6mm Napoleonic (& others) Terrain

In many games, particularly smaller scales, I feel that the depiction of urban spaces is abstracted to a large degree, for obvious practical reasons.

But I wanted to do something a bit different (although I’m sure this has been one before!) and put on the table something closer to a diorama of a town, rather than just a building on a base which is imagined as a number of houses etc.

In the rules for Grande Armee (Sam Mustafa) he recommends using a town base slightly larger than the army bases (in my case 3″ squares) and removing the “house” and replace with an army base to indicate occupation.  One army base per “town”.

Larger towns are represented by multiple bases, but I wanted to present a large town as one large base, rather than simply cobble together three/four bases with half a dozen buildings.

So my approach will be to have a few single bases for small villages and a couple of larger bases for a town.  In each case the town block can be removed to allow placing an army base, but hopefully the “look” will be more dramatic and better represent an urban environment on the table top.

So I started with a few sketches of a 4×4 town base to see how many small building could be realistically placed there. As with Sam’s suggestion, each of these town bases will be a multiple of a 4″ square (to allow for a 3″ army unit base)

The pictures are initial ideas and the second picture shows the base materials I’ll use. Unfortunately I can’t get hold of thin MDF, which would have been my first choice, so instead I’ll be using a thick cardstock.

As for the houses themselves, I have a supply of balsa wood in various sizes and will make these the basic material for the buildings.

If I had a 3d printer, (and the skill) that would be a superb alternative, and undoubtedly produce a cleaner final product. But you can only play the hand you’re dealt, and no such things exist here yet.