Basing a Village in Afghanistan

       A short while ago I was approached by my friend Kevin (known among blog-followers as Zhodani Commando) about building some terrain for him. As brilliant a painter as he is it seems that Kev just doesn't care to make terrain.
      He showed me some pictures (see below) and explained that he had purchased the buildings through a Kickstarter and wanted me to construct the terrain on which to base them. I thought to myself "hills are a pretty straightforward, what the heck" and when Kev offered to sweeten the deal by trading me two of his Saga armies (did I mention that he is a brilliant painter) I suddenly found the idea irresistible. He dropped off the buildings the other day and I framed up the two three foot square bases that the village and snippet of Afghan countryside would be based on.

 

these are the handiwork of a more talented artist than I

      Kevin asked if I could make the bases so the the "countryside" base could be placed on any of the four sides of the village base, essentially making it "geomorphic" like the old board-games from Avalon Hill's Squad Leader or Panzerblitz. This is a simple enough idea but requires careful thought to make sure that each different combination presents different tactical challenges and opportunities. To achieve this required careful thought; so I grabbed a glass of bourbon and my sketch pad.  Being more of a draftsman than an artist I began by sketching out a square to represent the size of a base and then measuring the buildings to get an idea of the relative size.

 

      This gives me a feel for the relative size of the structures and the space they will need on the terrain base. the smaller squares in the sketch above correspond the the following buildings;

      Then I got out some of my standard rough hills and placed them and the buildings on the base to get a feel for some of the vertical nature of Afghan villages. The Afghans long ago realized that they were in the pathway of anyone who felt like invading anything in south Asia and had learned to build their homes on hilltops out of a sense of self-preservation. So I stacked up my hills to see what it could look like with a couple of layers of blue board.

      With the large building having three stories the vertical dimension is quite noticeable. As I was moving the hills and buildings around it struck me that there was little need to permanently affix the buildings to the hills. If I carefully based each building on a standardized base I could swap their positions around as well as replacing them with entirely different terrain features such as orchards, rocky outcrops or poppy fields. In essence the base would become a sabot base but written to a much larger scale, with the buildings replacing the individual soldiers. Thus having finished the bourbon and found some creative impulse I knocked out a series of sketches of possible layouts.

 

"P.F." means poppy field

      These will go to Kevin for his thoughts and inputs but I think that I'm on the right track finally.