Building Marengo Battlefield, Part 2

So our building continues on Marengo. Lets dive right in.

When we last left our tale, we had done a rough cut on the hills.

 Using a random orbital sander to smooth out the hills. Do this outside as the dust is toxic.

Gluing the hills down to the table with Liquid Nails.

 Carving out small streams with a dremel and a router attachment I picked up at a garage sale. The cutting Dremel bits really work well on the foam. The grinding bits melt the foam.

Using lightweight spackle to make the hills gentle rises. So spackle, let dry, sand, spackle, let dry, then finish sand.

We also use spackle in the river bed. The Surform leaves big holes sometimes, and lots of nooks and crannies.

Adding really low hills to the river loops, more like gentle rises. Using foam core.

 Spackling the low hills.

 We have previously drawn out the road network. Now we will lay down the road surface. With the road network down, this will help us work out our patterns of fields.

 We paint the road down, then dump a ton of Woodland Scenics Fine Brown Ballast on the paint. The paint makes a great adhesive and if the ballast comes up, the brown surface helps hide the missing cover.

We take the boards apart, and dump the excess ballast on to newspaper so we can dump it back in the bottles. No waste. Here is the road work after dumping the excess.

 Blocking out major terrain features. In this case, vineyards. Marengo had a lot of vineyards. We are not sure how we are going to do the vineyards, but we have some ideas. When trying new things we do a lot of experimental builds on scrap foam board.

The fields are laid out, and we start flocking them.

 We use the same process for fields as we do the road. Use paint as an adhesive. Pour a ton of flock on the boards. Let it dry and dump off the excess and recover it. We do one color at a time to stop the flock colors from mixing.

 More colors added. This process is a bit slow. We pour the flock on the paint and have to walk away for a few hours till it drys. We could dump off sooner I suppose, but we want to make sure the flock sticks.

Now it's starting to look like a battle table.


Next build, more flock, more flock and more flock. Also start on the river, getting it ready for the water pour. And the daunting task of the vineyards.

Xin

Mordor vs Galadhrim, Battle Report

The title of this post should be "I am the worst general Mordor has ever seen".

Last night 2 friends came over for a game of LOTR. We use the Strategy Battle Game. Not all, but most of my group love the way it plays. I had recently painted up 6 Fell Wargs and The Warg Chieftain so I wanted to give them spin on the table.  So we did Orcs vs Elves at 700 points.

The Elves were 24 Galadhrim, 3 captains, a Storm Caller and maybe 12 or so Wood Elves as we ran out of Galadhrim.

The Orcs were 6 Wild Wargs, Warg Chieftain, 4 Warg riding Orc Captains and a Shaman, leading about 40+ Orcs. All spears and swords, no bows.

Establishing shot. Orcs in foreground, tree huggers on the farside of the table. set up 2 feet apart. The Elf General set up the table. Note the lack of cover.......

Closer shot of the Elf battle line. Wood Elves on the far end of the line. Galadhrim Archers Center, Spear and Sword in the ruins on the hill.

Back of Elf line looking towards the Orcs.

 Orc Left side of line. Front Rank, Shield and Sword, back rank Spears.

Orc right flank. Morannon Orcs in center, then more spear and shield guys. On the far right are my newly untried Wargs.

The terrain was wide open, he had bows, I didn't. My only choice was to go straight at him as quick as I could. I think I spent 3 turns marching under bow fire. Lost 9 or 10 orcs closing the gap.

Getting close now.

 Wargs rounding the hill.

 And we finally clash.

Not many Morannon Orcs left. At this point the combat got pretty hot, so I forgot to take pictures. I took a lot of losses  crossing the field but now I had some good numbers in contact.

I cleared the ruins and broke up his center section. On the far side it was back and forth with the wood elves. I did very well in the melee combats but I could not make up the damage done crossing the field. I broke at 29 dead and he was 3 away from breaking. It was a good fight and we had fun.

I'm not sure what I could have done differently. The ground was too open. I suppose I could have gone up the right side in the woods, but then he would have had all the time in the world to wheel his line to compensate.

The wargs were not the killing machines I had envisioned. Either I needed more or they would be better with riders. They were weak. I would have rather had a troll or something. They did help out flank the Elves in the ruins, but one on one, Elves were much better.

The one thing I think I did right was put all my Captains on Wargs. That made them very useful for smashing into the battle at critical moments. It might have helped if I rememberd the extra attack for charging cav.

Anyway, good fight, lessons learned and fun was had. I also got to put out my Scenic backdrops on the side of the battle table.

Xin

Building Marengo Battlefield, Part 1

We are going to put on the Battle of Marengo at Fall In 2014. We will be using my friends Napoleonic rules, "Eagles at War"(working title). Since their is no adult supervision for us gamers we are going all out with a custom built board like we did for Stones River. This is part one of my documenting our build. Hope you enjoy the ride.

Home Depot supplies us with 5 large sheets of foam insulation. We have to cut them in the parking lot to fit into my car.

We lay out the boards and test the joins to get best fit. The boards are numbered so we can keep the same layout. Also we use sharpie to mark across the board joints so they can be lined up exactly after they are taking apart or moved. 

We locate as many maps as we can of Marengo. Then we use them to draw our map of what we are going to represent on the table. None of this would be possible without reading glasses.

With our map complete. We layout major terrain features with glass beads that I normally use as game markers. The reason I like the beads as opposed to drawing it in, we can layout terrain features and adjust them just be sliding the beads around. Once we are happy with the position of terrain, we use a sharpie to draw in the features,

Roads, rivers, streams, hills and towns are now marked on the board and we can begin cutting foam.

Hills are cut. Now Marengo is a very flat battle field from what I've read. But there are a few elevation changes, as the ground undulates across the fields. This is what we are trying to represent. These will be gentle rises.

Making a mess in my basement. Carving out the Bormida River. Using a Stanley Sureform to dig it out. Later we will use sandpaper to smooth out the rough cut. 

I made a little guide to get a uniform depth on the river. When we did Stones River, the bottom was very uneven and it caused issues when we poured the Realistic Water.

The river is cut, we have some small streams to dig out as well.

The hills have to be smoothed down alot. We use the Sureform to remove most of the foam. This is the rough cut of the hill. We also have to get some small trees together as all our other trees are for a bigger scale.

That's it for now. I will have another update in a few days. Thanks for reading, Xin.

Dinner in the yard today

I came back from a little getting some lunch and I see 2 deer in the back yard. Now we get deer all the time in our yard, but these were big boys. From the pics I think I count 6 points on one and 8 points on the other!

I ran inside an grabbed the DSLR. I was taking shots as I was walking slowly towards them, but before I got really close my neighbor scared them off. Here's what I got.

UPDATE
They came back the next day and this time I caught them fighting

Cheers, Xin

Uruk-Hai, Ogres and Saxon's

I have been on a painting tear lately. In the last week I got 3 different genre's done. Plus I upgraded my photography set up and had a nice photo shoot. Lets go right to the pics.

My Uruk-Hai Battering Ram. I added 2 guys to this model. This is a project that has sat about 95% completed on my table for about 8 months. I finally put the finishing touches on it.

 Since I added the new Rohan back drop to my photo stage, I dragged out some other figures to set up a little scene. The other Uruk-Hai and Rohirrim were already painted

My friends pointed out that the battering ram might be a little over kill. But look at that door, its got metal studs and stuff. It's tough I'm telling ya.

This is my favorite Warhammer Ogre. The Jes Goodwin Ogres are the best. He has sat unpainted in my basement for about 15 years. Back in the day my Empire Army always went to war with a unit of these guys.

I will have to dig out my other ogres and play some Oldhammer.

I think these are Gripping Beast. They were given to me. So I painted them up and they will be my Saxon Hearthguard.

I hate doing shields. I'm terrible at it.

These are Gripping Beast Monks. Very quick to paint up. What are they doing in Rohan?

Hmm, need to figure out how to manually set the White Balance on my phone camera. Depending where you aim the picture it changes the color saturation.

Seems the Saxon Hearthguard don't like Monks.

Painting will have to take a back seat for awhile. The convention Fall In is coming up, and we are going to be running The Battle of Marengo. We are building a table like we did for Stones River. It's a long process. I will be posting pics of the building process once we make some headway.

Xin