Graviton's terrain singularity

So I've been quiet on here the last few month (and just generally on the forum in general) but I've still be plugging away:

Space port board
A fair while ago but I printed a couple of ships from elite dangerous to use as general port craft and scaled them to a point where they'd fit an infinity board:

Spoiler: Vulture and Mamba

Suryat for scale

.

New buildings
I said previously that I'd be phasing out my old foam core stuff which is looking a bit battered so i've started on some buildings from expanded foam:

Spoiler: Some buildings I'm working on

Experimenting with some reversable roofing to either allow or deny "castles" and being able to invert the roof means it takes less storage space.

there are some more but I've as yet not taken any pictures

Mountain board
The crashed ship now seemingly goes with the nomads mat as a breaker yard so I'd found my thinly veiled excuse to finally do a mountain and tundra board since the snow mat was now free.
Ingredients:
1.2 sheets of standard bobbly polystyrene (approx £5 used from a £16 packet)
3 bags of amazon standard mini christmas trees i saw in a garden centre at £10 a go (so £30 in total)
left over house paint, left over filler.

Spoiler: WIP Pics and some testing

Look at all this LOF blocking brilliance

Hot wire cutter for the win.


A first test for desnsity


A bit better


Lick of paint+filler on the hills


Making some 3rd party players test the board, playing TAK vs Generic Aridana for 13 vs 7 Camo markers, made for a fun game to watch.




All in all the board had loads of cover and hiding places and made for some really interesting movement, elevated firelanes and canyons both player certainly seemed happy with the set up.

Possible additions:

• More in the way of terrain zones such as woodland or scree, the main point was to get some use out of mountain or multi terrain which I feel the board is still missing even if it's fine as is.
• More rocks and low scatter, perhaps the occasional gears of war standard chest high wall
• Bunkers and caves, some buildings designed around the height of the mountains so they can run through and be capped off by them because CQB is cool.

Last but not least, My local store is closing it's gaming hall (because rent is high and gamers are cheap) so I've had to relocate all my terrain back home to the garage, so I've got a rare group shot:

Spoiler: Tetris music intensifies

While it's certainly not ideal it'll give me some time to perform maintenance (the foamboard stuff, the fact that the lava board is overcramped even in it's extra large box and is beginning to look like it's suffering for it.)

Anyway that's all for now.

 

So at weekend my local gaming store closed it's dedicated gaming store which was very sad, however we used the last access to the large space with plentiful tables to play a 2400pt game of infinity on a 12' x 8' table. while all the tactics and observations are going in a write-up in another thread please find attached some glorious pictures of absolute insanity:









I made all of that terrain.

 

What a year right? Anyway I didn't do any posting (or indeed playing of games) but I have still been building terrain!

Anyway, at some point in the distant past i mentioned wanting to build a neon nightmare cyberpunk board for my JSA, I got a couple of buildings for it but then general business held me back from doing anything with them, anyway at the time of UK lockdown 3? I think it was 3 in October i decided I was just going to get on with it. I did actually keep a detailed picture build log for everything but we're going to start at the end and work backwards I guess so without further ado I present to you on it's first outing beyond my own back garden:

Kuramoi post uprising board

Spoiler: pretty pictures

Terrain suppliers:
Redbeam studios (now wayland scenics new kyoto range)
TT Combat (takeaways and highrises from their modern city range)
Colour forge (mardukes bar and the garage)
Deep cut studios (mat)
Raised areas, planters signs and scatter all scratch built

 

Yes, this board is mostly inspired by the mat which I've had for a couple of years.

I really like it but it suffers for the wide straight roads, since I loathe building placement not matching road layout it tended to lead to two 8" across dead zones directly across each players DZ is why i built the two raised areas, the larger corner one covers one of the four crossroads the long "thin" berm fits across a road and can be put down in a variety of ways to break up those opportunities for a single flanking shotgun or spitfire from just culling the enemy in their DZ. the spoiler images cover what I've done to get around it.

Spoiler: the problem with the neo tokyo mat

so this is my solutiuon, raise one corner and the "berm" juts out and breaks a fire lane

Spoiler: corner section

Spoiler: the Berm

 

Thanks :) I also have the space hulk mat, the YJ mat and also the neotokyo one with the streets narrower and parallel to the edges, they're all good mats, the YJ matches the green hell board i did a while ago, the space hulk one is my go to for the spartan scenics stuff and the parallel roads one is used with one of my other urban sets which is up for rework it has the same sorts of problems still but can be mitigated a little easier.

One thing to note is that if you email deepcut they will do customs, costs about £10 more but I have a custom of their badlands mat with an orange filter over the top to make a mars mat without any craters, they could probably do the YJ one with a blue filter to get the result you want if you're after that road layout and that colouration.

 

Lads on tour!

So this weekend we went to our first tournament in two years, and were asked to bring boards, the event needed 12 tables and we brought over 6 of my boards. this led to a bit of an interesting discussion as we were thinking which ones we should bring?

The answer to this ended up being where possible the most compact and the fastest to set up and take down. Originally I'd been wanting to take over the JSA board, but quite rightly it was pointed out to me that it takes about 30mins to get out and 45 to put away so it was shelved for:

1. Meltdown (the lava board)
2. Helheim mountains (the snow board)
3. nomad breakers yard (crashed ship board)
4. CA ship board
5. Warsenal Alcazaba board
6. Paradiso jungle board.

Spoiler: couple of board pictures

Hellheim


CA ship:



Alcazbra board:

*This is a fragmentary post, I did a preview to check the images worked, wrote the rest and attempted to submit it but the forum logged me out (I forgot it did that) and I lost it all, and there was a lot. I'm going to make a cup of tea and I may write it all up again.

 

Part Deux:

Well I guess if i'm writing it again there may be less waffle:

So I realised I want to do some work on some of the boards:

The lava board:
The paint is starting to flake i think it's due to adhesion of the paint to the skin of the expandy foam, the way the towers are part of the hills makes it hard to put away and always ends up with hills pressing against each other, i think the adhesion between the paint and varnish is adhering to each other better than the skin of the hill it is applies too.

Were I to start again (and I may) I'd make the hill/tower pieces separate for ease of packing and to ease contact pressure between elements. At the very least I'm going to sand (as in rub down) the untreated expandy foam surfaces and paint them again, a pain but it will I think extend the usability of the pieces.

The Haqq board.
The Warsenal stuff is just beautiful while also hideously intimidating to paint. I'm getting through it slowly but now I'm at sort of a baseline I can build from there. It also lacked scatter pieces so some 3d printed antenocis bulldog vans and some new jungle bits i made go really well, especially with the tohaa mat from Deepcut Studio, which really gives the board the eco utopia of the future vibe i get from haqq. happy with how it's coming together i just wish that: 1, the building actually blocked LOF, they just hemorrhage LOF every which way, 2, that they stored more easily, they've broken the "each board fits in a single 64L really useful box" rule I have as the armoury tower is HUGE and space devouring, beautiful but huge.

Hellheim mountain board:
The styrene hills are chipping, think i need to run a touch up round on them and then hit them with some cement of some sort to harden them up, other than that I'm really happy with the board.

Jungle board:
Does what it's supposed too has excellent coverage and provides tactical challenges, it's also just about stopped shedding.

CA board:
Does exactly what I want, have a few more pieces to detail but i added a few more feature bits and I think it's goat a lot of versatility in its setup.

Breaker yard:
This has been my pet project board and is still being expanded, I'm now pretty happy with it's coverage and I'm happy with how it plays (especially with a open topped CQB region in the centre of the board) I backed the saucermen studios crashed ship graveyard KS and have been printing more bits for this board to pad it out, a couple of bits were visible in the image from the tournament in the last post but here is the stuff I've been working on since the event:

Spoiler: 3d printed breaker yard

Now I'm quite happy with the breaker yard board as what I call a height controlled board, but i think these extra pieces will let me play with movement and firelanes quite nicely.

As for the rest of the terrain in the set, lots is just painted with my standard rust technique, this existing stuff will be getting the same treatment as the printed stuff above to bring it all into line with each other.

*finishes cup of tea* Part three to follow having learned my lesson from the initial write up

 

Lads on tour PART C.

Other stuff I'm on with

So some time ago I thought that I would revamp my Martian desert board, this is my original terrain set I've had for some 15 years from back in my 40k days. It's had several upgrades over the years but these then tend to bud off and turn into other boards so for example my jungle board was originally part of this terrain set. Anyway, one thing that did stick was big tiberium style crystals and now having a resin 3D printer and finding that i could print in transparent resin:

Spoiler: 3D printed crystals

I look forward to revisiting the board more thoroughly and adding in more plaster rock faces etc, and since Mars is a YJ colony (and the home board of my YJ army since red desert base and green armour looks sweet) I'll have to see about adding in some YJ bits or terraforming bits to the set as well.

 

So since the last post I've not been madly focused on terrain but recently I've done a fair bit:

Lava board
I've not remade the board but I have sanded it back passed the skin on the expanded foam and repainted it, it seems much happier, the paint feels far more "set" been used twice since, has suffered some crush damage from being stored incorrectly which was annoying but the paint seems fine, It'll do for a while.

Space port
So I backed flatline city and have been printing a fair few buildings, they're very nice but probably 50% are suitable for infinity (which is still a lot) obviously I look for buildings that have an entry and an exit and some are just boxes with a door. so just bunkers to hide an LT in. It's given me a lot more experience working with printed items i even have a landing pad which I've plastic welded together out of smaller printed items you're meant to clip together.

The printed stuff is paired with a set of TT combat iron labyrinth walls which do really well as tall LOF blockers and good walkway to run around on, they also have so many gats i can put them across roads which i've always struggled with on this mat.

Mostly it's just an excuse to put some nice eye catching vehicles on the board which it's doing quite well and expand my cyberpunk theme.




Secret board project no.1
So I printed a very non anatomically correct "T-rex" skeleton a while ago and a friend said "I'm surprised you've not done a Jurassic Park board" ...

Now. I'd been planning to do an Acon nature reserve or Varuna board for a while. so I ordered a new light swamp mat from Deepcut when I ordered the Tohaa one to put under the Haqq board. It's taken a lot of planning but it's reached a point where I was happy to break ground on it so:

Spoiler: Aconcementio Megafauna Preserve

Step 1 make trees, done this many times before, the picture is because I got some sweet copper wire from the scrap bin at work, joy to work with lovely and maleable when you twist it with force but with a good quantity of springback when it's formed (copper work hardens the more you bend it the tougher it gets) being 1mm wire it's got a lot of body and resiliance but was again really easy to work with.



Polystyrene hills (dishwasher packaging) PVA'd together and covered in sculptamold (plaster with shredded tissue in it) then the trees were put on top. this was the first attempt so i was unsure about how to attach, best way so far is to dig the wire into the hill and then glue gun it to hell.













These are going to be mangroves. they're built onto a hill for several reasons.
1. Clear LOF blocking terrain
2. Rigidity
3. Because it looks good. and i wanted to emphasize the way dirt builds up in the root systems.

So the roots and dangling branches are wool soaked in plaster and draped across in an appealing fashion. the more the better it looks better the more that go on (see the first image to the last) and they help hide the join between tree and hill and secure the whole arrangement.

These thus far have then be liberally hosed with scenic cement (1 PVA to 3 water)

Oh this is the messiest terrain making i've ever done, not even close.



So it's not just going to be mangrove elements I want big electric fences and a megabeast, TAG raid has really helped reinforce the concept to me but here is the godzilla that will be part of the terrain set. Not sure how i'll be ruling it or it's tournament gaming potential but i have until the board is done to think of that.

The main thing is the 500mm long fence sections, there will be towers to break them up (with viewing galleries?) but obviously they will be major obstacles, will also be doing some mouse hole placement maintainance hatches , the idea being it's a short move from one door to the other allowing access for S2 S1 to cross the fences.

Further plans, a visitor centre building if there is space, an actually viewing gallery and a road passing through the swap for tour vehicles.

Secret board 2
I'm also working on another board but I can't show any of it until I've show somebody else, It's based on a dumb in joke but having tested the board the other day it was great to play on.

 

Maaaaaaaybe...

 

Varuna Megabeast Resort / Jurassic Park:

After many an hour my swamp board has had it's first outing to playtest it, it was always designed as a Jurassic park board but then TAG raid came along and now it's a Megabeast research centre (with private tours and on resort accommodation for a reasonable price)

Spoiler: Uh oh, the inevitable has happened

We played the megabeast mission with Godzilla as a Steindrage which worked very well, obviously nobody went anywhere near the centre of the board until the creature had been suppressed adequately.

Oil wash weathering

I'm going back over a couple of boards at the moment and tried Oil paint washes last night along with some dirty down rust effect paint. makes a basic painjob pop rather nicely, will definitely be using more oil washes on terrain in future.

Spoiler: Anti Cilit-Bang