NOTES: (circled no. on map) 1. Center of 30m hill based on center point between three adjacent hill points. 2. 3/4 point between hills defining the low ground lines and the topographical crest-lines. 3. One of the three hill markers adjacent to each other defining a 30m hill. These would be erased from the final map. This article is being written in order to tie several articles together that have appeared in THE COURIER starting with an article of the same name written by William Silvester. The other articles are "WARGAMES TERRAIN: A Better Way" and "VISIBILITY: Using Low Ground Lines" both by George Jeffrey and published in THE COURIER in the Vol. IV No. 3 and Vol. IV No. 6 issues, respectively. The game club located in Detroit, Michigan, sponsors two major conventions in the Detroit area as well as ORIGINS. The last ORIGINS had a modern armor game involving a Soviet regiment and an equivalent of a NATO battalion. The terrain was completely generated off of the terrain generator presented in this article and was located on a table 36 feet wide by 12 feet deep. It ties together the use of random numbers to determine terrain and the use of the "lowest ground" as presented in the two articles listed above. However, the use of terrain regarding visibility is treated differently. This will be expanded on below. First, how is random terrain created? Choices You have three choices before using the random terrain chart. One is to place the major man-made terrain features such as roads and towns/villages on the map before using the generator. Another is to place key hills or rivers or other features as you wish and then use the generator to fill in the spaces. Finally, you can create all of the terrain using the generator. If you have no idea of the terrain except the general location of where you want the battle to take place, such as near the Southern Bavarian town of Bamberg, then use the generator to place all of the terrain. If using a strategic map showing the major rivers and roads and the terrain generator to do the tactical battlefield, then locate on your tactical map the rivers and roads as indicated on the strategic map, and then place the cities/towns as indicated by that strategic map. The remainder of the terrain will be filled in from the random terrain chart. To use the generator you need a pair of percentile dice and a general idea of either the location of the battlefield or what kind of terrain it was fought over. If in the hilly wooded area of Colonial America choose the general terrain type that best describes this terrain from the table. In this example it would be HILLY/WOODED. The tables are GUIDES. You might ignore rolls of 16-21 or decide all such rolls will be farms because of the lack of villages/towns in that area and period. You are free to do so. The table is expected to be used with some common sense. It is expected for you to have to make some minor adjustments when making your map. Using the above example of HILLY/WOODED terrain and a table size of 4x8 feet you have a possible 32 results. Using a pair of dice the following results came up for the 32 possible rolls. The table is numbered 1-8 along the long side and A, B, C, D for the short side. . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 A 43 20 76 36 88 32 32 24 B 49 19 2 2 45 91 13 65 C 32 74 1 85 37 83 34 20 D 45 4 38 5 58 64 84 67 The table generated above gives you the terrain in each square foot of the table. Looking at the RANDOM TERRAIN GENERATOR and using graph paper the map above is created from the table above. It does not have the streams, roads, bridges, treelines, or the hills completed. That is explained below. The RANDOM TERRAIN GENERATOR is next. It translates the random numbers into a map. To the "Random Terrain Generator Table" The first random terrain feature we have to add after filling in the general terrain from the RANDOM TERRAIN GENERATOR is the hills. We have one 30 meter hill at B3B4C3 and three 10 meter hills located at D2, D4, and A8. The center of the 30 meter hill is located using the center point of the three marks indicating hills in B3, B4, and C3. These marks can be erased after locating the centerpoint, but are left on the sample map to help show how the center of the 30 meter hill was determined. Using the center of the 30 meter hill and teh center of the closest other hill, in D4, make a mark on the map between the 30 meter hill and the 10 meter hill 1/4 of the distance from the larger hill to the smaller (use 1/4 rather than 1/2 which would be used if the hills were the same height. 1/3 would be used if the larger hill were 20 meters, etc. for larger hills). Do the same for the hill in D2 and the hill in A8. These three marks indicate the low point between the 30 meter hill and the three 10 meter hills. Draw a curved line around the 30 meter hill connecting the three points and maintaining the radii determined from the marks. The result gives you an egg-shaped hill based in the radii and marks out the major hill. It runs off the table in A2 and A6-7. Now draw a curved line around the three smaller hills the radii equal to the distance to the point on the line to the larger hill. Note that the two hills in D2 and D4 almost meet at the table edge in D3. The field in A6 is on the hill the in A7 largely in the valley between the hills and the woods in D3 are in a valley at the base of the three hills hemming it in. The marsh in B7 is located only on the flat ground, not on the hills. The hills define its location. Next, we add in the topographical crestlines by running a line from the hill centers to where the hills touch, and continuing this line across the hill. The large hill has three such lines. The smaller hills one line. Now, for the smaller hills add a second line through the center of the hill perpendicular to the first line. These topographical crests represent the highest point of the hills and block line of sight. Thus someone located in C7 could not see someone in A6. AFV can use the crestlines to go hull or turret down. Next we connect the villages with roads continuing them off the table at the logical points and connecting the villages by the line of least resistance. Next we drain the marsh with a stream. Since it will not go through a field or up a hill it could only go into C6, C8, or the lower part of B8. A D6 rolled gives us a 5 so it goes north of the village in C8 along the base of the hill off the east edge in B8. Last, we determine the direction of the prevailing winds by rolling a D8 with 1 equal to north. A roll of 7 has the prevailing wind coming from the West. Treelines are placed on the west edge of the fields, along the north side of the road along the field in C7, and as trees generally grow near water, along both banks of the stream. This completes the map. The major improvement in this method is it provides random terrain for virtually all types of terrain which the original table did not. It also provides an idea of the low ground vs high ground and realistic hills. Hills often will make up the entire battlefield with your forces fighting on their relatively gentle slopes (except in MOUNTAINOUS terrain). It also gives you the topographical crests defining the tops of hillsides and the blocking of fields of view. In this there is a great difference from Mr. Jeffrey's system. His may be more accurate but less defined, especially for someone who has to worry about getting a company of armor hull-down on a crest-line he cannot see but must define by drawing an imaginary line from the hill-top to the low ground line at right angles to the line of sight from his vehicles to a moving target. A future article will cover determining blind areas and dead space from the hills created with the RANDOM TERRAIN GENERATOR. Random Terrain Generator Table" Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. VI No. 6 Back to Courier List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1986 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com