In this post I will try to explain how I built my Epic Battleboard.



Some of you may already have visited my french article about this board but as they are few of you who can undestand the explanations, I will try to make them more clear with my "not so clear" english.


At the beggining of the process, I decided to make a "multi-system" board that could be used to play Warhammer games as well as Epic, W4OK and Warmachine/Hordes games. That's why I choosed the "agri-world/rural" colour scheme. Note that this wasn't my first choice as an Epic system fan, I would have prefered a desert scheme but as I'm the only Epic player in my game club, I choosed the multi-games scheme to avoid long hours of work only to see my boards taking dust at home. The second important choice was to make a table with modular terrain pieces of various scale depending of the games I wanted to play.

The whole board consists of 4 120cm * 60 cm wood panels even if most of my battles are played on 3 panels. Each board is pre-painted (on both sides) mostly to avoid the "torn and twist" problem. The next step consists of adding some sand and paint it. Finally the static grass was added. Note that to create more uniformity between each board, the sand was glued at particular spaces on the boards which join to one another from board to board ( not sure of the words to explain that....sorry).

To be continued...

Hey removable trees! I like your base shapes better than mine.  

_________________
-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

...this sounds like something i'll keep an eye on...;-)

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Let's climb the hills.



To make this kind of hills, you need a solid base to be sure that your piece of terrain will survive the passing of ages. Here, I've used some kind of wood panel that I don't even know exactly how they are called in french so you can bet that I can't tell you their english name. By the way, let me try to explain what it is..... . You will probably find this kind of "soft-compacted-wood" panel somewhere in your supermarket as it is usually used to separate the water-bottle packs. I love this material because it doesn't torn as much as the fine MDF, it is lighter, cheaper and it can be sanded very easily. I use it to base each pieces of terrain (hills, woods, ruins...) and alo to make my roads in this project.

So, using that base, you can easily glue various slices of polystyrene (using the famous isolation boards) that you cut at the desired shape. To add a "rocky effect", I use some pine barcks that are glued at different point of the hill. As the barks don't perfectly fit to one another, you have to fill the gaps between each ones. To do so, I use some modelling material (called Plastiroc in France) that is air hardening. This modelling material is a fantastic tool as it is very cheap and it can be sanded once dry and sculted or shapped during long minutes before it dries. In my hill, I firstly fill the gaps and then, using a sculpting tool, I have added some "striation" so that you can't tell once painted where it is pine bark or modelling material. Believe me, it is very funny and easy to do. Be sure to humidify the modelling material before sculpting but once it is done, you can make one hill in just few minutes. Once the modelling material has dried (it may take one night) you can paint it. It may occure that some "crack" appear on you modelling material once it has dried, the most often if you have used lots of it or to fill big gaps. It is not really a problem as you can fill these cracks easily using once more modelling material (almost liquid by adding water)or filler. I have used the same scheme as the main board, painted sand and static grass.

Hills are very important in Epic games has they break line of sight and the choice of making rocky hills was natural to me because I find easier to determine if the units are hidden by the hills or if the hills modify the movement of units etc...with rocky hills, it's WYSIWYG, don't have to bother and debate to know if the unit is on the crest.





To be continued...

Fantastic! If I ever decide to expand my hill collection I know where to look for inpsiration.  

_________________
-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

HI Nico!

Finally i get to thank the one person who's idea for woods i stole!  

Your site inspired me, i really like it!

cheers,

Clever ideas!  Thanks for sharing.

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author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Excellent, awesome looking hills too!

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http://hordesofthings.blogspot.co.nz/

Good stuff Nico.

I've used the tree bark idea a few times over the years (cliffs for Lord of the Rings terrain etc) and it is a great way to get a realistic effect.

I definately like the way these terrain boards can be used for many different games, VERY clever.

Got anymore terrain bits? How does the board look with 12 terrain features on it (as per the 3000pt Tournament scenario rules)? I'd love to see more photos.

Cheers,
Steve.

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Just call me Steve.

NetEA Rules Chair
NetEA FAQ

Want to play Iron Warriors in Epic Armageddon? Click HERE
Some of my Armies.
My Hobby site.

 Oops. Guess I should have read that before I set about constructing tons of buildings....

_________________
-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

Awesome.
Very inspiring, I like it a lot  
Eyal.

A terrain feature can be several building (from memory, the wording in the rule goes a terrain feature can be anything about 15 to 30cm across).

We call up to 4 buildings (say, the polystyrene buildings or the very old cardboard buildings) a terrain feature.

There is no hard rule as such, just 12 terrain features to break things up. Few terrain features can give certain armies an advantage.

Anyway, whats next Nico?

_________________
Just call me Steve.

NetEA Rules Chair
NetEA FAQ

Want to play Iron Warriors in Epic Armageddon? Click HERE
Some of my Armies.
My Hobby site.

Thanks guys for the comments.

As I don't have many occasions to play Epic, I'm not very concerned by the rules for tournaments and when we play we just put the terrain on the board to make a "beautifully devasted" battleground. For the moment, we just play with the current pieces of terrain which consist of :

- 4 rocky hills
- 2 woods
- 1 road system (12 segments that can be layed on various and numerous ways)
- 1 ruined imperial small city
- 3 ruined buildings to put along the road or near the small city

The future project is to make :

- 2 boards of urban terrain (imperial city)
- 1 spatioport
- Orkish village and pieces of terrain
- 1 big "corner-hill"

Let's take a walk under the trees....

Like many of you, I wasn't very clever when GW had the good idea to sell their Epic scale trees and I only bought 1 set of them. No that they are out of production, it appears very soon that it will make a poor wood. That's why I decided to recycle them into 28mm woods using them as little trees or bushes. It was time to try a technic learned on the french Epic forum to make your own trees.

In fact, it's quite simple and even if it take a little time, you can build quite a big number of trees without spending that much of money.

First you need to sacrify one old broom and cut his bristles. Then you put this bristles between an iron cable. Just put one edge of the cable into a clamp and using a screw gun on the other edge you "twist" the cable to make a beautiful "bottle-brush" tree. Using your scissors you can cut the bottle-brush into the kind of tree you want to have in your woods.

Then you just have to spray the tree with a large quantity of green paint and to sprinkle over the tree some green flock. Let dry. It's just time to spray some varnish to "fix" the flock a little more (varnish spray or hair spray will work perfectly. For my woods, to had playability I decided to make removable base so that you can move the units easily into the woods. You can add some pine barks and/or some lichen to add relief and colours. That's all.

Here's 2 links to french forum with pictures of that method. :

Making your trees 1

Making your trees 2

And here's my 2 Epic woods :






To be continued....

On the road again....

Roads are very usefull for Epic Games. Not only they are nice pieces of terrain on your battlefield but they add a lot of mobility to vehicules and doing so add tactical options to both players.

It may seems to be an easy project but it's probably the one that took me the most preparation time because I wanted to have a flexible road system with lot of combinations and a "realistic" look. To do this I started to divide the battleboard in 30cm x 30cm parts. Each pieces of the road had to enter into one or two of this squares. In the end, I have a road system that always perfectly match with the borders of the board.

The road is made using the same material as for the hills and forests bases, and I have just added some craters.

Here's a schematic descritpion of the road system :



and pictures of the road elements :







To be continued...