Saturday, April 18, 2015

Built Up Areas

 Change is slow to come to the Duchy of Alzheim. Still after many years of contemplation, I have finally started making the change over to using 15mm scaled buildings.
 The buildings are resin Medieval types by Hovels and not the Franklin Mint, although you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise.  They are nice buildings, decently priced and very easy to paint. I could have gone for their "European" range, but they speak to me a little too much of Belgium when I am looking for an effect more reminiscent of Bohemia and Silesia.
 I hope this picture shows what I am doing. I've taken a leaf from Keith Flint's book and standardised my town sizes. The square of felt is 12" to a side and roughly equivalent to my unit frontage. This is the smallest town size. More can be grouped together to form larger conurbations.
 A battalion/regiment/unit can defend two sides of the area. These buildings represent light cover. They are not proof against artillery fire. Only the entrenched position shown below is.
 The village below is garrisoned appropriately enough by Garrison Regiment #2. It's still awaiting its flags and standard-bearers, but is close enough to being finished to be worth photographing.

8 comments:

The Good Soldier Svjek said...

They look well with the buildings - like the fortification , Tony

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said...

Very nice looking buildings, and the idea of grouping them on a more or less standard sized base for ease of use is a good one too. Might just have to "borrow" it myself.

Best Regards,

Von Tschatschke

Fitz-Badger said...

15mm buildings, but 25 or 28mm figures? If so, it looks like it works well for this case, where you're dealing with armies and each figure represents multiple men. Nice little buildings, too.

Bloggerator said...

Cheers chaps. Glad you like it. Tony, the fortification is quarter-round hardwood beading cut with a mitre saw.

Fitz, the newly-painted GR#2 are 28mm RSM Ministures.

Greg

ColCampbell50 said...

This is an excellent method to handle built-up areas when your basic maneuver element is a battalion or larger.

This concept is an old one. Larry Brom used it many, many years ago as he was developing his battalion level horse and musket rules. We call them "Brom" towns. There was an article in the old Courier magazine about them.

Jim

Bloggerator said...

Hi Jim,

As in most other things, I guess there is very little that is new in the world!

Regards,

Greg

Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said...

I still have a clipping of that 1980's Larry Brom Courier article. So I've been thinking about doing town bases now for ... a while.

Yours looks good thus far. Will it be a permanent dioramic thing fixed to a hard base or
just a base with loose componants that can be rearranged for convenience?

Bloggerator said...

Hello Ross,

I thought about that quite hard and have liked the idea of doing it all as a series of fixed modules. This is attractive, but costly in terms of space.

In the end I'll probably plump for loose items that pack down small.

Regards,

Greg