Sometimes you just get a hill
mike robel
🖼️ 15 images Surveyor
This is another map for the GMT game Main Battle Tank taking place at Fort Riley, KS. A little study in how a tank-mechanized team takes a hill.
Comments
I guess the best place to be is somewhere on top of the hill for the height advantage? Or would it be near one of the waterways where there is tree cover.
Did you use different trees this time? I'm having a bit of a clash in my mind over the Ordnance Survey style map with the photorealistic trees. I hadn't noticed it before, but maybe you changed them?
For these maps, I like to combine some of the aspects because at a such a small scale (each hex is only 100 meters), it is boring and the players like a little more detail. These particular trees are from the Japanese City annual. The kind of looked like cottonwoods or willows which grow at the Fort. This map is about 3km wide and 2km high.
A copy of an actual game (and its map) is attached here. You can see it blends topographic style with other features, but I don't like it because I don't think it reflects the complexity of real terrain.
My other maps cover much larger scales, so I am more faithful to the topographic symbols.
They are concentrated along the streams. The rest of the ground is covered with tall grass, but not the historic tall prarier grass from the frontier. Most of that is gone, but there is some southwest of where the pictures are taken. In the training area itself, there are old farms and a couple of old churches. There are many roads running north-south and east-west about one mile apart. We used those to navigate. Sometimes there are bridges and sometimes there are not. Sometimes an old bridge falls down and you discover it in the middle of the night. Quite a surprise that was.
As you can see from the other pictures, its pretty wide open in KS, but not Flat. These pictures are not of Fort Riley, but it is off in the distance in the top photo on the right.
Well, you always like to defend from higher ground. But how to get up there? If you go up that central draw/valley you are right in their kill zone. Not a good place to be. Especially in the day time. At night, dismounted infantry could make it work. As a cavalryman, I would put two platoons on the lower right, its a downhill shot for the enemy, but that's all you can do. Then my other platoon would move north, getting low on the reverse slope, use the low ground in the north to get up onto the little round hill. Meanwhile artillery and mortars would hopefully plaster the three peaks to make him keep his head down.
The Red ovals are the bad guys positions. the dotted one is where the guy on the right is supposed to go as an alternate.
The Blue ovals are my positions to suppress the bad guys with my tanks. (armor symbol is the oval which represents a track).
My Infantry moves up the draw (They are mechanized, indicated by the oval and the X which represents the cross straps they wore to hold all their equipment.)
2 dots = a section (2 tanks, the Headquarters) and 3 dots = a platoon (4 vehicles.)
The long dashed lines show how I would intend to move. We'd stay on the reverse slope some the bad guys on the other hills would have a harder time shooting us as we move.
The black + signs are where the artillery would fall.
It would probably be a bit dicey...
Wonderful!
This map is also for the MBT Game, but based on stuff in a book called First Clash, written about and for the 4th Canadian Mechanized Battle Group when it was in Germany. (They were very good.)
The first picture is a Google Maps View of the general Area.
Then a map with a rectangle highlighting the battle area for the game.
Third is a scan of the battle area as it appears in the book. The author flipped the map and rotated it somehow so that when I went to the place on the ground to recon it for an officers class for my tank battalion, I was very confused trying to get my map to orient on the terrain and align with the book. It took me quite a while to figure it out. I decided that it would be too confusing to try and use that for a class.
Last, still in progress, is the map rotated so as to be somewhat in line with the books illustration. Each Hex is 100 meters and therefore I had to blow the map up about 10 times the size and then cut out the battle area for this map. Then, since I live in America, I sized it to be 34 inches wide and 22 inches tall (to fit 11 x 17 inch paper). Each hex, to further confuse metric thinkers is 1 inch wide.
I still have to stick in the trees, now represented by the Green splotches, and decide if I want to put building symbols in the built up areas (faint pink). Also have to figure out what to do about the "school yard" which has an odd color on the map.
To get to this point, I had the scale settings vary from between 10 and 15%, the distance is 1 and 1 horizontal and verticle, chance of placing the symbol is 100% and I say put 4000 symbols in the polygon. I think this comes pretty close to looking like the density on the map.
My question is there a way to set density per square inch/centimeter to some value. What I did here is I set the # symbols to 4000 and then repeat as necessary to get to the density that looks right to my near sighted eyes. However, that won't work for areas of lesser density, like at the left of the screen shot from google Earth. And I don't want to place the symbols by hand.
It doesn't have to look like the picture, just be close as to the way it looks in total.
Edit: Added a better picture.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks