Sorry it's been while but I've been busy, both with modeling and a few other (less fun) things. Anyways, I wanted to post a bit of the progress I've made on my 1809 set-up. So far, so good. Here's a little step-by-step first, all of which feeds back into my previous posts on the project.
The above shows how I lay down the substrate for the mat itself. I went for subtle elevation contours in this case. I could have used deeper valleys, especially around the river because it would show up better in the pictures. For an actual game just a few contours can make for subtle and not-so-subtle in-game effects as far as masking arty and LOS is concerned. It really begs hidden movement and ref'ing, IMHO. Anyways, next time I'll set it up with more dramatic elevation changes.
You can also see my "get by" river. Basically I cut out a winding river from the roll of excellent vinyl terrain mat that I got for $5 at a second hand store (10' x 4'!). This stuff is designed so you can scratch the flock off with your finger nail to reveal the earth tone backing. You could use it to make roads, or with more-or-less work make some rivers. I chose less in this case because I just wanted an easy stream. What I didn't want was a stream built into the mat as this limits what elevation changes you can place in relation to the stream and I wanted my project to be more flexible. By using the technique below you can solve the worst issue with most modular streams, which is having the stream rise above the terrain mat, and you can heighten that effect of correctness (to the eye, I mean) by putting sensible contours around it to make the river flow through low ground. You could put a lot more effort into doing a very fancy one. If you wanted you could use a heat tool to melt the vinyl mat into a trough and then build a very detailed, realistic river in there, then pin it in place as in the photo below.
The river here is in two pieces to make it across the 5 foot board. By lining it with trees and shrubs you can't even notice the break. It's a great way to do streams at this scale, and they look like streams in real life, which are almost always lined with vegetation of one form or another.
I then pin everything in place with the trees. All 280 of them are used either along the stream or the roads or in the villages. Then I add the buildings and some shrubs.
Above you can see the river and the towns plus fields/suburban areas, depending on whether you want to play a brigade or battalion level game (the terrain was made to function for all possible levels of representation).
Not bad. For the brigade level games I'll have to do some farm fields to place out in a patchwork. This is pretty easily done, and I have a technique from my older mat set-up that'll do the trick. I'll take some paper or cloth and glue various colored flocks to it, cut them into geometrical shapes and then pin them down all over the mat. Cheap, fast and good looking.
So, those who've been following me awhile know I originally set out to do Wagram at 6:1, which meant using battalions with 90 figs, three strips of 10 figs each on three 20mm x 10mm bases. I stopped because I thought it might be too fiddly. Today, before I broke down the set-up I took out some of the 20mm x 10mm bases that I hadn't taken apart to use in my brigade bases. As it turns out, this was really quite do-able…
The above shows a full (largish) division of 14 battalions and a battery of 8 (2 guns per model) cannons deployed in front of one of the villages. No flags, but just pretend for now! Everything is deployed at a realistic distance and in realistic depth. You could easily fit an entire corps on this one 5 x 5 battle mat with plenty of space for maneuver and tactical surprises. On, say a 12' x 8' mat (8' is about the biggest a person can reach across) you could easily do multi-corps battles with unsecured flanks, depth and all the terrain detail you'd want.
Here's an overhead shot where you can see the relative positions of the battalions better. Each 3 base battalion is about 60mm/150m long, so you can use that to gauge the other distances. The supporting battalions in the second line might be a bit too close but the supporting brigade in the back is a good 300m behind the brigades in front. I don't have any skirmishers, but this scale and terrain density would even allow for historic deployment of skirmish troops at real distances from the parent units (not to mention real artillery ranges and depths for the gear involved. You could even place the mysterious location to which artillery units retreat to re-arm themselves every few turns, and more besides.
In this final picture I used the new cameras panorama function to capture the view from the village as the brigade deploys- you'll notice the battalions on the left moving up on the flank! You can also see the interesting terrain contours that you get with a well-supported battle mat, all of which can be in-play during a tactical level game. Check out the row of hellish trees in the background. That's all created by those few pieces of substrate in the first picture in the post, plus the relative heaviness of the cloth itself. Like I mentioned in an ealier post- you want your mat to be stiff enough but not too stiff.
Gotta finish the Blucher project first though!
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