Sitting Ducks by Dorian

Good morning!

Dorian here with a short tutorial on how to make some ridiculously cheap, yet decent looking objectives for Flames of War.

First, let me preface this by saying that I am always in favour of the neatly and intricately modelled objectives. However, in my experience, these usually tend to blend in with the terrain a bit too much, and are easily overlooked during gameplay. On the other hand, objectives bearing the insignia of your formation tend to stick out pretty blatantly.

Battlefront already offers a range of these, but their range is far from comprehensive, and the price is pretty steep for three rectangular pieces of clear plastic with print. I normally love Bettlefront’s gaming accessories, I just find these quite overpriced and somewhat incomplete.

This incited me to create my own, representing all the army formations I have, and I have later appended the project in order to add some friends’ requests. 

I went about the Internet and gathered appropriate pictures and then formatted and compiled them in Corel. The file posted here is in still in Corel, so some of you might not be able to see it at home, but it will allow you to select what you want to print. Here is a thumbnail of all the objectives present in the file:

The file has four pages with fifteen objectives per page on the first three pages. The last page only features objectives for Great War and Arab-Israeli War. In order to turn the file into objectives you can use in the game, you would need to download the file and bring it to a photocopying or print shop. Most of those tend to have Corel. There you can select which objectives you want to print, and rearrange the pages accordingly. For the rest of the text, I will just assume you would like to print everything.

 Ask the print shop attendant to print the whole file twice (to get two copies of each objective) without duplex or scaling (As in document) on 300g matt coated paper using a colour laser printer at 600 dpi. Once this is done, ask them to matt laminate the paper on both sides. This should result in eight A4 pages of 0.5mm thick plasticard. This is the most expensive step, and in my town it cost just a bit more than 7EUR to complete. To put things into perspective, this is 7EUR for one hundred objective markers.

Now comes the tedious part…

Safety warning: DO NOT perform the following step in a room recently cleaned by your wife. This can cause severe irritability (of the aforementioned wife) and in turn substantial amounts of commotion and distress.

You need to cut out all one hundred tokens. This can take some time and cause quite a lot of mess while tidying the corners. After finishing this, you are good to go!

Personally, I like to add one more, optional, step – black lining the sides. I used a standard black marker for this. Beware that the paper between the plastic is prone to soak in some of the black paint causing paint bleeds, but this looks quite good with the weathered look of most objectives.

As you can see I have included objective markers for Great War and Arab-Israeli War, and even some peculiar ones like Yugoslav Partisans, but left out markers for Vietnam. This is mainly because there is not much call for it around these parts. They might be available in an updated version.

Good luck and have fun!


Dorian

Copyright notice: I do not claim authorship of any imagery in this file, and as far as I am concerned, anyone and everyone is allowed to do whatever they want with it unless it is to the detriment of third parties. Given the historical nature of the images in the file, I would assume that they are all in public domain. Should I be wrong about this, please do not hesitate to drop me a line and the offending images will be removed forthwith.

Download LINK