Terrain Greek and Persian

Ancient Greek STL Terrain: Building the Ground the Phalanx Needs

Terrain decides ancient battles more than any other period. A phalanx works on flat open ground and falls apart on anything else, which means the table itself is doing half the tactical work before either player moves a model. Where you put a hill is a decision.

Printable scenery for the March to Hell: Greeks and Persians collection, designed to work with the 15mm and 28mm armies and supplied as digital STL files.

Why terrain matters in the ancient world

In most periods scenery blocks line of sight and gives cover. In antiquity it does something more fundamental: it determines whether a formation can exist. Broken ground, slopes, watercourses and defiles all fragment a spear block, and a phalanx that loses cohesion stops being a phalanx and becomes a crowd holding long sticks.

That’s why Greek and Persian commanders spent so much effort on where to fight rather than how. Put the same two armies on open plain and on rocky hillside and you get opposite results with identical forces. Terrain is the lever.

What a Mediterranean table needs

Less architecture than most periods, which is good news for print time. Ancient battles were fought in open country far more often than in towns, so scrub, rocky outcrops, olive groves and dry watercourses will carry the majority of scenarios.

Where built structures do appear, they’re doing specific work: a wall to anchor a flank, a shrine as an objective, a defile that channels movement. A handful of pieces used deliberately beats a table crowded with generic scenery.

Printing terrain

This is where FDM earns its place in an ancient collection. Buildings, walls and structural pieces are flat planes and hard edges, which is exactly what filament handles well, and PLA is cheap enough that covering a table is affordable. Layer lines read as stone texture once painted, so the usual objection to FDM barely applies.

Resin is worth it for small detail pieces where surface texture is the point. Around 0.05mm layer height is plenty on scatter, since nobody inspects a rock closely.

Frequently asked questions

Does terrain need to be the same scale as my army?
Structures do, without exception. Doorways, steps and column heights are immediate scale references, and a shrine that a 28mm hoplite can’t walk into breaks the illusion the moment somebody notices. Natural terrain is far more forgiving, because a rock, a bush or a slope has no built-in human reference, which means the same scatter pieces frequently work across scales. If you’re building for both 15mm and 28mm armies, invest in natural terrain that serves both and print structures separately for each scale.

How much terrain do I need for an ancient battle?
Less than for most periods, and using it sparingly is historically correct. Ancient armies chose open ground deliberately, and a table cluttered with woods and hills produces a game where no formation can function, which isn’t how these battles were fought. Two or three significant pieces to anchor flanks and channel movement, plus some low scatter, is usually enough for a battle-scale game. The exception is scenarios built around difficult terrain specifically, like Thermopylae, where the whole point is that the ground does the fighting.

Should I print terrain in resin or FDM?
FDM for anything large. Walls, buildings and structural pieces are flat surfaces and hard edges, the geometry filament handles best, and the cost difference on an object that size is substantial. Layer lines actually help on stonework, since they read as coursing or weathering once painted. Save resin for small pieces where fine surface detail carries the model: altars, statuary, detailed scatter. Many people build their entire ancient table in PLA and print only the small decorative elements in resin.

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