1809 Project in 15/18mm: Battle of Eckmuhl Part Three: Finishing off making the battlefield

 In Part Two I gave a lot of detail about how I made the 12 x 8 feet sculpted tabletops for the whole battle area. Thanks to all who have viewed or commented on it so far.  In this part I will be showing the detail up to finalisation - woods, buildings, fields and general atmosphere plus a "tour" of some of the villages. 

Woods

Not really in the right sequence but I will deal with this subject first as it's the easiest. Below are three shots across the main table while I'm at the stage of planning the woods and villages. I find it helpful to paint on the footprint of the woods clearly enough for players to identify the boundaries but while still retaining some element of blending in visually. That means I'm free to use whatever combinations of foliage bases or individual trees suit the area. Most of them will be left loose so they can be moved or temporily withdrawn while troops move through, but I stick down quite a lot, especially near the edges, to try to maintain scenery discipline (and stop some sliding down the slopes!). Wargamers are messy creatures who will steal a mile if you give them an inch in the name of trying to get best advantage from terrain. Limits on occupation of BUAs is strictly controlled but woods are different and you'll see later even I can't persuade my players always to keep units suitably spaced out in woods.

By this time I have also made my final choices for buildings but there is much to do to blend them into their environment.

I did buy another couple of batches of trees for this game and these days I find the easiest way is to go to Ebay (or Etsy or Temu) for the many varieties of mass produced plastic trees. They are cheap but often too colourful and, apart from the couple of weeks wait for them to come from China, you need to be prepared to get to work to sprinkle on fine leaf-type scatter and/or spray them various shades of more acceptable foliage colours. I can't recommend any particular supplier, just Google for example "model trees on Ebay " to get choices. I've bought different styles over the years but found multiple packs like this give a good variety of sizes and styles in one go.

The very small ones I found were great for decorating the edges of the BUAs and lining the rivers and steams without obscuring too much the visual and practical impact for troop access. They can be grouped on small bases or used individually. The advantage of my paper/card/thin plaster surfaces are that I can use a gimlet or thin screwdriver to make a hole and just "plant" the individual trees where I wish. Glue is very rarely needed so they dismantle quickly too.

Scroll down this post from August 2023 for lots on tree building/decorating Hausen -Teugn

Buildings

Looking in the archives it's evident I did not take any painting-stage photos for buildings this time. That is because I was mainly using up stocks of 3D printed buildings I had accumulated in 2023-24 and not got round to assembling and painting. I did buy a few and painted up some I do have early stage photos of.

The Aspern Church model was used in Alte Glofsheim

The 15mm Russian style church was used in Schierling, the left hand 12mm house in Hagelstadt and the right hand 12mm house in Unter Sanding - the small ones got blended in(!)

Half of Schierling was on the tabletop, and the two arch bridge seen below

Below is one of the gates of Leipzig in a series of 3D printed Napoleonic buildings by Warfayre

It comes in useful component pieces so you can make up customised buildings with a great authentic appeal. Minus the front gatehouse I used mine for part of Hagelstadt

Showing this here as Hagelstadt is in the distance. In the foreground 3D prints from earlier 1809 games, but behind them is a row of plaster cast 6mm buildings from about 35 years ago. I had to fill that narrow space cut from the hillside, and they felt perfect to me with a backdrop of Woodland Scenics foliage netting to disguise the cut and backed onto by the Glofsheim Wald home made sponge-based big bushes.

These are cute very finely sculpted, and despite my searching I can't trace the manufacturer, I think it might be highlands3d again. They are beautiful and very useful - 10mm. All three of the bridges were used in my Eckmuhl terrain and they are 15mm so I can actually put 25mm wide infantry bases on them. The nearest one is cut off above road level so I could use it butted up against my sunken river banks near Thalmassing.

These buildings were used in Finkofen and Unter Deggenbach in my game.

The free-standing tile-topped wall is scratch built by me.

Finkofen

Unter Deggenbach and one of the bridges

The small bridge with sides for slotting into a river bed
 (awaiting blending in).

10mm WW2 Russians photographed with Russian wooden village 

I got this lovely set of Russian log cabins from my children as a present and I don't have a link to where they are from. These are particularly fine in 10mm with log and thatch detail to scale, and they paint up a treat with washes and dry brushing. As Hohenberg is the highest BUA on the table I wanted low rise buildings that looked rustic - ideal in my view though not classic Bavarian of course.

"Lower" Hohenberg cabins and a church

"Upper" Hohenberg lots of cabins and a windmill

Further up in this blogpost you can see the turquoise onion domed church I used in Hagelstadt. I love that building and it's a Warfayre model called "Tyrol Chapel", this is the 15mm version which I find looks a good size for a proper church next to 15/18mm figures and 12mm buildings. I ordered two more and customised them a bit and put one in the lower part of Hohenberg and the other in Zeitskofen. (I see Battlehonours3D do a similar one with a Tyrolean village).

The water meadow with Zaitskofen (and the "Tyrolean chapel") on the left and some of Paul B's beautiful models forming Rogging on the right.

Unassembled: from right - 15mm chapel; 12mm Aspern church and cottage; 12mm Essling granary - for use when we get round to an Aspern-Essling refight

If you fancy 3D printed buildings then apart from Warfayre I recommend Highlands3dprintsuk and particularly  Highlands Napoleonic range

I needed two small watermills that would not take up much space but would look the part guarding two fords across the Laaber. A tiny hamlet did the same job further upstream and I used an existing 6mm building for that. I bought two nice mills for this game.

Stanglmuhl Water mill in 10mm
 by Highlands3D

Schnitzmuhl by Battlescale in 10mm.
 Water Mill

Scroll  down a fair way into this post from early 2024 to see plenty of info on my painting buildings and "planting" fields Terrain building for Lutzen

This is the main post I've referred to often on painting 12-15mm 3D printed German buildings 

A couple more new purchases:

I was alerted to Battlehonours3d who, apart from their range of 18mm 3D printed figures, do scenic items too and so I bought the "North German Village" . These buildings have thatched roofs, more suited to Saxony than Bavaria, but I was keen to get variety among so many BUAs on the table.

Battlehonours3D North German village (not the old windmill) which I used for Gailsburg

The company that used to be Linka (remember casting your own sections of bricks in the 1970s/80s)? is now called Scalecast. They do loads of moulds for durable plaster-type casting pieces but also are marketing a range of 3D printable buildings Scalecast.co.uk and offer one or two as free downloads (only the STL files are available not prints). The range is a bit "fantasy" but still nice. I asked my old friend Rob, who is a retired architect now a designer of 3D printed objet d'art, to have a go with the free files and he is always up for a challenge. They are intended for 28mm figures and Rob is not a wargamer, so I had a fun task persuading him why I needed prints with 12mm size doors to go with 18mm figures on a scaled down wargames table. Anyway, for the price of lunch at a nice theatre restaurant in Cheltenham I ended up with a batch of different sized cottages and barns . the smallest were bigger than I would have wished so I used them at the extremity of the "extra bit" as the main part of Luckenpaint village. Here are some photos including the old charity shop pottery cottages I used for part of Thalmassing, and Highlands/Warfayre 3D prints for part of Ober Sanding, also on the extra bit. 

Scalecast cottage and barn at about 12-15mm size. Roofs are removable which is handy

Scalecast at left 

Car boot/charityshop pottery/ceramic
 cottages and a Warfayre 3D print
 German church

Eckmuhl Schloss

I've saved the most significant BUA till last - that is Eckmuhl village and castle. From a contemporary sketch in the Osprey book it appears Eckmuhl castle was/is a tall fortified manor house type complex behind a solid-doored gatehouse which the Wurttemburg Jagers had to smash down with axes against a defence by Austrian Grenzers. The latter had been beaten back from the bridge over the Laaber and the rest of the village.  I had to keep the total village footprint in scale with everything else but wanted the schloss to look the part. In the unused 3D print store I had part of a set of 12mm 5/6-storey high German town houses. Using one of these reduced by a couple of storeys, and attaching the spare porch from the Leipzig gateway shown near the start, I thought this looked convincing. The real Eckmuhl village evidently had crumbling walls and a church and houses outside the "castle". So I wrote into the Austrian brief the ability to defend the outer "village" area (built with pieces of plaster cast tiled top wall from Ebay) at plus 1 defence value, then fall back if necessary into the castle for plus 2 hard cover defence. The Allies could not easily gain access if contested without the sapper company I so helpfully added to the Wurttemburgers orbat.

Above and below: Eckmuhl front and rear not yet blended into the landscape   (with rear entrance scratch-built)

The villages tour would not be complete without me giving profuse thanks to Paul B for bringing along his collection of lovely authentically modeled Austrian/Bavarian buildings, he says made by a company called "JB" but no longer available. I was able, with a little help from a card model too, to make them fit the footprints for Rogging and Pfakofen. 

My Rogging - apparently that church is modeled on Eckmuhl's so I put it as near as I could! This was the first village after Eckmuhl to be set ablaze in our game

My Pfakofen. It was to prove dauntingly defensible in
 our game.

Finishing it all off

I'd approached this whole build process differently to in the past. Previously I got the whole table up and put the background firm side walls in and built up to them. My cardboard walls and cardboard ribs approach this time had caused some gaps, most noticeably on the long eastern side of our battle area.  Once the background panel was in I had to build out to meet it.  That was done with polystyrene and cardboard and a level topping of "gloop" and then had to be blended with the landscape with grass and sawdust scatter on PVA.  You can see some of the in-filling at right in the photo above, and in these two below.

thin strip of packaging cardboard
 

sticking down a nice
 batch of sawdust/grass
scatter to match

At this point I was happy with all the main work done so far and I spent a couple of days just going round the whole table doing what the building trade might call "snagging". I was using a combination of pre-made low profile fields recovered from previous terrains (even as far back as Hougoumont gardens in 2015), sawdust and grass scatter, and small trees (individual and based in lines or small clumps)  to cover up the joins wherever that seemed possible. I also tried to make some of the BUA boundaries more obvious, and defensible by sticking down wall pieces or even making a few new walls. 

I did not want to slow the game down unnecessarily so most of these additions were just for visual effect and no obstacle or specific cover.

Hoping you are not bored with this by now I will finish off with a few photos showing different angles or some BUAs not seen, and then views overall. Note these are not "blended in" fully - those effects will show up in the full game reports coming very soon to a blog near you!

Lindach

Ober and Unter Laichling straddle the funny L shaped extra - all made from downloadable card models you've often seen before. 

Part of Ober Sanding - I repainted my very old 15mm resin La Haye Sainte farm

Drone view over the heights of Glofsheim

Part of Ober Deggenbach - three of these are very old "gift shop" English cottages and the others downloadable card models 

Alte Glofsheim and the nearby woods and high ground

Hagelstadt in the foreground

Hagelstadt close up

Over all 96 square feet there were 20 BUAs and 3 individual building models

Just for display in this photo - 3 of the six French Cuirassier regiments I was supplying. Left are AB Miniatures 18mm. The two on the right are rather nice 3D prints, just a fraction larger. I worked for several weeks with Kane Taylor of Taylored Figures to hone down a larger scale "18mm" and after these I think I've got there. If you want to order from Kane (he is very good value and helpful) I advise asking for a few samples first and you could mention me and this blog and "the Chris Gregg '18mm' to fit with AB Miniatures" which we agreed on. He will do any size/scale.

In the next part: Day One of battle

The two C in Cs. Paul B and Richard N size up the opposing forces on deployment