For a few years my main connection to the hobby was making terrain for my friends to play 40K on since despite my best efforts I could never really get into that game again. Luckily I’ve converted some of them to Grimdark Future and now Kings of War. Still we need terrain and terrain I’ve made for skirmish games doesn’t necessarily work optimally for KoW. Trying to make walkways or balconies that a modern GW termie can stand on is bad enough.
If on top of being not to disruptive for movement trays the terrain also has to stand up to being left at my FLGS, I struggle a bit to think of what might be interesting, so any advice would be welcome.
Are 1" hills much easier to deal with than 2"? Flat toped mesa hills easier than gentle slopes?
Strait obstacles better than bent or curved walls? Consistent height is needed? Relatively small obstacles will still have a decent effect on the game.
Forests should be fine as long as they remain marked even after you move the trees out of the way. What’s a good size for the bases?
Flat top hills are the best, I think.
2" looks very good but 1" is better game-wise, both work well though.
Obstacles should be straight and low, I found some pieces on the webside previously called 4ground (now called tymeagain.co.uk) which are a bit chunky and low, so you can even balance units on them if needed.
Forest should not be too large, because the game mechanics work better when there are several smaller forests instead. About the size of a cork mat for pots and pans ish?
You dont need a huge amount of terrain for rank and flank. Woods, a couple of small houses and hills is usually all thats needed. If youve not been using GWs plastic industrial sets youre probably already sorted.
My experience is, that a lot of terrain makes the Games more interesting. Warhammer was played with 6 pieces of Terrain, while we Play Kings of War with 10. At least.
The great thing with Kings of War is, that you can let your imagination run wild while building terrain. Just make sure to asign a height to each terrain piece before the game starts.
Hey there! I embarked on a similar project over the summer. I have a bit over 4 tables worth of KoW terrain, but wanted to leave some at the shop so I wasn’t lugging things back and forth all the time. I think my linked post here leads to other examples in my blog, but if not you should be able to search for terrain posts if you are looking for more examples of very easy things to do.
Kings of War is really slick in that the terrain is nicely defined in the rules, but the actual hobbying is really freeform. While there is a standard for everything, you could absolutely run bigger hills or funky terrain, so long as players agree to what everything is! If you are leaving it at a shop and expecting some heavy use. ,odpodge, watered-down white glue, or acrylic sealer spray are all great ways to make your terrain more durable, depending on the particular piece. As to some of your questions:
Flat hills are great for gameplay. Positioning matters a lot in this game, and flat hills (mostly) keep things where you want them. I used a sheet of pink insulation foam for all of my hills, and still have some left! A sheet goes a long way. If you have a wire cutter, that’s great, but I just used a metal ruler to scrape and add cliff-like features to the sides. Some shops and 3d printers sell neat “unit steps” to go underneath units to keep them on a hill. If you are building the hills, you can also cut out some chunks out for this use while are at it, and then their exact height doesn’t matter as much.
Buildings can be anything! You can build your own with foam and popsicle sticks and such, or raid thrift shops and the like for ready-made things. One local player used dollar store birdhouses as the basis for a few buildings, and they turned out great.
Obstacles are probably best straight. The sky is the limit from a logpile to barricade to fence… whatever you can think up.
Forests I’d say are a must for game balance, and are probably the hardest bit to craft. Having a well defined base for the forest with removable trees is fantastic for gameplay. Railroad kits can be a great source for cheap trees.
For forest bases and flat difficult terrain, a local player found an awesome trick. They went to some big box stores (Menards, Lowes, and such in the US), getting cheap carpet samples, and cutting them up to be the basis of the difficult terrain and forest floor.
Ruins are a set made with foamboard, sprue bricks and kitty litter. And 3D printed windows. Oh and special wallpaper I imported from england because someone made scale rock wall wallpaper for some reason. You can see some bigger ruins marking the edge of the Ambush battlefield.
Road is calk put down on flexible vinyl flooring. Trees are some railroad pine trees I had laying around mounted on washers. The forest bases have 3D printed sabots that fit those washers and magnets but I don’t think I installed the magnets which are really needed for top heavy trees.
Wall is 3D printed. There is a set of 1" and 2" xps foam hills. I tried the rock texture applied to foam method but I should have gone with that metal ruler method instead I think.
Not in the picture are some hedges made with gutter leaf filters and flocking. I mean cavalry are having enough trouble in out Ambush games without even more obstacles.
Wow, for someone asking for advice, you’re killin’ it! I’m sure even a cursory “here’s how I make this; paint it yourself” breakdown would be welcome on the forum for many of these pieces. That all looks great, and better than many boards I’ve played on.
…And once the board gets bigger, cavalry start to do better. Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder is not where they want to be!
For the most part I’d refer people to Mel the Terrain Tutor especially for green field kind of stuff. Lately Black Magic Craft for using caulk on every thing. For Sci-Fi terrain especially rusty industrial stuff Eric’s Hobby Workshop. That’s all on Youtube.
Compared to Youtubers, I’d say I keep things more generic. Ruins that could be used for 40k, fantasy or even Bolt Action WW2.
Some of my own details:
The forrest bases made with epvc plastic stiffened with popsicle sticks.
Then everything but the printed bits is covered with some ground filler (I used caulk because I figure that will hold up to game store abuse). After that texture, paint and flock. I do like to have fallen trees and stumps to remind the more literal minded that it’s supposed to be a forest not a orchard.
Here is a pic of a ruin under construction with the wall paper drying under clamps. I do like to avoid just making corner ruins even though it does make applying the wallpaper trickier. In this case the rounded ruin is based on a cannister that held nuts in a previous life. Then the ruin is extended with foamboard.
After it’s dried and trimmed you can see that I’ve used some kind of wood trim to make "columns and that I tried a few materials to bulk out the cardboard cannister to match foam board thikness. The textured floors were made with some textured foam that a friend that works in retail gave me. Something like packing from flat packed furniture or so.
That same friend gave me foamboard encased in plastic instead of paper and I like to use that for these kind of ruins just to be a bit stronger. You can see a bit of it in the bottom left.
