There have been a few surveys floating around recently (the Survey Monkey one for WSS comes to mind but there have been others too in the last couple of months) asking about figure scale preferences, which I’ve had a hard time answering. For me, it varies considerably, and depends on what I’m hoping to represent on the table.
I have a variety of figures from 3mm (1/600) to 25mm, though somewhere tucked away back in England I think I have some Naval stuff that’s smaller scale, but Naval is a category that I don’t play at all often (not in the last decade at least), and I see it as a fringe element compared to the rest of the wargaming that I do. Air is a little different, since we’ve played Wings of War quite a few times at the club.
Figure scale is tied up in a lot of factors. The larger the figures, the more space needed to store them, the longer they take to paint, the more expensive they are (generally, anyway – you can always find cheap figures in any scale, as well as more expensive figures in smaller scales), and the more expensive it is to buy or make scenery that fits in that figure scale, especially if you’re gaming in a variety of periods.
Because of this, I’ve decided not to bother with 25mm figures any more. I’m still in two minds about my 25mm Normans for Saga, whether to try to complete them and play with them, or whether to just sell them. I refuse to play more than a test game with unpainted miniatures, so if I don’t get my figures painted, I don’t play with them, and I’ve had my Normans since Saga first came out three or four years ago. I can see the value in them, but they take too long for me to paint up, which means they don’t get used. For anything larger than a skirmish game, 25mm can look great as long as you have enough figures, but the epic battles featuring 1000 or so figures a side are beyond me, in terms of expense, time to paint them, and storage, so there’s no way I’ll ever be in a position to join those gamers. This is where scale of battle comes into play.
I tend to group wargaming into three categories, skirmish, mid-sized battles and “proper” battles. For the first, I’d ideally use somewhere between 5 and 30 figures, and if on the very lower end of that scale (say under a dozen total), I could see myself still using 25mm figures. On the higher end, I’d use smaller scale figures though. As an example, my Muskets and Tomahawks figures are single-mounted 15mm, as are my Bolt Action figures. In both of those games, my force is around the upper limit of what I consider a skirmish game, and heading into the mid-sized battle area. I’ve tried to keep figures down in number for both games by generally having smaller, elite units that cost more in points and thus require fewer figures, but even so, especially when we play larger games (as we’re now starting to do), we’re heading for higher number of figures. I could see doing larger games (1500-2000 pts of BA, 600-800 pts of M&T) with 10mm figures, but starting smaller (200 pts for M&T, building up to 400, and 500 pts in BA building up to 1000) allowed me to go 15mm for both. It wasn’t that expensive to build a fairly small force and then add more to it (especially in BA where I bought one pack of Battlefront figures for my 500 pt force, then added a tank and armoured car to get to 1000) as we expanded. I think 15mm scale is ideal for these sorts of games. A unit is often a squad, the entire force is a company or maybe battalion, roughly. I think Saga would have been best in 15mm too (we’d have been playing with painted figures by now), but we initially decided on 25mm, which means that it hardly ever gets played. The new Crusades version is out soon, and people at the club are talking about that in 25mm too, so I won’t bother buying those rules or joining them in playing. It’s not like I don’t have enough other projects on the go anyway. :)
For the mid-sized battles, I tend to think of around 80-150 figures per side (in 15mm). These tend to be games such as Lasalle (which actually requires more figures than those), but where you want a decent number of figures depicting a unit. This is where 25mm is definitely out for me, and 15mm is still around the sweet spot – my Impetus armies and Lasalle armies are in this category, and the battles they fight in tend to represent smaller scale battles, where a corps-sized force at the most is fighting, and often where a smaller force (a division or brigade) is depicted as part of a larger battle. A unit is usually a battalion or similar. I quite like 10mm for this size force too.
The the full on “proper” battles, I tend to think of at least 200-250+ 15mm figures required. For this size of battle, the smaller scales are king. This is about the limit of 10mm for me (though I could see doing a well-executed 15mm project as a lifetime challenge). I have a few armies in 15mm which are around this amount, but they’re rare, and the quality of figures and painting on them isn’t the best. What fits well here are the 6mm and 3mm scales. I generally prefer 6mm for this scale of battle, as the units look like masses of men. A unit is at least a battalion, often a division, sometimes a brigade), and games such as Grand Armee, Bluecher and the like fit here, with the army as a whole being at least a corps, and heading up to an army. If it’s a force with a lot of vehicles, then 3mm is a good option (my “modern” 1984 stuff is 3mm), but for horse and musket armies, 3mm lacks enough detail for me. Ideally, I can provide at least one side for an actual historical battle, and a suitable lifetime project would be doing both sides for one of the larger battles in history. I’d love to do everything for Wagram or Aspern-Essling, for example, but even at 6mm and a brigade per base, it’s a project that would take years to realise and a lot of money spent. Our club project (Waterloo for the anniversary next year) is an example of what I’d like to do as a lifetime project in 6mm, but that project is being split between at least half a dozen of us, and comes in at a cost of around $1000. I can’t imagine trying to do that in 15mm.
I know people that do attempt full scale battles in larger scale miniatures, but they run into what I see as one of two problems – either they require a huge number of figures (and hence expense, time, storage are all issues) or they use a few figures to represent a large number of men. A base that’s supposed to represent a brigade of 6 battalions needs to have quite a few figures on it, and our Waterloo project has around 12 figures as a minimum to represent a battalion. Seeing a brigade base with 6 figures on it (or even fewer) representing 6 battalions just doesn’t look like a major battle to me. The smaller scales allow you to have a more realistic look – sure, a single 6mm figure on a base might represent 100 men, but when you have 40 of them on a base, they at least look like a formation of men.
The astute of you will have noticed that my numbers of figures per battle scale thing don’t exactly fit together well – skirmish 5-30, mid sized 80-150, large 200-250+ give gaps between the three sizes of battle. In those cases, I think of them as somewhere between skirmish and mid-sized, or between mid-sized and large. If I have 50 figures that are based singly, I’d think of them as an overly large skirmish force, whereas the same 50 figures on 10 bases would be more of a small mid-sized force. My Lasalle army is in the large category by number of figures, but I see it more as a huge mid-sized army (especially since it represents only a division), and my Longstreet army is definitely in the large category for figures, but since they’re 10mm, and since they represent about a brigade in total, I think of them as a large mid-sized force too. My 6mm Maurice army is edging towards the large battle size; I tend to think of it as a smaller “large” army of a corps or two. My forthcoming 6mm Bluecher army, on the other hand, will definitely be a large army (each base is a brigade), and I could just about see doing that in 10mm at most, but 6mm seems about perfect to me.
And so, when I consider what my favourite scale is, I have to consider what size of battle I prefer too. While I enjoy the skirmish-y games we play in M&T and BA, I prefer the larger battles. If time, money and space to play were no issue, then I’d be happiest playing the large battles. Because of that, the smaller scales tend to resonate more with me. On the other hand, there are a few campaigns I’d like to organise as major projects which would require a lot of figures, but which wouldn’t necessarily all be used at the same time. My Very British Civil War project that I tinker with every now and then is one that I’m doing in 10mm. It just about straddles the skirmish to mid-sized category, but since I aim to provide all the figures for each force, larger scales are out for me, while the smaller scales don’t give me the skirmish-y look I’m going for (small ad-hoc units of a squad or so). I keep thinking about an 1885 Sudan campaign too, but haven’t settled on a scale for that yet – the 15mm Peter Pig and especially the 18mm Blue Moon figures are excellent, the 10mm Pendraken range gives a lot of options, and the Baccus 6mm range would enable me to buy and paint up the various units more quickly. That may end up as one of my lifetime projects, once I finally get off the fence and decide which scale to do it in. My heart says 15mm, my head says 10mm, and my wallet cries before grudgingly settling on 6mm. A further complication is that I don’t have any scenery for Sudan, so I’d have to consider the extra expense of providing that too.
So, there you have it. This is basically a long-winded way of saying that I don’t have a favourite scale, at least not without factoring in the scale of battle I want to represent too. Even though I want to play the larger battles of history, I also have to consider time. We get about 3-4 hours at most to play at the club (oh for the days when we had all day to play at my previous clubs), which means that a lot of the larger scale games are out unless we have very fast-playing rules. But that’s for another blog entry another day.
