Strategic Map Terrain

[Mr. Average]

So I’ve been working on this for a while.  Welcome to the Democratic People’s Republic of Zaftra.

This is for a game of Planetary Operations I’ve been planning for some time.  It’s not model terrain because the scale is super-large – one square here will be one square centimeter when printed – the map is 4′ by 8′.  This is for a full-scale ground conflict on a long front – several hundred kilometers.  And whatever I did I could not get terrain that had the right “feel” to it at that scale, so I’m going with a map instead.

Zaftra is supposed to be something between Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey in terms of the “feel” of the terrain, with maybe a hint of Korea, since the neighbor to the West is the Zaftran Federation, aligned against the DPRZ.  I’m still working on colors, as well as things like the road system, the cities, the towns and villages, forested areas, etc.  But this is the “lay of the land,” as it were. It occurs to me that I may be able to make this into a low-relief terrain map, by the way. But then it becomes a transportation and storage issue. Anyway, a work in progress I suppose!

[Mr. Average]

Yeah, the hope is it can be a free-form kind of thing, with a just-past-near-future conflict. The map, which is currently getting rivers, forests, swamps, and cities, is just an art file but I intend to have it printed on vinyl as a kind of “command post map” to give the game the feeling of a strategic operation. The minis are all 3mm scale pieces, primarily National Cheese Emporium and Oddział Osmy, with some key units like cybertanks and battle striders coming from DP9 and Microworld Games. It’s basically a Western Intervention by my two fictional postmodern alliances, ENSPUN and the United States of Western Europe, versus the DPRZ and the Russian Confederation, with some random possibility of a third force called the Technical Alliance getting in on the act.

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