Waterloo60 Terrain - WIP

 

As part of the prep for next year's (hopeful) game of Waterloo with Adrian and Nick (in 20mm, 1:33, 1mm=1yd) I've been working on a terrain test on and off over the last few months. As mentioned previously we've decided to use Halfords 60cm x 60cm "rubber" floor tiles as its way cheaper than Hexon, and makes square (10cm) grids easier which I'm coming to prefer over hexes for tactical games.

The complete area is going to be 6km x 3.6km,  so 10 x 6. Tiles will be at least 2 tiers, with the lowest tier either a cloth or a third tile layer.

The test zone is 4 x 3 tiles, so 2.4km x 1.8m and covers the main conflict area between the British and French, from Hougoumont, thru La Haie Saint to almost Papelotte.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the result. A light extra dusting of flock on the joins kills the zig-zag edges if found off-putting, and the tiles above all have dots every 10cm that disappear when you are more than a metre away.

One lesson from the first tiles I did is that the PVA needs to go on neat and think, no watering down. Also mixing static grass with a dark earth flock gives some lovely and very natural variation on every tile. I sprayed in hairspray to reduce the loss of flock in use. 

I've marked out "random" field areas and used a lighter flock for those, with the option of putting doormat cornfield on top of them. Roads are painted in, but may be textured/flocked, or I might put my road sections over them. I cut the contours to follow natural curves - initially I'd thought about making it more blocky, just at the 10cm divisions, but the way the tiles work I don't think it would increase the future flexibility to rearrange the tiles. Having done the first few though I did end up with a couple of annoyingly small re-entrants, so might make sure that every element is at least 10cm.

Here's the schematic for the whole area - the tiles above are the 12 more or less in the centre.

Here are 6 of the tiles around La Haie Sainte laid out and the contour lines drawn on with chinagraph.

Here's the layer cut out and placed on the lower layer.

One issue was cutting the contour slopes. I'd found that ordinary Stanley knife (box cutter) blades were too short to do in one cut, but I found some 6" blades on-line!

Tiles get a coat of Emerald Green Dulux, which gives a really good and bright base for the flock/grass mix, and as mentioned above PVA was applied thickly before using a sieve to shake the mixture onto the glue. The final spray with hairspray to encourage "hold". 

Now time to lay the troops out!