Any flat surface will do, a table, pasteboard, or even the floor. To make the battlefield more realistic the players have used ready-made hills, and they've made some simple houses from card to create a village. The wood is made of scale model trees which have been bought, but you could improvise by using pine cones or even a few twisted twigs to represent bare or burned tree trunks. You'll find some example armies at the end of this book, which are all roughly the same size, and you could use this as a guide to start your own collection. The first thing to do is decide which army you want to collect.
Different races have different troop types, fighting skills, and technological assets.
The human troops of the Empire, for instance, make great use of cannons and war machines in their armies, while Wood Elves make use of mounted bowmen and can enlist the aid of sylvan creatures like Treemen and Dryads. Once you've chosen your army, you'll want to know more about it, how it fights, and what special models it can include. You'll find all this and more besides in the Warhammer Armies supplement for your army. Each army book tells you about the history of the race, describes the different troop types and any special rules they might have, and contains an army list. The army list is the most important part of the book because it tells you how many and what sort of troops you can have in your army.