Friday 28 September 2018

WW2 unit and preparing for ECW campaign games

My painting effort is dawdling along, something which often happens after finishing a project. But  while I am in-between projects I am continuing to fill the void with finishing off a few WW2 units. This week saw the completion of a Sd.Kfz. 250/10 using one of a pair of Sd.Kfz. 253 I have and a spare Pak36 found in the bits box.

The half-track and some WW2 Airfix Germans 
Armoured infantry unit
This weekend I plan to play game 3 of my English Civil War campaign. The preparation of a game starts with the selection of the terrain for the tabletop. The approach I am using in this campaign is to divide the tabletop into 6 squares each 2x2 foot (I have a 6x4 foot table). Each of these squares will contain a piece of terrain.

When choosing the terrain I use some homemade cards with terrain features drawn on them. These are shuffled and six are selected for each of the 2x2 foot squares. Some of the features are deliberately offset and not centred to show placement within the 2x2 square.

The current set of cards
If a river square is drawn, then that particular square will be treated as open terrain and the position of the river will need to be calculated. Rivers flow across the tabletop longways. Two dice are rolled, one for either side of the table (see diagram below).

An example of 6 cards drawn and placed starting left to right top row first then second.
Calculating a river's position - Dice are rolled for opposite sides and the river flows between the two marks
Once the river is in place the other selected terrain is positioned. Occasionally it may be necessary to adjust a terrain features position to accommodate the river. Then roads/tracks are added, I generally try to have two roads which avoid terrain features excluding towns, and help identify where to place any bridges.


One final note on the rivers there are two cards, one with an unfordable river and one which can be treated as fordable.

6 comments:

  1. That is a very complete and versatile way of generating your terrain Peter- you have come up with a great solution.

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    1. Thanks KEV. I find the cards work better when I am not using a gridded tabletop. When using a grid I will often use dice to determine which square to pop the terrain feature in.

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  2. Love your beautiful Armoured infantry unit!

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    1. Thank you. I normally play WW2 games with one stand equals a company, so I like to have vehicles and troops all together on one stand. I also like the look of a combined group.

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  3. Excellent work on the half track, Peter!

    As Kev states, you have a very innovative and versatile method for drawing up your campaign game battle maps. Well done!

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    1. Thanks. It allows me to reduce the number of hills in a deck if I was setting up battle in East Anglia for example, where the terrain is generally flat.

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