Sunday 23 March 2014

Maurice Buildings - A Different Approach

I did some more prototypes of the flat buildings the other day, but the more I work at them the less I think they will work. The design I have been using looks OK, but because it encloses the area of the building it is not very tolerant of slight differences between the base sizes of the figures and that of the built-up area.

I had considered another approach, which was relatively thin 3D buildings. These would enable a number of buildings to be fitted into a small space, giving a village/town feel, but being thin they can be arranged around the edge of the built-up area when troops occupy it, without taking up significant table-space and getting in the way, thus still giving the occupied area the look of a town.

Today I made some buildings.


I used the Junior General buildings as a basis, but they were mostly constructed in MS Word, using tables. The Junior General facades were pasted into the various cells. This makes the design easy to mass-produce, and folding them and sticking them is also quick as well.

Here's a small villages:


And here it is occupied by troops:


Each building is only 1cm deep, plus a small base for stability, so they will not significantly get in the way of troops moving around outside of the village.

I have used a spare roof piece to show how the gaps between the buildings could be covered by barricades - easily scratchbuilt in a number of ways.

The next stage is to fire up word and come up with a design for a church and some other public buildings.

For those that are interested, this is what the buildings look like in Word:


The roofs are a separate page.

7 comments:

  1. I tried a similar idea myself several years ago, though more along the Volley & Bayonet lines. I didn't pursue the plan. but from what you have shown here, it might have been a good idea had I done so! It looks quite practical.

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  2. Interesting development and well executed by you.

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  3. Unusual and nice, an interesting idea...

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  4. Yup. I like this one, a lot.

    To my eye the narrow buildings look better with the round miniatures than the flat buildings but still has that feel of an area of row buildings, strets and squares. A town base with cobblestones printed on might be nice touch. The buildings could then be arranged and rearranged as required without any question of the perimeter shifting and where the base shows there will be streets.

    Good job.

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    1. A town base with cobblestones is a good idea. Then the buildings can be arranged in any orientation and there are streets and town squares filling in the gaps.

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    2. I'll see what the texture collections on Flickr can provide, and dump them into Word/Photoshop.

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  5. Looking good ... and a very viable alternative to my L-shaped built-up areas.

    All the best,

    Bob

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