After starting with flames of war again after a break of about 2 years I decided to make a nice little town similar as the ones you see in the inland of Normandy. I’ve been there pretty often on hollidays and I simply love the view of all the little towns the nature and of course the coasts with its historic feel to it.

I have also thought about making many single houses so I can rearrange them every battle but that would restrict me in making them more realistic with little gardens, fences and many more details so I decided to make a single piece village. When you want something like this it’s wise to overthink the strategic value and possibilities of every corner, defensible feature and playability as a whole.

So after placing different tanks/guns and infantry units on an empty wooden plate, the plan came to life.

This is the layout with the first row of houses in an early stage, I will place the houses in a way where it’s difficult to have a straight line of sight through the village so you have to go around it or the hard way through it, it’s sometime better to go around it but what if the objective is to capture the village. You can also see some units that I placed to see where they could hide and dig themselves in, but every location has it’s weak spot.

The streets are made of wallpaper with a nice cobblestone texture and the pavements are from a sticker piece with tiny 3×3mm tiles from a hobby shop. The church is the only building that will have home made rooftiles ( what a dull thing to do) all other buildings will get ready made rooftiles from a train model shop.

On the left you can see a view at street level and you can clearly get the feel the soldiers will get when they have to take or hold this village, you can also see the building in the middle has some plasterwork missing, I used the same wallpaper as the street to make this look like brickwork. The room between the buildings is wide enough for a Panther tank to pass and the little archway on the left can fit a medium base.

When you see a Normandy village you a stable can’t be missed, I know normandy style stable didn’t have thatched roofs but I love the feel this gives so decided to make one anyway. This stable can fit a medium base or a Panzer IV, I really wanted to have this village look peacefull for allied air reconnance planes but when the ground forces arrive all hell breaks loose.

Here you see the layout with all the buildings that I planned for now, maybe in the future I will add some more to the right or the left at the end of the street but for now this will do.

Now it’s time to add the roofs, the straight roofs where not that hard to make but the angled roof and the one on the corner house caused me some trouble, in the end everything fitted perfectly though. The commercial buildings had to have some sort of sun screens and I thought the rooftiles would do this job quit well, the corner building has some nice round sun screens which I made out of ordinary cardboard bent into shape before glueing. Most buildings will get some roofchambers with windows too but that will have to wait for a later stage becasue that will be a difficult job to do.

I spray painted the ground and road and then applied a quick drybrush of grey ( for scenery work, I use the test pots for wallpaint you can get at the building material shop). The brown is just the underlayer before I put sand and grass stuff on it.

And this is the overview so far, stay tuned for more in the near future.