Terraforming Omicron 4

I have a pretty good wargaming set up in my basement. Plenty of room for a table and storage. My table is 5x8, and flocked various sades of green. I hate that golf course look you see on a lot of tables. It's a good surface for most games, but a little lacking for sci-fi. More specifically Starship Troopers which I have been playing a lot lately. We lean towards more scenario driven games, than the tourney style that a lot of SST'ers play, so I need a setting for our games. I came up with Omicron 4, a distant mining colony/ outpost. I've been collecting items to make terrain out for awhile. So I will be adding things like a military outpost, and a mining outpost among other things.

So it was time to build a sci-fi setting for my games. My wargaming buddy across the street had 7 or 8 2x8 sheets of pink foam insulation. I'm sure we bought them years ago for some project and never got around to it. Anyway so I had that to use. 4 sheets were trimmed down to 2x5 and that gave me a base.

Once the base was down. I took the left over scraps and the other full boards and started cutting up hills. I wanted a lot of hills, so we (friends came over to help) didn't go for very elaborate hills. Simple ones carved out of pink board. Very little sculpting, but enough. We made big and small hills, multi-layer hills and rock spires. That pink foam is a godsend for wargamers. The different layers glued down with Liquid Nails. Now to the painting.

I painted the underside with some random old paint. The reason I did this was to counteract any curling the topside paint might cause as it drys. I don't know if it works or not, just something I do. I hate train that starts curling up. The top layer and base color is a craft paint, Americana Light Cinnamon. This is the color of my MI's bases, so I figured it would make a good overall base color for my terrain. I painted a small Index card with the color and went to Home Depot and had then color match it and give me a quart of it.


Once I had the paint, it was simple to just pour it on the boards and roll it out. The ton of hills I made was a much longer process. So I slapped in a DVD, Black Hawk Down I think, and off I went.

With the base color done, I took a sponge, to add light and dark spots to break up the uniform color. Like Faux Painting for walls. I just dabbed on a dark shade of the brown, then mixed up a lighter shade and dabbed that on. I think I didn't make the color contrast great enough, as the shading and highlighting doesn't stand out very well. I may go back and do it again.

I took a paint brush to highlight the edges of the hills, with a lighter shade of the base color. Again, nothing fancy, the point was to get the job done and play. I tend to over do projects trying to get them to be perfect and nothing gets done.

Anyway, that's it. It took about 2 weeks working on and off. Fairly simple terrain, but it's done and we are gaming, not talking about gaming, which goes on a lot. Here's a pick of the first battle. No other terrain yet, but over time I will add small pieces to spruce up the table, like plants, rock/crystal formations. I might go and add some textured paint. I really need to break up the uniform brown. Thanks for stopping by.

Ciao for now, Xin