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  • Terrain in Wargames 3: built-up areas

    Hougoumont, 1815 – seems to tower over British ideas of fighting in and around buildings. This portrayal shows combat just outside the gates. Picture: Denis Dighton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Happy New Year to my readers! As part of a general change of year tidying up, I have changed the Theme on this (WordPress) site. This has not gone entirely as I hoped – the process is so much more complicated than last time I tried it. I probably picked the wrong template – but anyway it feels a bit fresher. The biggest change is that I have made the blog home page the home page for the whole site.

    In this post I am continuing my series on wargames terrain with one of the trickiest topics: built-up areas. By this I mean areas of terrain dominated by buildings, from farms or manor houses, up to urban areas. These are often tricky to represent on the table, and their role in warfare is often misunderstood.

    Historical view

    Built-up areas feature in ancient warfare mainly as fortified cities. These have a hard perimeter – city walls. Once an attacker had breached this perimeter it was usually game-over for the defenders. Thus the military actions were primarily sieges, as attackers built up to attempt a breach, or to starve the defenders out. These generally don’t make great wargames, though city walls make a good backdrop to a more conventional battle game.

    We need to consider this a bit. Unless there is a fortified perimeter, built-up areas are hard to defend. My contention is that this is true right up until modern times (by which I mean well after WW2). This is a bit more debatable in the world of firearms, but it is certainly true before that. The buildings themselves were quite hard to defend unless built with defence in mind. Perhaps a bigger issue was that they were mostly quite small (and poorly constructed) – and that breaking up your army to defend them was very risky. It would be very easy for defenders to become isolated and cut off; moreover small unit command was more of a modern development – so detailing a couple of dozen men to look after a building was more of a risk. Defensive tactics worked much better in open ground before firearms. Open ground was obviously not the death trap it became in later times. Shifting a serious body of troops with missile weapons alone pretty much never happened. An early cannon did more damage with their noise than their projectiles.

    This pattern seems to continue right into the 17th Century. Urban battles did happen – with the fighting taking place mainly in the streets rather than anything akin to modern house-to-house fighting – but not very often. Fortified manor houses played an important role in the English Civil War – but these were sieges involving relatively small numbers of troops. I don’t have any kind of detailed command of history in this era, but by Blenheim in 1704, villages are starting to play an important role in the course of at least some battles, and by Napoleonic times built-up areas are a feature of most battles. Battlefields were much bigger, and so villages and or farms were an inevitably encompassed. But once part of the field of battle, it is less clear why they should be so significant – and they clearly were. I have read several theories. If left undefended, they might offer the enemy an opening. And if defended they were perhaps easier to attack than open ground. Or perhaps their dominance of the geography offered a psychological marker of progress. Anyway, if in earlier periods wargames rules can get away with ignoring built-up areas, this cannot be done from the horse and musket period onwards. Still, even in the horse and musket era true urban battles, with house-to-house fighting, are a rarity. I know of just one: Saragossa in 1808. The Spanish defenders were largely irregulars, though, and had the numbers to provide breadth and depth of defence, making it very slow going for the French, with heavy casualties on both sides. It is hard to see that regular troops would have been used in that fashion. The retreating French troops did not make much effort to defend Leipzig, for example, in 1813. When it came to towns and cities, most fighting took place outside (think of Dresden), or at the perimeter. The rule that once the perimeter was breached, the town was lost still held true almost all of the time.

    Saragossa 1808 – a rare early example of of a true urban battle. Picture: January Suchodolski, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    As weaponry advanced to include breech-loading rifles and machine-guns, buildings took on a new significance: they provided cover. But at the same time, explosive shells were developed for artillery, and indirect fire techniques were developed. While buildings provided cover, they were also an easy target to locate. If an artilleryman sees a building, his first instinct is to blow it up. This became even more prevalent once air power came into play. Towns in particular seemed to have a magnetic attraction for bombs – they were such easy targets to locate, and the effect of bombing was reassuringly visible. The odds still favoured the attacker in urban combat – as it was so easy to bypass and isolate defenders. This was the conclusion of a data study (reviewed by me here) into 19th and 20th Century infantry warfare. I’m not sure how much this was understood by soldiers of the time, though. Some clearly did. At Salerno in 1943 the Germans held the town of Battapaglia at the start; as the British Fusilier brigade approached, they withdrew. The Fusiliers duly occupied the town, but then suffered heavily as the Germans counter-attacked. The Germans clearly understood how it worked, and the British were more naive. Interestingly, the study I quoted found that once buildings were reduced to rubble, the advantage to attackers was greatly diminished; it became much like other rough terrain.

    By the time we reach Ukraine, or even Gaza, however, it is clear that something has changed, and that the odds have shifted to the defender. That, however, is well beyond the scope of this article on wargames rules up to WW2.

    Fighting in built-up areas

    I think we can draw some general observations here. Buildings can either be used as cover for skirmishers – and abandoned once the enemy approach in force – or used as fortresses, with an all-round defence. In the former case, escape routes need to be well-understood. And only a limited number of buildings are appropriate for the latter role. Most buildings, especially in earlier eras, are too small or too flimsy, or have restricted outward visibility. If used as a fortress, you need to have enough men to do the job, and a decent supply of ammunition. And morale needs to reasonably good.

    So buildings actually have relatively little direct combat value. What has real value are the streets. The combatant who controls the streets controls the whole village or town. And if you read battle accounts closely, up to the 20th Century it is clear that most combat took place in the streets. Witnesses of speak of them being strewn with bodies from both sides. Barricades were important tactical features, and a small number of buildings might be turned into fortresses (the church in Aspern or in Planchenoit, for example; the granary in Essling; there were two farms in Ligny – not counting an almost entirely separate battle for the chateau; but nothing in nearby St Armand, which was barely defended).

    This general rule is less true of more recent times, where small groups of soldiers often defended fairly ordinary houses, and fighting in built-up areas often took the form of house to house clearance. That is presumably down to the extra firepower of modern weapons and the greater development of small unit command. If he who controls the streets controls the town, it became the case that he who controlled the houses on those streets controlled the streets. Even so, streets would be the central focus of any plan of attack.

    On the table

    Representing built-up areas on the wargames table is not easy. We start with the problem that figure scale and ground scale are of a different order of magnitude. The scale of my 18mm miniatures is 1:100. Usually the lowest ground scale for such figures is 1:1,000 (1mm to 1m) – and often it is much more. The figures are mounted on bases 25mm wide – which is narrow by wargaming standards. That means to fit one base width a street would need to be at least 25m wide in ground scale. This is much wider than the typical village street, especially in the earlier eras. If you try and represent the street plan of a typical village, you will often have little space left for model buildings. And these tend to be enormous in ground scale terms.

    There are two types of solution – not counting skirmish games where the scale discrepancy is much smaller and everything can be 1:1. In one buildings are scaled down to be representative, and then the game is played as if what you see on the table is what is there is in life (this is typical of WW2 games). The other is to be abstract: built-up areas are represented by zones, which represent both buildings and streets. There is then a set of arbitrary rules about occupying, moving through and combat. Obviously the greater the scale discrepancy, the greater the attraction of the zone method.

    Big problems happen when the two methods are in effect merged. A built-up area zone is represented by a single model building, and the rules deal with it as if it was a single building with a secure perimeter. Of course that is visually intuitive. And when we remember the heroics of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo (or Rorke’s Drift in a later era), this might appear realistic. One example is Sam Mustafa’s Blücher rules, where the playing units are brigade strength. Each zone (referred to as an urban area) is only slightly bigger than the unit base (though square). If a unit occupies it and takes up “prepared” status, which is very simple to do, it becomes a garrison – and “garrisons are very difficult to dislodge” as the rulebook says. I experienced this when I tried the rules out on a scenario loosely based on Ligny. The Prussians garrisoned Ligny village, and the French simply didn’t have enough infantry to stand any chance of victory. Repeated attempts to take the village ended the way of attacks on Hougoumont. Historically the French did take a long time to win Ligny, but they had much greater economy of force than the Prussians – it cost the Prussians more to defend than the French to attack, and the former became exhausted, in spite of superior numbers. It is my biggest criticism of the otherwise very clever Blücher system. Interestingly by the time Sam came on to rewrite his Lasalle system (where units are battalions) he changed the balance, though it uses the same zonal system. It is harder to attain garrison status, and no so difficult to wear down and shift a garrison. And garrisons may not “un-garrison” themselves – which is easy in Blücher (which to be fair is representing longer periods of elapsed time). Moreover he explains what his rule system is trying to represent much more clearly.

    The current rule system I use for Napoloenics, David Brown’s Général d’Armée 2, operates at similar scale level to Lasalle and also has a zonal system for built-up areas. It works in a not dissimilar way – but the general practice seems to be for the zones to have a much bigger footprint. In the Mustafa systems you can’t have your model soldiers and the building occupy the same table space -you remove the building when the troops get there. In GdA2 the practice seems to be to fit them both in the same space (something which I allowed by house rule when I was using Lasalle 2, as in the picture below). GdA2 also has the concept of “stronghold” for a more robust zone – something that can be used to represent the cores of the two famous Waterloo farms/manors.

    On the tabletop, even when using the zonal system, I like to represent streets and make them big enough to take all the occupying troops with at least two building models. The buildings need a small footprint (which can be achieved by using suppliers such as Total Battle Miniatures Big Battalions Range, one scale size down from the miniatures)and should not need to be moved. Buildings look so much better in groups.

    In this game you can see two of my built-up area zones in a Napoloenic game (Lasalle 2). The figures are 18mm (Old Glory and AB), and the buildings 10mm, mainly from Total Battle Miniatures.

    Rules

    If I was writing my own rules for the battalion-as-unit level (I won’t be – my creative activities focus on much bigger battles), I would try to use a much more representational approach (which is typical of WW2 games played on similar ground scales, though with a much lower density of troops). The basic street plan of the area should be represented, with the streets big enough to take infantry bases (though perhaps sideways if people insist on wide bases). Some buildings would have a stronghold capability, and these may be occupied – and generally only skirmishers could move through building models without being disrupted. I think this is just about doable at 1mm to 1m ground scale and 18mm miniatures. A village would have quite a large footprint – but remember that it also includes back-gardens, allotments, sheds, and so on. It would be more complicated than current systems, but at least it would present players with more realistic choices. It matters where the entrances to villages are. At Aspern (1809), at one point the Austrians were advancing up one street, while the French advancing down the other, parallel street in the village – such complexities are beyond most rules systems. Alas this is fantasy and I don’t think any modern rule-writers will want to take this up.

    Once you scale up, then the zonal model is the only workable one, and realistically this will be the system used most of the time. The rules need to represent the ebb and flow realistically. I think that it is OK to give defenders some kind of initial combat advantage, but they must also be exposed to higher risk if forced to retreat – to represent the risk of elements being cut off. This should apply right up to WW2. I think this should achieve the high defender casualties shown up in battle studies. Strongpoint battles, like Hougoumont, are harder to represent, because the garrison is much smaller than the typical brigade-level unit. But remember that to last out the garrison will need refreshing (if only with ammunition supplies). If you look a little more deeply, those heroic battles at the Waterloo farms, you will see that many more troops were involved in the defence over the course of the battle than many accounts suggest. It should also not be so easy to bypass enemy-occupied villages or farms, however. Waterloo was not unique in small-ish farm complexes delaying the progress of large bodies of troops. This happened at Marengo in 1800, for example, with an occupied farm delaying an Austrian flanking move. But setting up a strongpoint does require a degree of preparation – it isn’t just a case of moving in. Zone of control rules, designed to prevent bypassing of units in the open, can do the job well enough here, I have found. It also helps if villages, etc, can be assigned as objectives with victory points – this relates to the idea that they are important geographical reference points, with psychological significance.

    When it comes to WW2, I am less of an expert. But I think it is even more important to represent streets – as these provide transit for vehicles. These are not always wide enough to accommodate tanks, especially German Tigers and Panthers (one reason that the Panzer IV was more popular I some settings, apparently). Tanks would also be wary of ambush, especially after bazookas, PIATs and the like came into being. On the other hand, covering fire provided by tanks should make the life of attacking infantry much easier. How about reducing buildings to rubble? I am wary about this – I think this was generally quite hard work without the heaviest guns (say 150mm and up) – and even this should be quite slow work. Demolishing a building clearly puts its occupiers at great risk – but if defenders are allowed to occupy rubble, they can be quite hard to clear.

    Conclusion

    I think wargamers can be misled by two things when representing combat in built-up areas. The first is the temptation to play the terrain on the basis of what they see on the table. Typically a single building model represents a group of buildings- something that is altogether more complex – it is one place where bath-tubbing really doesn’t work. For one thing troops tend to occupy the streets between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The second temptation is to turn all such combats into reruns of Hougoumont. But real Hougoumonts were rare – and depended on having the right building in the right place. Hougoumont favoured the defender – but in most cases combats in built-up areas favoured the attacker.

    And a final point: remember that the old buildings we see today are the survivors – the ones that were well-built enough to survive the vicissitudes of time. Most buildings were much flimsier and are long gone. They were often constructed of wood or wattle-and-daub. More robust construction methods, using mass-produced bricks, only emerged in the 19th Century.

    For the next time in this series I will look at water features – but before that I will return to my painting projects and latest games.

  • Terrain in wargames 2: Woods

    Woods are major feature in this game based on Shiloh – with Napoleonic troops!

    Woods are a common feature in European battles, and even more so for battles in Eastern America. They weren’t an ideal spot to actually conduct the fighting but wooded terrain in some shape could not be avoided. I want to think about the European context especially – but some of the observations will apply more widely.

    It is natural to think of wild forests as dense, impenetrable and overgrown and contrast them with navigable, managed woodlands- indeed such a contrast is the basis of what little Clausewitz has to say on forests in On War. It was often the reverse – which shows how little even military people took to consider the matter. So we need to start by trying to understand what woodland is.

    Real woods

    Woods are collections of trees. Our natural understanding of how trees look is based on the ones we see on their own – with all round foliage coming down nearly to the ground – and model trees typically follow this. Trees in woods are different; they compete with each other to reach the light, growing on upwards, and not wasting foliage where the light is poor. Typically they comprise a long trunk with a relatively thin canopy of branches and foliage at the top. The visual impression in a wood is of a dark place with lots of bare tree trunks. The canopy blocks out the light, inhibiting growth in the lower storey, which is often also kept in check by forest animals as well. How easy this is to traverse depends on the development of this understory, how close the trees are to each other, and any other terrain covered by the wood. In the case of many European wild woods (from Poland eastwards), there is little understory and the trees are reasonably spaced – and I expect this is true of North American woods too. So it is actually quite easy to traverse, except at the margins, where there is more light and vegetation, or where other types of terrain – rocks, slopes, marshes, streams – intervene. Hardly a parade ground, and close formation isn’t possible, but not necessarily slow going. Horses would have little difficulty (ancient forests were roamed by big beasts) – but horses with riders perhaps not so much. The main problem is maintaining a sense of direction, as there would be little in the way of external reference points and few tracks.

    A scene from Bialoweiza Forest on the Poland/Belarus border. This is one of Europe’s biggest wildwoods and shows how wildwoods are often not impenetrable. Photo by Robert Wielgórski a.k.a. Barry Kent – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2052575

    It is not quite as simple as that for wild woods, of course. There is a reason that Clausewitz describes them as impenetrable: that is because they are often associated with other difficult terrain, such as steep slopes. That is why they are left uncleared or unmanaged in much of Europe. But in the American Civil War we often find infantry pushing through ancient forests, little managed by man. Uncultivated does not mean impenetrable. Of course as in all terrain, there would be some areas more difficult to traverse than others.

    In Western and Southern Europe, there was little in the way of wild wood in well-populated regions. Woods were a resource used by a rural population that was often much denser than in modern times (not counting commuters and retired people in villages). One important land use was wood pasture – where animals such as pigs would roam the forest eating what they could. This was often common land (like the New Forest in Hampshire now). There was little in the way of understory, and the trees were generally well-spaced. In Southern Europe I believe this type of woodland was commoner – and certainly accounts of the Peninsular War suggest that Iberian woods were relatively open (the French retreated through one with little difficulty after Salamanca). Cork forests, where the pigs roam to eat acorns while the trees are harvested for their bark, are often so open that they can’t be considered to be woods at all. It may also be that regular fires kept any undergrowth in check – something that doesn’t happen further north.

    Wood pasture can be as dispersed as this example from Spain – actually classed as Savannah. Photo by Ardo Beltz – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=749372

    Otherwise woods would be managed for the trees themselves to be harvested by felling. We typically think of timber, for use in building and carpentry, coming from the felling of mature trees. But in pre-industrial times charcoal, firewood and hurdles were very important. Hurdles were an important building material, latticed for fencing and even walls of buildings (e.g. in wattle and daub construction). These last products came from poorer quality wood, from smaller trees. These were typically harvested using coppicing – with smaller trees such as hazel cut to the stump, and growing into a thicket of small branches, suitable for hurdles. Another method was planting potential timber trees such as oak densely and thinning them out as they grew – with the thinnings used for firewood and charcoal. My father managed such a wood in the traditional style, and did both. The significance for our purposes was that these woods were (and are) dense, except for the odd clearing where recently harvested, because the understory has economic value. This made them hard to traverse, and impossible for cavalry. This is mitigated to an extent because they would be traversed by a network of trackways (“rides”) so that the resources could be accessed, but it was still very easy to lose any sense of direction – as I know from walking in my father’s wood. This type of wood is the default in Northern Europe.

    Freshly felled coppiced woodland. This illustrates European managed woodland well – some cleared areas, but look at the density of the forest on the far side. You won’t get cavalry through that! Photo by Charlesdrakew – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41974308

    The two types of wood – common land with a history of wood pasture, and the much denser managed woods, can be illustrated in the Waterloo campaign. The Forest of Soignes, to the north of battlefield, was an example of the former. It was quite open, and some troops, including cavalry, traversed it to avoid the congested main road on the approach. Napoleon’s famous comment that it blocked Wellington’s line of retreat was mistaken – though doubtless artillery and baggage would have been challenged. The Bois de Paris, through which the Prussians advanced to the battle seems to have been an extension of this, as cavalry units seemed to have traversed it. On the other hand the Bois de Bossu at Quatre Bras was a managed wood. Cavalry avoided it, and even the infantry often struggled. The British Guards were able to push through, but took heavy casualties.

    Forêt de Soignes – cavalry can move through this without too much difficulty. Photo by GdML — own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84543885

    In more modern times there are conifer plantations, used purely for timber. These can be extremely dense when recently planted, but when mature the pine needles kill any undergrowth and they become much more open – though the trees might be planted quite close together. Sometimes these are planted in rows, allowing you to see quite a distance when looking between them. The Reichswald in Germany, site of one of the 1945 battles in Germany, was such a place. These typically use non-native species, and would not have been around in Napoleonic times or before.

    Then there are orchards and olive groves – though it is probably not correct to call these woods. The trees are spaced widely enough apart so that they can branch sideways as well as upwards, and typically they are managed so that there is no undergrowth; the trees aren’t very tall, and may be pruned so that the fruit is easier to harvest (as my grandfather did with his apple trees). These are quite easy to traverse, though the lowness of the trees might give cavalry pause. They are often surrounded by fences and walls. Closely related, but definitely not woods, are vineyards. Wargamers need to be careful about how they represent these, as viniculture has evolved rapidly in the last two centuries. Modern vineyards look nothing like the older ones. My knowledge of how these older vineyards looked is very sketchy. I understand that they consisted of mounds of vine, and not trained into neat rows until later in the 19th century. If a reader can point me in the direction of some research on this, I would be interested! For wargames purposes they are quite similar to orchards, but probably provide less cover. Vineyards would be much less of an obstacle in winter, when the vines died or were cut back; at Austerlitz cavalry was able to penetrate them. This would be true of temperate orchards too.

    Combat effects

    The main importance of woods is that they make it hard to see and control troops, and impossible for them to hold close formation. Clausewitz didn’t like them because they might conceal an enemy advance, and advised woods to be kept in the rear when on the defensive – unless they are impenetrable and block and canalise the enemy. In more modern times, concealment is a much greater virtue (amply demonstrated by the current horror in Ukraine), as it makes it much harder to attack with artillery or from the air – and close formations are irrelevant. Woods do stop most vehicles though.

    The extent to which woods provide cover to small arms fire (or mortars and artillery if they do find you) is perhaps exaggerated in our imaginations. There is typically not a great deal of undergrowth, and the wood can give off nasty splinters. By breaking up close formations they would have made hand-to-hand combat more deadly. In modern times you definitely still need to dig in.

    On the table

    The commonest way to represent woods on the wargames table is with patches of dark green cloth or textured paper, with or without model trees scattered across them, as in my Shiloh terrain at the start of the piece (an excellent subject for a war-game, incidentally). This does the job, but lacks something visually. Another method is to have loose groups of model trees placed straight on the table. All these model trees, of course, represent stand-alone rather than forest trees – but at least they are easy to move around to make way for you model soldiers. A few people have constructed detachable canopies with which to cover an area of woodland. This offers the benefit of concealment. What you can’t do, though, is represent a wood by populating it with a realistic quantity of model trees (even if you could find models with long trunks), as that would leave no room for the troops.

    My favoured compromise is that used by my hero Bruce Weigle. Here is his Kissingen board, representing a battle in 1866 in Germany:

    Credit Bruce Weigel https://grandtacticalrules.com/gameboards/

    He represents the edge of the wood with a line of touching tree models whose foliage comes practically down to the ground. The interior wood is represented by foliage-coloured cloth. I particularly like this because it replicates the denser foliage usually found at the edge of woods, which is a genuine physical obstruction. This may work a bit better in his 5mm scale. Here’s how it looks in one of my games with 18mm figures:

    The dark green felt looks a bit ropey, I admit. One question when modelling the interior of a wood like this is whether it should be coloured like the canopy – green, or grey in winter – or the forest floor – various shades of brown.

    The loose model tree method works much better for orchards and olive groves, where the models look more like the real thing. Boundaries can be represented by fences or walls. Vineyards are much harder. Bruce Weigle simply paints in rows of dark green on the base cloth (by the time of his later 19th Century battles doubtless this was how they looked). For larger scales you could try something more textured, or else movable models for the vines.

    In the rules

    Most wargames rules recognise two types of wood: dense and open. The latter category would include orchards. Troops move more freely in open woods, and cavalry is (usually) permitted, but not artillery. Usually movement is slower in woods for all types of troops, except perhaps skirmishers. This is fair enough. Even where the ground and vegetation is less of a physical obstacle, the need for orientation would slow troops down.

    In all rules woods block line of sight; there is usually a reduced vision distance within a wood. Thicker vegetation at the margins, and the light contrast, make it hard to see into woods from outside, and within the you had to push right to the edge to see outside the wood. Visibility in woods is limited in even the more open ones, unless the trees are in neat rows – a rarity. There should be more visibility in orchards, where trees are much more likely to be in rows, but these are usually relatively small, and not worth making special rules for.

    I am more sceptical of any defensive advantage given to troops in woods as cover against various forms of fire, or in close combat. I don’t think this is worth bothering with – except that the edges of woods can realistically be treated as hedges. Having said that, at Quatre Bras the British Guards suffered heavy losses when pushing through the woods – and it is safe to assume that the French suffered much less. These French troops would have been light infantry, though, and much more skilled at this type of warfare – and the Guards were in a hurry.

    A further consideration is the way that woods would break up close formations – and even make looser formations harder to maintain because of reduced visibility. If advancing through woodland, troops would need time to sort themselves out once they emerge, if in any bigger unit than a platoon.

    And finally it is worth remembering the effect of woods on command and control. There is much more friction for troops deployed in woods. It is harder to see where they are; it is harder for them to know where they are, or where anybody else is – and it is quite easy to lose your sense of direction unless you are familiar with the ground. Where woods feature as relatively small patches – which is typical for most games – then obviously it is less of a problem.

    Conclusion

    The main thing to learn from all this is that it is important to do research on any woods that feature in your historical battles. See how the armies used them, or not, at the time. If they didn’t feature at all, then they are likely to be dense. Also be aware of other terrain features – such as slopes – which would impact their use. If woods are extensive, consider how the affected command, consider how to reflect this in the scenario. The Waterloo campaign shows that both dense and open woods can be in the same landscape, and can look very similar from a distance.

    Next time – built-up areas.

  • Terrain in wargames 1: Hills

    Classic sculpted terrain – from Bruce Weigle’s San Martino 1859 game. This consists of a cloth covering a sculpted base. The trees are pins holding the cloth in place. The figures are 5mm.

    This is a new series of posts when I set out my thoughts on a broader subject. I am moving from mixing colours to something more directly to do with warfare: terrain. Everybody knows that terrain is critical to the course of battles – but representing it on the tabletop, or allowing for its effect in rules, presents particular challenges. In these posts I want to do two things: consider what these terrain effects are – based the landscape as it was historically, rather than the very different place we typically see today. The second is to consider how to represent these effects on the tabletop. In this I will have a strong bias towards Europe, and the eras that I play, from Horse and Musket to World War 2.

    I will start by looking at hills – or relief. At least this aspect of terrain is virtually timeless. The shape of hills has changed little over time. Their effect on warfare has changed though. In ancient times, when a lot of warfare came to big shoving matches between close packed bodies of men with shields, with few casualties until one side broke, the physical effects of gravity were clearly important. This would have diminished once firearms started to dominate, and physical contact became less important; contemporary accounts still talk of the tiring effect of marching uphill towards the enemy, but it is harder to discern whether this had much effect on actual combat, unless combined with disordering terrain. The effect of hills on line of sight started to become much more important: hills could block the path of a cannon shot. And when modern howitzers and mortars allowed the indirect fire over the hilltops, hills became critical to observing and directing such fire. In the 1943 battles in the Mediterranean that I am studying this was often central to the way the armies fought: the advancing side had to capture the commanding heights, which could render defensive positions untenable. In addition steep hills were an obstacle to the passage of troops and especially vehicles. The biggest battle in Italy (barring perhaps Anzio – though this was fought largely on the flat) was centred on a mountain: Monte Cassino.

    The shape of things

    What about the physical characteristics of hills? Firstly the shape. Here the biggest challenge for wargamers is that they rarely conform to nice isolated blobs on the landscape. The whole ground is shaped in features that can extend for miles. In fact there is rarely such a thing as completely flat ground: and it doesn’t take much of a fold in the landscape to affect what you can see. If you take a walk in the countryside you may be surprised how short it your line of sight – unless you are above the features you are observing. Visibility on level ground is in practice restricted by small folds, to say nothing of trees, hedges, walls and buildings. When visiting the battlefields outside Ypres, the ground at first seemed to be flat and nearly featureless. But standing where the British would have stood, we were looking at a German controlled ridge that was considered to be of great tactical importance.

    Two key points arise here: first, don’t think about “hills” so much as “relief” – shape of the whole landscape. And second, height is a relative concept. It doesn’t matter how high you are in absolute terms – it matters whether you are higher than what you are trying to observe. Or lower. If you can see, you can be seen. If you are descending a hillside you are exposed to the whole landscape in front of you. A slope neutralises the effect of other terrain obstacles.

    Linked to shape is steepness, and this can be considered next to ruggedness – or how broken the terrain surface is. Slopes are mostly gentle outside hilly regions, but occasional steep slopes can surprise. The countryside near Devizes is mostly gentle and rolling – but Roundway Down, the site of a Civil War clash, stands out as a low hill when approached from West, as the Parliamentary army did, but conceals a 100m precipitous drop, enhanced by Iron Age fortifications, that caused havoc to their cavalry when forced onto it. In hilly areas steep slopes become more common, of course, as well as rocky and other rugged terrain which hinder close order formations and vehicles. When thinking about all this, I conflate slopes and other ruggedness into a single concept of “difficult terrain”.

    Roundway Down: innocent-looking rolling terrain can conceal surprises: [Picture by Doug Lee, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8328899}
    Like this, which caused mayhem in the ranks of Parliamentary cavalry. It became known as “The Bloody Ditch”[Picture by Brian Robert Marshall, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14278373]

    Incidentally there is an interesting debate about horses and hills. In traditional rules, cavalry would get a +1 for charging downhill – and you would station cavalry units on hills. People that actually ride horses (not me, I must add) find this highly dubious. Quadrupeds like horses find it easier to go up hills (though exhausting) than down. At Rolica in 1808 one of the British officers ascended quite a steep hill on horseback and got into trouble because the horse ran ahead of his men. One rule-writer went as far as not allowing cavalry to charge downhill, or giving it a disadvantage – though this was usually house-ruled away, apparently. It would be interesting to know if anybody has done any systematic research on cavalry and hills.

    On the table

    How to represent this on the tabletop? The best way is to sculpt terrain, directly modelling the features of relief. But this is a huge investment, which usually cannot be re-used for other battles. This is appropriate for show games rather than more ordinary fare. There are three broad approaches: avoidance, separate hills, and cloth over contours.

    Avoidance is a common approach. I see a lot of games without any representation of relief at all. This can be justified if you think that relief did not play a significant role. If historical accounts don’t mention hills, they probably aren’t important. We have an idea that a lot of ancient battles were fought on flat, open ground because controlling armies in other terrain, or enticing enemies into battle, led to this. I’m no expert on ancient battles, so I can’t really comment. The exact location of battles is usually unknown anyway, so going back to the historical ground isn’t an option. Indeed when setting up setting up scenarios using historical forces but indeterminate locations, you can simply design out the hills. This seems to be what happens with many skirmish games. But there can be a stronger justification, especially with the smaller games: other terrain features can trump the effects of relief. The main effect of hills is to block line of sight. But if there are plenty of other obstacles – forests or buildings – the additional effect of hills is pretty limited. This would apply if refighting Shiloh, say, or parts of Stalingrad.

    A short step from this is to use the traditional approach of placing separate hills on the terrain – sculpted or contoured, on top of the mat or under it. If the historical account mentions a hill, you can just find one from your box terrain and plonk it on the table. In fictional scenarios you can place them where you like to present particular tactical opportunities or problems. In many cases it is possible to achieve the tactical impact of more complex relief this way.

    Typical club game treatment of hills. This might represent the key features of much more complex terrain. It’s not hard to see how this setup could represent something more complicated.

    But very often this will not do. The features are simply too big or too complex to be represented by some blobby hills. Waterloo is a case in point if you are trying to recreate the whole battle. The best solution, I think, is to try and resolve the terrain into a small number of contours – two above the base level is often all that is required. I have found this to be perfectly feasible, but putting it together on the basis of a contour map or other information can do your head in. It is not a question of precision, it is judging what is and isn’t important. I love this kind of doing my head in, though, and I have found that attempting it always adds profoundly to my understanding of the terrain and the battle. With a bit of luck you can find that somebody has done this for you. Bruce Weigle does this in his scenario books for the Bismarck era wars, even though he usually goes for the full sculpt himself (as in the lead picture). Chris Pringle has done it for his Bloody Big Battles rules.

    My Vitoria game with contoured terrain used direct (with 6mm figures)

    What you then need to do is recreate this contoured terrain. This can be done in some appropriate material and directly painted, and used as the playing surface. A friend did this for me for my bicentennial game of Vitoria – using some cardboard type insulating board – though he said that it proved difficult material to work with and he wouldn’t recommend it. Much easier to use styrofoam board (high or low density), and place a cloth on top of it. The under-layer can be as bitty and messy as you like – though it’s a good idea to tape it to the table before placing the cloth on top. You sometimes need pins to get the cloth to lie in the right way. Alas the foam board is unlikely to be usable for other battles. You either need to throw it out afterwards or store for a future rerun of the same game. If the latter you need to mark the pieces so you can figure out how they fit together. Relying on memory won’t be enough.

    This cloth over styrofoam terrain is from a Waterloo game I did in 2015. Rather crude, but it demonstrates the principle. Note the use of map pins to hold the felt cloth down

    In the rules

    Mostly the treatment of hills in rules is quite straightforward. They block line of sight. Some slopes may be steep or rough enough to constitute difficult terrain. Being uphill of an opponent may give a tactical advantage in combat. Or not. Still, there are a small number of issues which I think can be neglected, or which are difficult in practice.

    In the first category comes the effect on visibility. Being uphill does not just help visibility, it transforms it. Visibility along the same level is usually quite limited – not least by small folds in the terrain that it is too hard to represent on the table. Small gains in height, such as from a first floor window, or railway embankment, can transform the view. This needs to be allowed for, especially in 20th century games. On those country walks, test yourself to see how far you can actually see without the object being on a higher or lower level. Often not much more than a few hundred metres. This is not just important for directing the fire of longer-range weapons, but it is important for the situational awareness of commanders, including in earlier eras. Whether or not this justifies a ” +1 for vantage point” in command friction tests is another matter: you can have too many modifiers. The important point is that control of vantage points confers a tactical advantage which makes them worth fighting for – and that can be reflected in the scenario set-up.

    One potential complexity is the question of dead ground. This applies where some hills are high enough to overlook other blocking terrain. This is sometimes ignored, or sometimes you get very elaborate tables. I’m very much in the keep it simple camp – and probably scenario specific rules are the best way to go. A fixed distance of dead ground is easier to live with than having to refer back to a table.

    Then there is the question of rounded hills and ridge lines. This is a particular problem for contoured terrain – such as I have just recommended above. A good general rule is that units on the same contour are treated in the same way as those on “flat” terrain, and can see through any ridge line. But troops on a lower level can see units in front of the ridge line but not behind it. Likewise troops behind a ridge line can’t see units on a lower level across it. The ridge line can be marked in some way, or you can use a simple half-way rule. Or if that doesn’t feel right, units need to be within a certain distance of a ridge line to see through it. Something similar applies to plateaux. The ability to see beyond the edge into valleys or other lower ground is limited unless you are close to the edge.

    Another issue that can vex people is the ability of cannon to fire overhead in the Horse and Musket era. Some people, like the great rules designer Sam Mustafa, say that this didn’t happen – or not often enough for it to be important. I disagree – based on my reading of the Battle of Ligny in 1815 in particular – where I think both the French and Prussians used overhead fire, and this had important consequences for the conduct of the battle. It was one way the French were able to isolate the village of Ligny, hindering the ability of the Prussians to withdraw troops to regroup (which the French were able to do very successfully) – and the ability of Prussians to reinforce without running the gauntlet of cannon fire. Howitzers had a better ability to fire overhead, but they were a far cry from their more modern namesakes – their main advantage was in the use of explosive ammunition.

    Conclusion

    The shape of the landscape can be tricky to represent, but it is important if you seek a historical understanding of the battle you are recreating. It can provide important insights. At Waterloo the shape of the terrain is critical to understanding the battles for Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. They are in hollows and/or screened by woods. They aren’t so easy to target with artillery – though the French eventually managed to converge some howitzers to attack Hougoumont and set it on fire, not a tactic that most wargames rules cater for.

    Next time: Woods

    This table for Albuera shows a more subtle use of the styrofoam and cloth technique. There is a single contour, using higher density insulating foam. You can see some offcuts on the char at the back. A bigger table, a nicer cloth (Geek Villain Sicily fleece) and a slightly thinner contour sheet combine to make this look much better than the Waterloo game. Still a bit small for 18mm figures though!

  • Using caulk for roads and rivers

    Another view of my Albuera table

    Last time I posted about the first stage of creating a wargames table for my Albuera game – which I dealt with by placing a fleece mat over a contoured surface of extruded polystyrene. Next come the roads and rivers. I have been trying out new techniques on this – by using decorators’ caulk.

    I am not a fan of the standardised lengths of road or river that you can buy commercially. Nature doesn’t usually conform to these shapes, and there are lots of joins. All this is fine for an evening club game when you need to set up in minutes, and the game is usually quite generic. But you should aim higher for historical battles. Hitherto my technique has been to use masking tape, painted over with tempura. But these don’t handle bends well – especially in rivers and streams, and painting the edges of the tape means a bit of spillage onto the terrain mat, which also softens the edges. That was OK for my old felt mat, but not my lovely new printed fleece. So I decided to try a technique described on the Altar of Freedom website – using caulk. This is meant for 6mm terrain in the American Civil War, but my features aren’t that much bigger.

    Two types of caulk are needed: opaque for the roads, and transparent for the rivers. The material needs to be paintable – so you need acrylic caulk rather than silicone. For the opaque sort I decided to use coloured material rather than the standard white. It would still need to be painted, but any gaps and damage would be less visible. I bought Unika ColorSealant on Amazon in medium oak. It comes in tubes designed for use with a “gun” – which I also had to buy. It proved trickier to work with than I hoped.

    First off I tried spreading it on an old plastic document wallet (I have dozens of these) – but one of caulk’s properties that makes it so useful in DIY is adhesion – and it was impossible to get it off the backing cleanly. I experimented by spreading it on jay cloth that had been pre-cut. That was fine, and gave a more robust product, but a bit of a faff. I also tried wax paper – as recommended by Altar of Freedom – and I found that I could peel it off that with a bit of care. Once off the backing though, the product was a bit fragile and retained a slight stickiness. It is unlikely to survive most types of storage, so it will usually need to be remade each time a table is put together. One thing I learnt on my experiments is that this stuff hates water – which dilutes it rapidly. I tried spreading it on damp jay cloth (so that it was nice and flat) – which was a bit of a disaster.

    Transparent acrylic caulk is much harder to find, and (usually) pricier. Most transparent caulk is silicone, which can’t be painted. Eventually I found some on Screwfix – No Nonsense All Weather Clear. This is very different stuff from the opaque material: it is less adhesive, dries quicker and is much harder to paint. Spreading it on plastic document folder was fine, but painting the underneath afterwards not so much.

    So much for the experimentation. I want to describe what I did for my Albuera table. I decided on using wax paper. It can be rolled out nice and long, and it is transparent enough so that you can trace felt-tip markings through it. The first step was to trace out the course of the roads and rivers in felt-tip on the XPS base board. I could then mark up the lengths required (using the felt-tip) by tracing through the wax paper. The river bottom was then painted onto the wax paper, over the felt-tip. I then spread the caulk. This means laying beads onto the paper from the caulk gun, and then spreading it into a reasonably flat surface with a spatula. And then I applied paint to the road sections. I did this all in a single session of one to two hours, which meant laying things down before the previous stage was fully dry. The sequence, after the tracing, was: paint the rivers; lay the caulk for the roads; lay the caulk for the rivers; paint the road. A bit of wet on wet is fine, so long as there is no water. Small traces of water in the paint I used for the road (student acrylics) caused issues, though fortunately not fatal. Acrylic paint blends well with he caulk, though, and white caulk would probably probably have been fine. This is how it looked when I left it overnight:

    I came back after nearly 24 hours. The river sections peeled off fine, with the paint sticking to the caulk rather than the wax paper, as planned – a bit of wet-on-wet probably helped; the sections just needed a bit of trimming with scissors. Alas the roads did not peel off as nicely as they did in the experiment. In the end I had to leave the backing paper on and cut them out. At least that made the end product a bit more robust, though less flexible. I found that there was a bit of spreading on the road, as a result of water in the paint mixture; in some cases this created a slight ridge at the edge – actually quite a pleasing effect!

    There was no time to do more work. The roads could have done with a bit of dry-brushing, and perhaps painting the edges in a contrast colour, or even flocking. It would have been nice to do something with the river margins. Both look a lot better than using tape, though, and the more complex features, like junctions, come out nicely. The rivers are fine by wargames standards, but still aren’t very realistic. The grey colour was a bit of an accident – I mixed too much blue in with the brown – I had wanted something browner. Watercourses should run in a bit of a depression – but that could only be achieved with a lot more cut XPS. In fact rivers and streams (especially in Spain) look more like strips of green than blue, grey or brown, as the banks are vegetated, and this tends to dominate the usually trickling flow of water. I could potentially achieve something by using flock while the caulk is still wet – though I would need to be careful about bridges and fords. But as already mentioned, caulk terrain is not robust, and it is best regarded as throwaway – so it is not worth investing too much in it. Flocked margins would make storage even trickier. On the table, the pieces did have a slight tendency to be knocked out of position. Pinning down with tree models may be a solution, but they should really be a bit wider to accommodate this.

    I will try to store these pieces, along with the cut pieces of XPS, so that I can run the game again, but my expectations are low. Anyway I’m sure I will be using some variation on the technique for my next project. Once the basic techniques are mastered, this is very quick and easy -the wet on wet technique in particular saves a lot of time. I will post about the trees and villages on another day!

  • A table for Albuera- fleece mat and XPS

    Apart from reading, much of my recent hobby time has been devoted to the long-neglected aspect of terrain. I focused on one-third of the field of Waterloo, representing the line of advance of the Prussian IV Corps on Plancenoit. Pretty much all aspects of my terrain needed work, and this is still unfinished. Meanwhile my friend Rob offered me a game. This was not just a chance for me to road-test my new wargames rules, but also an opportunity to try out some terrain ideas.

    I picked the Peninsula battle of Albuera. This is on the small side for my rules – suitable for an evening game, but not for the day game we planned. I decided to scale it down, with each base being 600 men or 200 cavalry, and the units being brigades or regiments for the most part. The game-design aspects of this are another story. For now I’m going to look at the table. Albuera was fought in Spain, near the border with Portugal, on terrain that was remarkably empty. It has just one significant habitation, very gentry rolling hills and two streams that merge. This was quite easy to put together quickly – and a good test run for some of my new ideas.

    The first problem was how to shape the table. I wanted something between the two extremes of beautifully sculpted boards as seen in exhibition games, and the rapidly assembled table from standard bits that you use for a club game. I decided to go for contoured rather than sculpted hills, at least for the gently rolling terrain that most of the battles I’m interested in were fought on. This is much simpler to assemble, and its flatness makes it much easier to put things like models of buildings on. The big problem is that I want to represent the sweeping shape of valleys and ridges, and not just plonking a few hills on hill pieces on the table, or just leaving the whole thing flat – which are the normal wargames solutions. The technique I have been working on is to place a mat over cut polystyrene. The mat softens the sharp edges of the contours, as well being the fasted way to get a respectable looking surface.

    This time I retired by well-worn green felt mat, replacing it with a modern printed fleece mat produced by Geek Villain. I picked their “Sicily” mat, which has the muted colours I am looking for and enough pattern to break things up, without dictating the shape of the terrain. You can see it in the picture. One side is mainly beige, which fades into mainly green. This suits Albuera well, as one side of the table is lightly wooded, and the other dry, featureless farmland. The green is a little strong for my liking, but I think it is as good as it gets when buying off the shelf.

    The next innovation was to abandon the lightweight expanded polystyrene (EPS) for the denser extruded polystyrene (XPS). EPS is cheap, and a common packing material (lots of it comes free when you buy stuff), but quite hard to work with. XPS is mainly sold as insulation, and cuts easily with a knife – so long as it is sharp. It is much nicer to work with. It is pricier though. I have been buying off Amazon. My first attempt was a pack of six sheets (10mm thick) of 60cm by 100cm in bright yellow. This cost £40. As I decided I needed more, I found a pack of 5 sheets of 60cm by 120cm (fewer sheets but same area overall) for just £26. This stuff is designed for hiding under floorboards, not for craft use, so the sizes are not precision, and the surface is not always smooth – but as I’m putting a mat over it, that doesn’t really matter.

    One thing I had learnt from experiments though, is that it is very useful to be able to stick pins into the board. That means you need a bottom layer covering the whole table – the main reason I needed two packs. That bottom layer can be re-used for different projects, though. Another thing I have learnt the hard way is that to represent gentle terrain you need to keep the number of layers a minimum – preferably just one on top of the base – and represent only the critical features. That means you can’t just work it out from a contour map; it is more art than science. For Albuera the critical terrain was a low ridge passing the length of the table. I had enough bits of board to put in another feature on the top left of the photo. Strictly there should be another low feature running along the right of the table – but this has no game significance, and I decided to save material. I stuck the top layer to the bottom with masking tape and put the mat on top. The fleece forms beautifully over the XPS sheet, and there was no need to use pins – which is what I needed to do when I experimented with my Sorauren table, which has much bigger hills.

    The next big task (at least so far as this narrative is concerned – I actually did it before the contours) was the roads and rivers. That will be my next topic.