FoW: Building A Terrain Collection
Hi all, DNiR here with a few informal words about what makes a FoW terrain collection great. If you’re used to my usual diatribes, be at ease; this will be a shorter article.
Now, many of us probably have private terrain collections, and I’d hope that those of us who don’t help their FLGS owners maintain and create the store’s stockpile. However, those terrain collections are more than likely 28-30mm in scale, to fit in with the Space Marines and Zombie Queens we loved before we ever heard of Flames of War. This is all well and good for your first few games – God knows we’ve all played on library books and Solo cups when we had to – but after a while the itch may strike you to play on a good-looking board.
There’s a lot of work to be done manufacturing a FoW board from scratch, and not all of it can be done at once. All right, maybe you’re a member of a large gaming club that has big 20-person terrain workshops every month. If so, great – you can stop reading now. But chances are you’re not, and you’d like to know which pieces you’re going to get the most value out of first, and which ones can wait a while.
1. Hills and Valleys
It was absolutely no contest in my mind deciding what the #1 most important thing to rebuild for 15mm scale is when coming from larger-scale games. Hills are #1 and should probably be #2 and #3 as well, but I didn’t want to go overboard. The reason is this: models with 1″ bases and comically oversized upper bodies (familiar to none of us, I’m sure) will tip over at much of an incline, so 28mm hills are usually not actually inclined. They’re usually “stepped” to look like ziggurats, as in the image you see at left. FoW models, on the other hand, are not top-heavy at all and have pretty hefty footprints, so they rest easily on inclines.
Simply put, proper, sloping hills will change the way you think about wargames. They radically change LOS and open up a host of modeling opportunities, like shallow ridgelines that just barely conceal infantry, or steep ravines counting as Very Difficult Going. They allow for legitimate real-world tactics like hull-down positions for tanks at hill crests, rather than a binary “see, but be seen” approach to elevation. Lastly but not leastly, they look less obtrusive to the eye than stepped hills, and can greatly contribute to the verisimilitude of your miniature terrain.
2. Fortifications
Fortifications are not always a big part of FoW games, but they are a small part of most games and a big part of some. Many infantry forces boast the ability to deploy wire or minefields before a standard mission; some few infantry forces can even put forward trenches, gun pits, and bunkers. Also, the set-piece missions in the main rulebook (Trench Fight and Big Push come to mind) are great scenarios that a lot of people never even get to try because they just don’t have the terrain modeled!
If you’re just going to build a few pieces, start with wire and minefields – that way, you have what you need if you ever decide to have your Pioneers deploy fortifications before a normal game. If you have more time, invest in some trenches, too – as arguably the most useful fortification, you’ll need lots of them in the set-piece scenarios.
3. Water Features
Water features are a strange choice for third place, I know, because water terrain scales pretty well and there won’t be much visual difference between water in 28mm and water in 15mm – a creek just becomes a river. And while that’s true, I put them at #3 because I believe it’s easy for new FoW terrain builders to ignore water entirely. Let’s face it, none of the popular systems out there make water features a very appealing terrain piece ruleswise. Water features were critically important in the actual conduct of World War 2, however, and in FoW games rivers, creeks, and lakes have huge effect on the way the game is played, and require special consideration. FoW rivers require a certain number of crossing points, or fords, per length of river. Having pieces with these modeled on will save time and arguments later. Secondarily, you’ll probably want to model some bridges – maybe even narrow enough that one burning wreck on the bridge will create a dramatic bottleneck! (Also, don’t miss out on the River Crossing mission available free on BF’s website; it’s one of my favorite FoW scenarios ever period.)
4. Houses, Linear Obstacles, and other remnants of civilization
This one is purely aesthetic, but buildings and other human constructions are the place where it’s going to be most clear whether or not your terrain is in scale with your miniatures. Part of the reason WW2 was such a true World War was that people lived in basically every place that was being fought over (yes, even North Africa); the war visited many villages and even cities in an extremely personal fashion.
When constructing FoW buildings, it’s nice to keep in mind the size of a medium base when considering how large to make a room. Basically, if you can’t fit one base in, it’s not going to be of much use! Contrariwise, if you want a room to “look big” but still only fit one base, just make it slightly smaller than the size of two bases. Also, try and correlate your buildings to each other – having row houses painted in the same scheme, or a church with masonry that matches that of the walls around the cemetery, does wonders for the cohesion of your terrain board.
5. Everything else
The observant reader may have noticed that some of the most common terrain pieces in mini gaming didn’t make the top four of this list – forests, for example. The simple fact is, trees look weird next to minis in every scale; FoW scale forests are very nice to have, of course, but simply not as important as the above. The dividing factor is gameplay. In the game, you can remove every tree from a forest and it still acts the same. In the game, a patch of Difficult Going represented by comically huge rocks is the same as a patch represented by rocks of the right size. Area Terrain simply is not as important to rebuild for a new scale as things whose size directly affects gameplay, and so Area Terrain can wait until last.
