Saturday 28 March 2015

Drop Zone Commander - Ruins: All Very Distressing

So one of the strategies in Drop Zone Commander to help you achieve the victory conditions is to target buildings, to either, injure enemy models contained within, to reduce the enermy's opportunities for collecting objectives and intel, to open up fire lanes to give more opportunities in target selection, and finally, and most amusingly, to bring down a building on the enemy's sorry arse.

However, the cardboard buildings available in the game do not offer any options in how you represent destroyed buildings on the tabletop. So being a Wargame terrain geek I decided to see what modelling possibilities existed. My own club have decided to build 1 inch high blocks of polystyrene with the same footprint as the DZC buildings with appropriate texture added and painted grey to represent the collapse.

I took a different approach and considered what the cardboard buildings could offer in a quick and easy approach. Below are my photographs to illustrate.

1. Take an unmade building and with scissors cut the bottom inch away from the main body. Please note that you will need to measure this as the inch is less than the height indicated as the height of the ground floor windows.

2. Make the top half of the building as usual, and in addition glue tabs to the inside of the top so that it can sit snugly on the bottom half. Job done.




If you are looking for something a bit more substantial, less prone to damage and a bit more pleasing to the eye, then I suggest you provide the bottom half with some rigidity by adding strength to the walls (thicker cardboard or foam board as I have used in the picture below) or in addition making a floor within it, perhaps including some detail to represent the collapsed building if you wish. Happy gaming.


5 comments:

  1. This technique comes out great. We're still waiting for 50 more to fill all our boards down at the club Rusk!

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  2. Thank you for your comment Zombiestate. I am afraid 50 of these is quite time intensive and beyond me. However, I would be happy if you wanted to use my methods to do 50 yourself :-).

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    1. 20 will suffice for now then
      They do look very good

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    2. Thank you also for your comment. What I will do is put this little project on my list of outstanding little projects. See you tomorrow evening.

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