Cyanight's Customizations

Hey everyone,
Sharing my global game now that i’ve spent a good amount of effort customizing it.

Custom Map:
I traced @Tjoek 's map in a website program called “inkarnate” and colored it myself. Then in Gimp I added roundels and labels to everything again using Tjoek’s roundels page for the base roundels. The map is just a tad larger than the OOB map as I unforuntly don’t have a huge space for the setup table. I really like the way it turned out visually as I love the more simple look. This was printed at 200dpi (a little low imo) from an online service in the US called Smartpress on .40 Styrene. It cost $150.00 shipped.
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Custom Table:
Table is built out of 2x4’s and plywood. Nothing fancy just a big flat surface.

Custom Chart Board/magnetic roundels:
A small magnetic white board with my custom charts printed on vinyl applied to it. The magnetic roundels are my design as well and are 3d printed.
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Battle Board:
3d printed base with a vinyl printed sticker on top designed by me. It incorperates the tech units and combined arms into it.

Money Chips:
These are just cheap chips from amazon and I use white for 1 green for 2 red for 5 and blue for 10. Way nicer in the hand than paper money.

Magnetic Units:
Small magnets 3x1mm glued to almost all planes (japan tac bombers needed the larger 3x2 because of the wheels) using ca glue and activator to set them up quickly. A lot of work to get them all done but very rewarding. Carriers got holes drilled and 3x2 magnets inserted as close to the surface of the deck as I could to get the planes to stick nicely to them.
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Flight Stands:
These are made from 3mm thum nuts and 3mm acrylic rod. I designed a number of jigs for accurate cutting, gluing and magnet gluing to get them as cleanly done as possible. They have a 3x2mm magnet glued to the top.

Storage:
All of the unit storage boxes are custom designed to hold chips and roundels nicely. My original designs allowed for all of the bins to fit back in the game boxes but for ease of use I eneded up making more boxes/changing the shape so they no longer would go back into the game boxes.
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Troop Placards/Placard Markers:
These are a 3d printed base with another label applied to them. I did crop/adjust the flags so they would all be the same dimensions and I took a lot of liberty with the Anzac one (AUS and NZ mashed up). The markers are the same flag just double sided and small enough to fit into territories nicely.
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Facilities and Neutral Troops:
All of the facilities are of my design and are all 3d printed with a .2 nozzle. I did keep them small so they didn’t occupy too much board space. The neutral troops are nice as they blend into the space but still represent the troops in a tactile way.
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Roundels:
These are just a simple 20mm circle 3d printed with a 19mm laminated sticker attached. These were punched with a “3/4 paper punch”. Very time consuming but the result is hard to argue with.

Im not talking about a digital Map, but a real one. I consider myself very artistically minded so I think I could do it without it looking too bad. What materials would I need, how much time would it take? I wanna do a global map from about 1920.

New Sets Arrived today.

Republican Spain/National Spain
Balken Crosses for Armor
Balken Crosses for Aircraft
UK Roundels for Aircraft

check em out.
combatminiatures.org

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German Aircraft Crosses.png

I’ve gotten several private messages and some responses in this thread… so just as a head’s up and a community service…

Because of the private messages, I have ALREADY made a deal to unload my custom units, and they are, in-fact, already mailed off.

I know its kinda pointless now, but if you’re still that curious as to what I did have, here’s the complete list of the custom HBG units I had purchased in the last few weeks to beef up my bins… since I later made a decision to pull them and not use them, I did eventually re-order equivalent numbers of default/original OOB A&A units from HBG to beef up my numbers (like if I didn’t like the two HBG Japanese Fuso battleships, I reordered two OOB Kongo or Yamato battleships to replace them… so-on and so-on.  Anyways, here’s the (now kinda pointless) list:

(BTW: you may notice that for the most part, planes are missing from this list… I found most custom HBG aircraft to be good enough and scaled well enough to survive my “off-scale axe”.  So there are many HBG planes like P-47s and F4F/Hellcats that survived the cut and made it into my permanent bins)

HBG Battle Pieces (custom units)

US - Olive Drab:
5x Pershing Tanks
5x M5 Stuart tanks
15x M4A3 Sherman tanks
5x P-51 fighters

5x Essex CVs
5x South Dakota BBs
2x Nevada BBs
5x Baltimore CAs

UK - Tan:
10x Churchill Tanks
10x Valentine Tanks

5x Ark Royal CVs
3x King George V BBs

Russia - Brown
2x KV-2 tanks
11x T-34 tanks
4x T-26 tanks

German - Black
2x Schleswig Holstein BBs
2x Seydlitz CVs
8x Pz-III tanks

Japan - Pumpkin Orange:
10x Type 97 tanks
5x Ki-43 fighters
2x G8N Rita bombers

2x Kaga CVs
2x Ryujo CVs
5x Nagato BBs
2x Fuso BBs
5x Mogami cruisers
5x I-400 subs

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The best approach I’ve seen was a friend who cut his factories in half with a hacksaw. Large factories are majors, while the smaller, halved factories are minors.

I’ve got mine painted three different colors. Bought a lot of 50 for a few dollars from a vendor at Nashcon in May 2016.

Before Nashcon, I used red Monopoly hotels for the major factories and the green hotels for minor factories. I still like to use the green ones every now and again because I think they’re nifty.

So very true. When I first started painting my aircraft I had to include decal roundels for the players to distinguish the pieces from one another. My naval units are painted mostly with a color scheme for playability except for the capital ships like the Carriers and popular Battleships. All of them have a decal or flag to show which nation they belong too. I actually replaced the OOB British Cruisers because I thought they looked too close in size with the destroyers. I ended up replacing with some ships I found on Shapeways. The biggest problem I had with naval units is that they can exist in the same seazone with enemy pieces unlike land territories. Because of this I decided to keep the subs, destroyers, cruisers and non unique battleships following a color scheme. There are so many colors in the spectrum though we should be able to come up with a solution that will make them look more historical yet keep the pattern or color scheme for the nation. I really would love to paint all the ships historically and maybe I will revisit them again someday. Every time I go back and repaint my pieces I seem to get better at it. Or at least I think I do, hehe.

@sgtwiltan:

Yes. There are so many. Trying to get one thing done at a time. I sent back some pieces and have started on a big batch of artillery which he loves. I’m amazed at his patience. Still have a lot of pieces he sent me and was able to find and keep them in a box so I know which pieces are his that I need to work on. They had been lost in multiple boxes from when I moved 4 years ago. I’ve also redone literally hundreds of PZIIIs including some all of the painted ones. One of these days…… I’ll get them done.

That is cool! I’m sure he doesn’t mind, because the end result is fantastic. :-)