good!) You can quite easily rack up a considerable stock of terrain.

I share your pain. After spending years in 15mm-mode often spent recreating elaborate set piece features like this Chinese-style BOB fortress

I now find myself without many of the basics for even a simple 25mm skirmish game. I have a bewildering to-do list of 25mm terrain not helped by (probably over)ambitious plans and time spent on entire castles, big defensive works or singular scratchbuilds. I now have to consider lower level games and want to represent a small hamlet (4-5 scratch-built half-timbered buildings) etc. I have 3 copy boxes just full of trees, but the to-do list still seems pretty endless...

[Sunjester]

If you are getting rivers and roads, a bridge would come in handy. Also a patch or two of marsh and some linear obstacles like hedges, fences or walls.

It so much depends on the period/location for your games and also the scale of the games, eg skirmish or big battles?

For example, hedges are good for Britain and much of NW Europe for most periods (medieval to present day) but not a lot of use for Greece or Italy. On the other hand, rough stone walls would be suitable for almost anytime, anyplace (unless you are gaming North America when fences would be more appropriate).

If you could give an indication of your interests we might be able to be more helpful.

[sukhe_bator]

I agree with Sunjester that fixing on a specific geographic location and period can add flavour, particularly if you can find architectural details to reinforce the look. For my 15mm Greek War of Independence project I found an image of an Ottoman pack-horse bridge in Epirus to model and a small Greek orthodox church. Dry stone walls, mediterranean tiled houses, sangars, rock outcrops, and fir trees add to the effect while still only filling in the basic terrain inventory...

[vodkafan]

Thanks Sunjester and Sukhe-Bator. Both good replies.
I had not even thought of a bridge or walling/hedges  but I can see now I must add those.

I am limiting myself to 28mm.  The periods I want to do are:
 Colonial/VSF using both skirmish rules and perhaps The Natives Are Restless Tonight rules. Thinking about the Congo rules too.  
WW2 skirmish but have also always wanted to try Crossfire
Naoleonics with up to a brigade per side sometime in the future, although I might be limited by my table size

So, no medievals/ancients/modern

[joroas]

If I were starting again I would set all my games in one location so, for example, you want to do Colonial, Napoleonuc and WWII, go for North Africa where you could do Sudan, Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign And The North African Campaign. At a later date you could also do the Crusades, all with the same scenery.

[sukhe_bator]

So either deserty or jungly terrain or a bit of both sounds in order. WW2 in N Africa, The Pacific or Burma theatres.
Colonial could be anywhere in N or W Africa, Egypt, the Middle East or Afghanistan, even China...
Morocco and parts of Tunisia are most heavily used by film makers... Ouarzazate and Merzouga in particular. If you want to go all Sci-Fi then most of the original Tatooine footage for Star Wars was shot in Tunisia and Luke's home was actually a cave hotel!
N Africa, Ethiopia, W Africa and the Arabian peninsular have particular architectural styles of mud brick and adobe architecture well worth looking at...
The Nile delta also has some peculiarities, like 50 foot high conical dovecotes in the villages. I researched them for my Napoleonic Alexandrian Expedition project

Like joroas says, opt for a particular region you like then fill the terrain inventory and it will stand you in good stead for a number of periods. For more verdant areas, palm trees, scrub and light jungle type foliage, and more deserty, rocky outcrops for the barren areas... There'd be little or no fencing (lack of wood for building materials) but some mud brick walling close by the village and probably smaller woven fence panels/hurdles, to keep livestock off vegetable patches etc. with an emphasis on shade...

[Norm]

I think from a starting out perspective, the 'to do' list can look daunting, overwhelming and possibly lead to abandonment.

Far better to create some 'for now' terrain, so that you can get some game in and when funds and time allow, start to replace the 'for now' terrain with something more to your liking.

For now, use gravel at a river crossing to make a ford. Use strips of green pan scoured (pound shop) glued onto lolly sticks for hedges. Make fences from BBQ skewers. Do buildings from card (cereal boxes) or foam core or paper printed buildings. For trees a trip to a local rail model shop will get you enough to get started or use dense cushion foam, ripped into chunks, skewed on BBQ sticks and glued and flocked.

there is nothing like actual playing to keep motivation going.

[sukhe_bator]

Sage words from Normsmith... playing will also offer up suggestions for scenarios and terrain ideas will present themselves in manageable chunks. With a bit of foresight and planning the butterfly effect will not occur and every terrain piece will constructively add to your inventory and expand the scope of possible scenarios...

[matakishi]

I am limiting myself to 28mm.  The periods I want to do are:
 Colonial/VSF using both skirmish rules and perhaps The Natives Are Restless Tonight rules. Thinking about the Congo rules too.  
WW2 skirmish but have also always wanted to try Crossfire
Naoleonics with up to a brigade per side sometime in the future, although I might be limited by my table size

Get a farm. Perfect for The Natives are Restless Tonight and Crossfire and easy to work into a VSF or Napoleonic game. The component parts can be used separately (out buildings and fields for instance) to add flavour to an open battlefield.

[FramFramson]

What I did is progress towards urbanization. So start out by making sure you have the elements for a game out in the wilderness or countryside (they are easy unless you are going to get obsessive about realism - just buy some trees or shrubs, or make some basic ones). Then I moved to small buildings which could stand on their own, like farmhouses, cottages, shacks, or outbuildings, then I started towards village stuff, like a local inn, simple village houses (i.e. multi-story) or local shops, which is where I stalled out as I haven't been making more scenery. The plan after that is to progress to bigger, more distinctly urban buildings.

The idea is that all buildings have some range of use - trees, shrubs and fences can be used anywhere, farm cottages can be used in the countryside, but also in villages and towns, village and town buildings can also be used in cities, and so on. They're only out of place in a city proper and even then you might make it work as an outbuilding depending on what architectural style you're going for. Unless it was truly pastoral (the classic thatched cottage, say), it could always be the office of a junkyard or somesuch. Full-sized city buildings are the narrowest, since they can only be used in cities, so they were an end-stage thing.

Also I went for Tudor-style buildings, with a few Victorian elements fudged in, which allows them to be used for a huge number of periods (anywhere in Western or even Central Europe, from late medieval through to today, as well as fantasy gaming) as well as some generic wooden shacks which can fit in anywhere. Tudor half-timber buildings might be generic as anything when it comes to wargaming, but they are versatile as anything. Detail bits like horse carts, dungheaps, lampposts, postboxes, cars or other clutter can then be used to "date" the table more precisely.

[traveller]

If I look at my own mistakes regarding terrain I would say that you are about to take a Ł2-3000 decision. That is minimally what I spent at buildings and terrain I no longer use. The "end-solution" for me was to decide on a format, which in my case, since I only focus on skirmish actions, is 100 x 70 cm. I built a frame around a plywood sheet of that size and then I build terrain tiles of mdf fitting to this format, usually 2-3 tiles. These tiles are typically rather flat terrain that can be populated with trees, Buildings etc. Bullding this type of limited size boards is great fun, sometimes even more fun that painting miniatures. Materials are cheap, EPS, Wood glue, paint, sand/gravel and flock. Try it youŽll like it 

[mrtn]

I wouldn't say a river is a must-have. I still haven't got one, after 12 years of gaming, and I'm just getting up to the "wouldn't it be nice to have a river?" stage. I think FramFramson had a great idea with the "going towards urbanization" plan.

But, then, it depends on what rules you use. For example I never missed having no roads or hedges when playing Warhammer, but when I started gaming WW2 they shot right up on the priority list, with tanks benefiting from going on roads and infantry benefiting from hiding behind hedgerows.

Marshes/swamps can be easy to make, I made mine from CDs with milliput, sand and clear varnish for the watery parts.

[MartinR]

Felt and card are very cheap ways to improvise roads and rivers.

Cut up bits of doormat make excellent cornfields.

Gravel from the garden for rough ground.

My first bridges were made of cardboard, was were my first buildings (I still have, and use them).

My hedges are still made if cut up pan scourers, based and lightly dry brushed.

But yes, your absolute basic terrain is hills, woods and buildings.

[vodkafan]

I wouldn't say a river is a must-have. I still haven't got one, after 12 years of gaming, and I'm just getting up to the "wouldn't it be nice to have a river?" stage. I think FramFramson had a great idea with the "going towards urbanization" plan.


Marshes/swamps can be easy to make, I made mine from CDs with milliput, sand and clear varnish for the watery parts.

I think for me a river is a good start. There are so many scenarios you can do with just a river alone, either getting your forces across it or deciding to take the time to go around it to reach a bridge or not etc...about the CD marshes I seem to recall an article about making those somewhere, maybe it was in a GW book.
 Yes the "going towards urbanization " approach is  a good one because it leaves the question of which buildings to build quite a long way down the line.