Terrain Box for Big Base DBA 3.0

For my small DBA I have a box with everything I need for a game, including all the terrain (but excluding figures). Now I want the equivalent for Big Base DBA. I figured I should sort out the box for DBA 3.0 rather than 2.2 so I’ve had a look at what I need.

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The box

I bought a 35 litre Really Useful Box for my Field of Glory terrain. But I stopped playing FOG pretty quick and the box is up for grabs. Big Base DBA seems a better use for the box given what I play on a regular basis.

(For my Small DBA I used a 9 litre Really Useful Box.)

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Number and Type of Terrain Features

Most of my DBA armies are from “Arable” terrain, a handful are from “Littoral” and one from “Hilly”. That influences what terrain I have in my box.

Terrain Type	1-2 Compulsory Features	2-3 Optional Features	My Armies
Arable	1 BUA or 2 Plough	River, Difficult Hills, Gentle Hills, Woods, extra Plough, Enclosures, Road, Waterway, Scrub, Boggy	I/24 Hittite Empire II/19 Seleucid II/33 Polybian Roman II/35 Later Macedonian II/39a Ancient Spanish – Iberian II/65 Early Visigothic II/66 Early Vandal II/72c Suevi II/78 Late Imperial Roman III/34 Andalusian III/35 Feudal Spanish III/74 Fanatic Berber
Hilly	1-2 Difficult Hills	River, Woods, BUA, Road, extra Difficult Hills	II/39a Ancient Spanish – Celtiberian
Littoral	1 Waterway	Either Difficult Hills or Marsh, either Woods or Dunes, BUA, Road, River	I/22 New Kingdom Egyptian I/28 Sea Peoples II/32 Later Carthaginian

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Size of Area Terrain

Obviously the terrain templates will be bigger than for small DBA. DBA 3.0 has moved to using base widths (BW) for all measurements. A change I heartily approve of. In my case, with Big Bases, a BW = 8 cm. Amongst other things this is used for the size of area terrain templates.

There are a few rules covering the size for area terrain template (with cm based on my BW):

• Length plus width <= 9 BW (72 cm)
• Length >= 1 BW (8 cm)
• Width >= 1 BW (8 cm)
• For a Gully: length >= 3 x width
• For non-Gullies: length <= 2 x width
• Only 1 feature with length < 3 BW (24 cm)

I knocked up a graphic to get a sense of what sort of shapes these constraints could result in.

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What goes in the box

Armed with that graphic I looked at my terrain and found I had enough terrain to go in my Big Base DBA box. Most of the features were 3-4 BW (24-30 cm) across so not much variety in size. This is what I dropped in my box:

• 3 x Difficult Hills
• 3 x Gentle Hills
• 1 x Small hill
• 3 x Rectangular Area Terrain Templates for Plough and BUA
• 3 x Curvy Area Terrain Templates for Woods, Enclosures, Scrub, Boggy, Marsh
• 1 x Small Area Terrain Template
• 1 x Road Network

I could, according to the letter of the rules, take 3 Dune features. However, I know of no battles involving the DBA armies I’m interested in that featured Dunes.

Sadly, I don’t get to use my Gullies. In DBA these only appear in Steppe Terrain. Sigh.

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What doesn’t go in the box

Unfortunately, quite a bit doesn’t fit into the box. For Small DBA everything except the figures went in a 9 litre box. 35 litres isn’t enough for Big Base DBA.

This is the terrain that comes separately:

• Waterway
• River
• Things to put on the Area Terrain Templates so it is obvious what they are, e.g trees for woods, ponds for marsh, walls for enclosures, buildings for BUA, etc.

I could probably squeeze them in but I use them for all my gaming so keep them in a separate bag that I automatically take to every game. If I only played DBA I’d do something different.