Flames of War - terrain - Western Europe

Well I'm back! Father enjoyed his visit with us, and we had an excellent time together. More whiskey was consumed than was probably sensible, but thats what holidays are about!

I did manage to get a little work done while he was here. I can't sit and paint indoors when dads outside enjoying the weather, but I did find it OK to take figures outside to sit and trim in the sun, while chatting and quaffing the odd foaming ale or two... ;-)

Dad also took a weekend break from us in the middle of his holidays to visit an old school friend of his who now lives in Oamaru, in the South Island.

So while he was away, I took the opportunity to improve some of my 15mm scale terrain for my Flames of War gaming. Its all aimed mostly for the Western Europe theatre, so Normandy etc.

Whilst visiting my local store (Macks Track) I found a small set of plastic fence sections that I thought looked about the right scale. I also grabbed some bags of various coloured clump foliage to improve the look of my hedges.

Fences

Hedgerows

Above you can see the fences and hedgerows. They were all based on lolly sticks (AKA ice-block sticks). The gates were made from 0.8mm balsa sheet. The gates posts are two lengths of matchstick glued together.

I also realised after some of games against my local Yank opponent (Brett) that I needed something to slow up his fast charging Americans, so I started off to make some minefields and barbed wire. I know you can buy pre-made, but I knew I could make them cheaper myself!

Plucky commandos face minefield and barbed wire obstacles

Barbed wire

Minefield

Both barbed wire and minefield are on 3mm mdf base. The wire used, was copper wire, stripped from an old piece of electrical flex. Two lengths were twisted together in a drill to make the barbed wire, and this was then coiled round a pencil. The supports for the minefield wire are just chopped up cocktail stick. The barbed wire supports are L-section plastic strut cut to length and glued together. I also messed about putting three pieces of this together for beach obstacles.
All were painted and flocked to suit

I also needed some good looking buildings. I had pondered about making my own, and had made one a while ago as a trial exercise. Though do-able, I did find making buildings at this scale very fiddly. I cast around the web for suitable buildings and some of the best I liked the look of, were from the Total Battles Miniatures range. I grabbed a small house, via Maelstrom Games to see what they were like in the flesh, or resin!

I managed to get it finished today. You can buy them all ready painted to go, but the price goes up dramatically! So I bought unpainted. Out of the box, the resin piece needed a fair bit of work to tidy it up.  The 'flash' was trimmed off with a hobby scalpel, and a dremel rotary tool. After that there were a great many small holes in the cast, that I filled with GW's new liquid Greenstuff, a very nice and useful product! :-)

Heres how it painted up:

Total Battle Miniature's - House

...and from the rear

Commandos skirt the building...

I have ordered more of these buildings from Maelstrom and await their arrival. I've ordered the small outhouse, cafe, and church.

Heres a couple of pics of the hedges and fences in action, alongside my recently 'tarted' up ploughed fields sections. (Note the hedges in these pics still had to have the base flocked with static grass. But you get the effect. I'm rather pleased with it.)

Also note these hedge are meant to be 'regular' hedges, and are not considered Bocage. I'll do some bocage later on...

What was once a quiet corner of Normandy...

...now awakens to the rumble of German armour!

None of this sadly counts for AHWPC but no matter, I have also made progress on my halftracks and command figures, which will follow in another blog post.