On the road again...

One of my recent terrain projects has been to upgrade my desert table with some roads. Roads are fantastic in Flames of War v.3, providing speed to many units such as halftracks and most armored cars. They can tie areas of the battlefield together and bring a table full of random terrain together. I love playing on a table that has interesting terrain but that looks like something a person could find in the real world. Roads really help make that happen.



I needed these on my table

I had built roads for a previous table that I had in Romania, but I’d sold them to my FLGS when I moved. I thought I would build a new set, and explain step by step how I created them.

Acrylic roads:

The roads that I build are flexible, textured and modular. When I first looked at road techniques, I wanted something that could float up one side of a hill and down the other, while looking attractive. Most of all they had to be cheap and expandable. These criteria excluded most of the premade roads that I could find online. They tended to be rigid. Cloth also was excluded. It never looks like a road, and I want my tables to seem somewhat realistic. Buying online looked extremely expensive, and I didn’t want to have to wait for the company to come up with curves or other accessories.

I found an online tutorial on using caulking solution to make roads, and that is the route that I went.

Step 1: Materials

To build these, I used the following:

• 2 tubes of brown acrylic caulking filler
• A caulking gun
• Knitters backing cloth
• Baking paper
• Bluetac
• Various cheap artstore paints
• Putty knife
• Cheap paintbrushes
• Blunt pencil

Note, if you ever do any window sealing or anything of the sort, you should have most of these things.

Step 2: Preparing the materials

The next step was to bluetac the baking paper down to a table I have. The acrylic caulking filler comes off of the baking paper when dry, so this step provided  for a nice base from which I could lay down some caulk.

I cut the knitters cloth in rough strips of about 2 inches wide. I wasn’t too careful about them being straight or consistant as I thought these would be desert roads that weren’t properly engineered or planned well. This also meant I could pump out many lengths of cloth.

I ended up cutting out 8 strips of cloth, which I laid out parallel to eachother on the table.

Step 3: Filler

I used the caulking gun to put caulking filler over the strips in sufficient amounts to be able to be spread over the entire cloth. I messed up in some areas and added too much, but the smoothing step takes care of this.

Once there was caulking filler on the cloth, I used the putty knife to smooth it down and leave only a thin layer of caulk on the cloth. I used the putty knife to provide some minor texture through little twists and turns.

Now smoothish, I took the blunt pencil and made 2 long, uninterrupted flowing lines down the cloth (now covered in caulking solution). These were roughly parallel and represented the ruts caused by cars, carts and other wheels. If you want tracks from tanks, you can wait until the caulking solution is somewhat dry and press tracks into the road. I chose not to given the desert nature.

I had some sand sitting around and I lightly sprinkled it on the roads for additional texture. I used VERY little sand. I hate overly textured terrain for its roughness and sandpaper quality. No one wants to use their miniatures on a damaging piece of terrain, so I kept the sand quite light.

Leave overnight for the caulking solution to fully dry.

 

Step 3: Painting

The basecoat is the most important step. You must paint the entire road, front and back. The bottom (back) of the road will never see the light of day, but it needs to have a coat of paint as thick as the topside basecoat (if not a bit more). If you only paint the top of the road, it will warp when the paint dries. Painting both sides results in flat roads. Make sure you paint BOTH SIDES.

Once the basecoat was put on, I gave the roads several lighter drybrush layers to bring out the texture. These were rough and were focused on just getting many layers on the road.

Step 4: Cutting to size

My strips were 3 feet long. I cut them at various lengths. I have several 18 inch sections, some 9 inch and some 6 inch sections. Places together they can form any number of shapes and roadway systems.

The entire project (20 feet of roads) took me a few hours of my time, along with a table being messy overnight.  The overall costs were quite low as none of the supplies are that expensive. The roads that came out are nice looking, easy to arrange and in the right scale.

I am thinking I will use the same technique to make the 12 inch by 18 inch landing zones for Vietnam. I can make a large, textured area with nice detail on the cheap.

Keys:

• Get the right backing material. I have used plastic mesh for this, and now knitters cloth. Anything that will let the caulking solution soak in and is heavy enough to lay flat will do.
• Paint both sides. Avoid warping by painting both sides of the road.
• Don’t make them too wide. Too many roads are like 6 lane highways on the battlefield. Keep them skinny.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment with textures, putty knife motions and roadway designs

 

Learning by Losing

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a game in against a reader of this blog by the name of Dave who contacted me after the first post. I normally don’t get weekday games in, so I was very happy to have someone who lived locally be willing to come over after work and play some Flames of War. I got crushed. Mauled. Stomped. Whipped. Annihilated. I mean, this was likely my worst loss in Flames of War. It was that bad. I also learned a ton during the game. It really made me think about how I, as a player, view my development as a player and what losses can teach us.

My game was the FoW version of this. Ouch.

 

Losing is tough. I’m not talking about the exceptionally close, “one die can make a difference” 4-3 game that is tense throughout. I’m talking about tabletop massacres where one side so thoroughly dominates the other that it’s almost sad. No one likes to see their army get wiped off the table, and during the game the feeling of helplessness as nothing works can make for a very frustrating experience. Sometimes the dice undermine a beautiful plan, and sometimes a beautiful plan really is a dog. In the worst of cases, terrible dice work together with your dog of a plan to create a truly god awful situation.

 

Look, it's one of my Panzer IVs

It is easy to write off a loss like that as a fluke or bad dice and try to suppress the memory of it. However, I think there can be a lot to be learned by reflecting and trying to figure out why the disaster happened. Flames of War has very few match-ups that are so stacked against one side as to make the game a foregone conclusion. If the game was one of those, fine, but for the vast majority of games there are areas where learning can happen.

If it was bad dice, why were those particular rolls that felt so damning so important.  Did every shot miss because they were easy and bad dice come in, or were you trying to hit on 6’s with every shot? Was that missed stormtrooper so nasty because you were hanging your troops out to dry and hoping to pass the skill check? Should your CiC have been in a better position to grant a re-roll, or did you waste him giving a failed platoon morale re-roll for a unit that really didn’t matter? I find that dice will go back and forth, and some games you’ll just have to be extremely redundant with your shooting and careful with your exposure.

 

I think these guys from Fury did better than my troops.

In the game, I was relying on low percentage shots and trained stormtroop roll to protect my boys. My opponent was saving his guns for high percentage shots. For example, his battery of 4 25pdrs were usually in a great position to direct fire at my Panzer IVs. However, I would be taking 2+ (AT9 vs. long range armor 7) saves. On one turn where he could have fired, he went to ground instead to protect his assets. His guns survived and were able to do damage to me later when they were in a higher percentage situation (New Zealand Time-on-target with the mike target re-roll is crazy good). This made me think about how I view aggressiveness in the game. I came from playing a lot of 40k, where firing is almost always better than not. There are few drawbacks to attacking and few benefits to hunkering down. Flames of War is not like that. The +1 difficulty to hit for gone to ground (assuming concealed) is huge, and the gun save rule makes it exceptionally important. A gun team gone to ground is a tough target to take out, more so when dug in. I really learned a lot about when to fire and when not to, and that I shouldn’t always blaze away hoping for kills.

 

Time on Target with Mike Target (at cheap UK arty prices) with AOP is insane. Lots of respect for NZ arty.

Having a general plan is extremely important. In my game against Dave, I didn’t have a plan. Random deployment created my plan for me, but once the toys were down I didn’t have much to work with. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to set up assaults, or if I would try to whittle him down. My artillery didn’t have an idea of what to take care of first, or if it would serve as smoke support. Basically, I tried to wing it and it blew up in my face.

While each bad game will have its own reasons, the key is to take advantage of situations like this to really examine your game. A win will often teach you nothing, but make sure that all games are reflected upon. The grand, high risk move that works against all odds and wins you the game is relatively useless to reflect on in the long run. If it works once in ten tries, your chance of recreating that glory as a standard tactic will likely result in failure. Instead, focus on the worst performances as the things that will build you game. Fix mistakes, fix lists and understand why you did poorly. When that happens, you’ll play a leaner, better game and hopefully suffer few 1-6 (or, god forbid, 0-7) losses.