Any paintballers here? Field mapping thread

[Talroth]

I was debating on where to put this, but the general section here likely works the best.

To the point: The local paintball field where I am, (Spikes Paintball in York, PEI, Canada) is working hard to make a better, more interesting field for players. Last year they built a Western themed field that is made up of movable 'bunkers' styled after western building fronts.

This made for a great field, but it has a major drawback when it comes to building another like it. It is friggen expensive for all the materials, and they're not even pressure treated. (But still holding up amazingly well, stays decently dry I guess.)

Now because we have a large group of people that can show up for construction days, labour is the cheap part, material prices are what kills us. So this gave me the idea of using wattle and daub to build a close quarters village. About the only things we might have to bring in would be straw bales, and maybe some extra sand for the mix. The rest of the materials would be free off the land the fields are being built on.

The village is most likely going to be open roof structures, and then likely white washed to help protect them. I figure it should hold up decently for a year or two, and then just require minor rebuilding of some walls in the late spring to deal with frost damage.


The problem now is that I need ideas and suggestions on layouts and things to keep in mind to make a Realistic feeling game field, somewhere for Sim games of raiding a grow op/chem lab/terrorist cell. If you were to have a new field in that style go up near where you play, what would you like to see about it's layout?

I'm thinking the play area isn't likely to be much more than 300'x300', and the village itself wouldn't be more than 200x200 feet. How many buildings would you expect to see in a space like that? Would you rather see more smaller buildings that are one or two rooms, two exits, and a few windows? Or would you rather see fewer large buildings with multiple rooms and more detail to them?

Small households with their own low fenced in yard? (tight wattle fencing is a good option, you might be seen through it, you might not, you would likely have to crawl/crouch very low to hide behind most of them)

Single compound with a wall and two gate houses, then a series of buildings inside the main outer walls?


Thoughts and suggestions on details to include?

[Hoel]

I have an idea right off the top, but haven't got the time to reply in depth with sketch and such. I don't know if you're planning to play speedball or anything on it or if there should be any symmetry but here goes a quickie.
Put a big half-building along one edge, sort of like a long thin building and space out an even number of big, medium and small buildings (one of each?) to form to halves. with bigger road between (leading up to the half-building). This should give flexibility. you can play a lot of scenarios and game types.
Now I'm late.

[NeonKnight]

Paintball....haven't played that in about 8 years

Sure miss it.

And PEI too, My father grew up on PEI, near O'Leary.

[Talroth]

Yeah, not much to miss about PEI today. Give it a few more months and then we'll talk about missing here. Bloody cold and boring, and not even a decent hill to ski on. (They raised the height of the local 'ski hill' by a fair margin by using it as a landfill for a few years...)

For this field it would likely be woodsball/scenario players mostly, the speed ballers would have the current open, level fields to practice on (While I'm not a speedballer personally, instead I'm a poor student that can't afford to fire 2+ cases a day, I'm still keeping my eyes open for an easy way to do a 'permanent' air ball field that doesn't need setup/breakdown every weekend).

I'm personally pushing for a field that is well suited to asymmetric game play on a realism setting that would work well with the cheap material structures planned. This would likely be kept in a fairly wooded area, the village itself might be cleared and leveled (and hopefully on a hill for drainage,... walk on rental players usually don't like playing in mud as much as us crazy mil-sim types)

Not really looking for a solid layout, seeing as we're not 100% sure where we're building the field, we have small rises, ponds, and a brook to deal with and hopefully make use of. But more of ideas to include for realism, what aspects of a small village made up of mostly mud houses would make it feel Real to you?

[Hoel]

Can you post a map of the intended area?
I'll post a sketch when I'm done RPGing and fiddling with the final of my carlsborg map.

[Talroth]

Well, that is the hard part. We don't really have a solid location of where it is going currently, or even if we actually build it.

http://maps.google.ca/?ie=UTF8&ll=46...06909&t=h&z=17

Area that would be used for this is most likely somewhere in the woods, to the east of the little brook there, but not too far in.


Hardest part about this is there are more fields that the group wants to build than just a village for close quarters combat, so everyone that supports one field over another is going to fight over where to put it. You can see the red buildings that are the staging area, which puts you kind of far from some of the better looking spots in the back. The other issue is that I'm not sure where the property lines actually are. I haven't been back on that part of the field in over a year, there isn't much of a reason for most people to go back there.


I'm just trying to use this thread for brainstorming ideas to throw around at the next meeting.

[Hoel]

Looks like a good area if you cut down some trees and drain it a bit.
One of the coolest places I've played was an old sawmill. It has two huge buildings, one rebuilt to a roofed speedball and the other one walled up with a lot of rooms inside. Outside there was a couple of old buildings and set buildings, much like what you want.
The big building was great for hostage scenarios and attack/defend and when you removed some wall sections it became part of the village outside.
The outside buildings were mostly build from the walls from an old go-cart track and wooden frames covered with tarps. They were mostly small oneor two rooms but there was two bigger buildings on each of the open sides, one of them was two floors, and there was and old shed, also two floors. They wanted to dig up a ditch running through the area to make a river/bridge type of thing but were kicked off the land by the owner before that.

[Ascension]

You should turn this into a challenge and have us all come up with different ideas.