Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward ...Several years back I posted a topic, which appears to have gorn missing, that contained some of the boards from my The Valley folder (now floating around in your 'unofficial' board folders). For those of you wondering who thought that 30x15 was a good set of dimensions for a board, this is what they're for. The individual boards are almost the size of a pair of standard mapsheets, making them handy for a quick battle. That said, this is what they were originally intended for ... stringing together vertically to make yourself a long, narrow battlefield.
Select the 30x15 map size, then select a number of boards from, say 5x1 to 'get-carried-away'x1, and you can end up with something like this sample (which is a 10x1 board map - a valley 900m wide by 4.5km) - and there are enough boards to make a valley over 9km long without repeating components. (Unfortunately, because of the way I initially built the boards, you can't rotate individual boards for variety. Sorry! Though I'm likely to keep building additional boards for this in between others.)
(The concept of the modular valley is obviously not original, and this particular one is modelled on a modular campaign scenario from Charles Steward Grant's
Programmed Wargames Scenarios (Wargames Research Group, 1983).)
The valley can be considered an accessible pass between otherwise sheer cliff mountains, and offers an opportunity for a defensive force to be deployed in depth, to obstruct an offensive force attempting to cross the pass from South to North. The various boards provide various terrain challenges for the attackers, which may slow them down, or provide locations where ambushes can be concealed. (In addition to assorted woods and various settlements, some of the boards include depth 2 water, for those of you who want their 'mechs to emulate Godzilla - "Up from the depths, 30
stories metres high ...") It'll also make a good opportunity to actually use scouting forces, especially if a time limit has been set for reaching the end of the valley before reinforcements arrive.
The sample combined 30x150 map below uses the following boards, but there are a bunch more in the folder ...
00 -
30x15 TheValley-NorthEnd (If you use this board, it has to go at the top end)
01 - 30x15 TheValley-Lakeside
02 - 30x15 TheValley-Open5
03 - 30x15 TheValley-Forest
04 - 30x15 TheValley-River
05 - 30x15 TheValley-Town
06 - 30x15 TheValley-Open2
07 - 30x15 TheValley-Swamp
08 -
30x15 TheValley-SouthEnd2 (If you use this board, it should go at the bottom, or just above '30x15 TheValley-SouthEnd1')
09 -
30x15 TheValley-SouthEnd1 (If you use this board, it has to go below '30x15 TheValley-SouthEnd2')
30x150 TheValley-sample-1
Saxarba tileset, grass set applied
(Click to enlarge!)
(NOTE: I'd advise not using the fatigue rules when using this map, as your 'warriors are likely to end up exhausted about halfway up the map - possibly before contact!)
This board has been added to the updated .zip file below - and I'm now date-stamping the .zip files (ISO-style - the one true date format!) so that people can be sure that they've got the latest one - I should have thought of that earlier.