Designing buildings and woods

  

Commercial buildings

When I left the UK almost all of my wargame buildings were commercial, mostly from Hovels.   I collected a large collection of 15mm north European and Spanish buildings. This photo does not really do them justice, as they are two or three deep. I choose 15m because I planned to have 18mm and 28mm duplicate armies. I painted both, but now only use the 28mm figures. I found that the 15mm buildings looked “right” with the 28mm figures.

My home made town walls are also on this shelf, plus a large collection of German paper buildings which are more suitable for the 18mm figures.

North Europe buildings

There are kept on my main shelves, where I also keep my 18mm and 28mm armies. The 28mm are one corps to a base as shown. Once more the photo does not do them justice, but you can see them all on the 531 campaign battles/wargames recorded on my 1813 campaign diary blog. Slightly more than half are suitable for Germany, slightly less for Spain.

Most of these buildings are scratch built and there are:
Two villages, including church
Two walled farms/manor house
One inn
Hedges and stone walls to create farms
Four churches for cities and towns
10 scratch build houses to create a wide variety of towns, when used with Hovels

 

Spanish buildings

Again these are scratch built and consist of:
Two walled villas
Two villages including church
Farm buildings to use with hedges and stone walls
Four windmills, popular on Peninsular battlefields
10 town buildings to create towns when used with Hovels

Four windmills  

The four boxes on the top shelf have stone wall and hedge sections
About half are bought and the remainder scratch built.

Woods

I have about 40 commercial trees. All are 15mm, which look right with 28mm figures. All woods consist of a dark green felt cut to irregular shapes to create different size of woods. The trees are free standing, and can be removed when I want to move model soldiers through the woods.

Villages

All built up areas are free standing. Villages can be open or walled and have one church and two buildings. They are placed on a 6x6 inch piece of light brown felt. Buildings can be removed to allow movement or fighting inside the village.

 

Towns

Each town has two pieces of felt. They consist of one church and six buildings, mostly scratch built. There are a sufficient churches and buildings to allow for a wide variety of towns. Larger Hovels buildings are sometimes used to add variety.

 

Cities

Cities have four pieces of felt, and take up most of one square. A combination of Hovels and scratch built town houses are used to populate the city. Our largest Spanish or German church is used on one square, and one large Hovels building on each of the others. We have pretty basic city walls which can be used if necessary. This photo shows our campaign version of Ratisbon, which bears no resemblance to the actual city at all!

In our next post I will explain how it all comes together in the campaign.