Back to Nature
As my 1809 project was my first 10mm project in a European theatre of war, I thought it
best to have a good think about whether the terrain for the project needed to be different
in any way from anything I’d done before. As I mentioned in Post 59, I’m happy to use
my terrain tiles for virtually any theatre of war – any battlefield where there’s earth and
grass! – so the base board colour and texture was already decided upon. Perhaps the
rough grass of my terrain tiles was not as luscious as the rich meadows of the Danube
valley of 1809 but it didn’t worry me at all. Anyway, what does a rich meadow look like
after a night of heavy rain followed by the trampling of thousands of men and horses?
Terrain Bases
I like to fix my terrain features straight onto my terrain tiles. However, the golden rule
of terrain making – if there is a golden rule – is never make something twice if you can
make it once. Some terrain features are better mounted on smaller, more adaptable
bases.
I was still set on using 3mm bases for my 10mm troops – if only for the ease of picking
up the bases rather than picking up and potentially damaging the figures mounted on
them. As for terrain features, I was happy to base them on 3mm as well – especially for
terrain that would stand alongside figures rather than terrain figures would stand on.
While 3mm terrain bases were fine for larger scale figures, I had a bit of a mull over my
10mm landscape and made one of those long-term wargames decisions and decided to
mount all 10mm terrain on 2mm bases. I ordered a bundle of 2mm MDF hexagonal
bases from Minibits, Pendraken’s sister company, timed nicely with a Christmas bases
sale.
I decided to continue my preference to grid my wargames tabletops – in theory, at least. I try to keep as many
measurements multiples of my chosen figure base size. And for my 10mm battlefields, this was going to be
25mm. For that reason, I ordered 25mm, 50mm, and 100mm hexagonal bases to go with my 25mm figure bases.
POST 62
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