A question of scale for buildings on the wargames table

[Meic]

Hi,

I'm new to 10mm and am trying to figure out what scale buildings to go with. At first 10mm seemed obvious, however I wondered whether 6mm or 15mm could work as well.
After reading a little on the Antenociti's Workshop site about scale information for wargamers, and adding the base depth to the overall casting could 10mm figures be treated as effective 15mm for the purpose of buildings on the table, and would it look good? I'm also torn about whether to consider 6mm buildings when gaming a large battle and going for a more built up look on the table?
I wondered what thoughts/experiences members of this forum had as to scale buildings?

Cheers

Meic

[lentulus]

YMMV of course, but I find most 6mm buildings look wildly out of scale.  So do *most* 15mm buildings, but the older "Architectural heritage" line from JR Miniatures is a bit on the small side and works ok (In fact, it has been sold in the past as N-scale to the railway hobby).

[FierceKitty]

I was at the Austerlitz bicentennial reenactment a few years ago. Noticed that they used much smaller buildings than the real things to represent the various villages that had to be bombarded and destroyed. It didn't look particularly convincing, though the troop spectacle was memorable.

[Aart Brouwer]

I have some experience because I play with both 10mm and 8mm (Adlers) as well as with some of my buddies' 15mm models.

I think that both visually and practically speaking 6mm is out of the question. A 10mm unit cannot convincingly invest a 6mm building or occupy a 6mm village.

However many 15mm buildings fit in remarkably well with 10mm models, and even more so the 1:200 scale Hovels buildings.

But the best advice I can give you is to make them yourself. That isn't as hard as many people think. Just look up some of the many original and practical instructions on websites. Or the YouTube videos of that brilliant Canadian weirdo, the Kamloopian. After a bit of trial and error you will get the hang of it, and then there is no going back. Scratch-buidling is remarkably easy and you will love the capacity to be able to build whatever buidling you fancy, from watermills to factories to alien bunker stations. You can also scratch-build rows of houses and other buildings on one base, or even entire villages.

Cheers,
Aart

[Meic]

Many thanks for the replies.

Aart, I'll definitely have a look at the Kamloopian, thanks. I've scratch built for 25/28mm, though for some reason I'm a little nervous for 10mm? I think it's because I've no points of reference.
Off to view You Tube.

Cheers

Meic

[mollinary]

Meic,

  This is obviously a question of taste, no prescriptive answer. I have experimented along all these lines and it depends particularly on what effect you are looking for.  For an isolated farm house, a 10mm scale building will work. From my point of view they don't really do it for a village because they take up too much space, or you have too few buildings.  Ultimately I have gone for using 6mm buildings, the beautiful ones ones from Timecast, and am very pleased with the effect.  I also feel they sit "in" the terrain better. Somewhere along the line, unless playing 1:1 figure and ground scale, both vertical and horizontal, we are going to make some visual compromises. I like big battles, with lots of figures, and when representing a large field 6mm buildings seem to blend in OK.  Just finished a multi player Gravelotte StPrivat on a 16ft by 7ft table, with about 6,500 figures ultimately deployed, and 6mm buildings. I hope to post a battle report shortly, and Dave will have a few pictures to add to give the impression.  But I come back to "its in the eye of the beholder"!

Mollinary

[Shedman]

It is a matter of personal taste but I've found that 10mm figures go well with 6mm buildings

For my 10mm 1859 project I originally bought Timecast's 10mm buildings

However at the scale I was using of 1 battalion = 1 stand of 10 figures the buildings and figures didn't look right

Magenta looked like a small village instead of a large town that several battalions could fight over and villages were single buildings insteads of a cluster

So I bought a load of Timecast's 6mm buildings and it looked "right".

My rules for buildings allow 1 infantry base to occupy a 40x40 square

I put my buildings on either 40x40mm, 80x40mm or 80x80mm  bases to give the impression of narrow streets and alleys

regards

Alan

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanmillicheap/4216866684/in/set-72157622950074405/ for an example






Alan

[Meic]

Thanks for the replies definitely food for thought.

Must admit that 6mm looks good to my eye (thanks for the link Shedman).

Hi Molinary, looking forward to the battle report and seeing some pics, 6500 figures on the table  , trust me I hardly need temptation like that being generally weak of will, I can see a 10mm lead pile beginning to rival my other scales.....

Cheers

Meic

[mollinary]

Hi Meic,

Come over to the 10mm side, you know it makes sense!  If you haven't found them already, the Battlereport and game pictures are in the BATREP section, under FPW Gravelotte StPrivat and Henry's photos of (you guessed it!) Gravelotte St Privat.

Mollinary

[Aart Brouwer]

It is a matter of personal taste but I've found that 10mm figures go well with 6mm buildings.

Yes, let's agree about how important personal taste is. To me your set-up looks distinctly out of whack, no matter how well you painted up the little houses (and you did!) or how well the ground, road and scenery colours were chosen. Your town still looks like a village, although this may be due to its lay-out as much as its components. In my view slightly bigger houses make for better towns because they 'dwarf' the soldiers a bit. Soldiers being able to look across the roof of a one-storey building would be a no-no for me. As for lay-out: put the houses tightly together in rows, twist the main road and add some side-roads so that at table-height you can't see right through the thing, and you get much more of a town feeling I believe. I apologize for being unable at the moment to put my own pictures where my mouth is, but this picture of my scenery guru Bruce Weigle shows what I mean. Weigle uses figures (Heroics &Ross) and scenery (scratch-built) of the same scale and to great effect. Building a town like this from Timecast stuff or some other brand would cost a fortune, but once you get the hang of it scratch-building is a good solution.

Cheers,
Aart

[Meic]

Hi Mollinary,

Got my first batch of 10mm yesterday (7YW Prussians), started painting tonight (why the delay? Too much time spent looking and trying to figure out basing for BP, so decided to get on with the painting and figure the basing out later). Must admit they are very nice figures indeed.

Looked the battle report up at lunch, amazing.

Hi Aart, thanks for the post, I can see you point it really does look the part. Dare I ask for more pics please?

Cheers

Meic

[Aart Brouwer]

Hey Meic,

I have the exact same problem: working out the right BP basing for my soldiers  

Mollinary's CR is astonishing indeed. I don't want to criticize anyone with a different view or taste from mine, let that be said, and my favourite Bruce Weigle is so far out of my league I couldn't even begin to copy him.

However I am in the process of making a town for my 8mm Adlers. Just like Mollinary I was not satisfied with the look of a cluster of 5 odd houses on the table supposed to represent a town. So I gave a thought or two to what exactly makes a town on a gaming table. I haven't got any pictures, besides I only finished 3 of the 14 houses I planned so a piccie wouldn't help much anyway. But I looked around for some to give you an idea of what I meant. Lo and behold, on Will's Wargames Blog I found a pic of a medieval town that sums it all up for me.



It's only a small grouping of houses, but already they make a convincing town because:

1) the houses are closely together
2) you can't see right through the thing
3) the houses are two or three storeys high, thereby 'dwarfing' any same scale model soldiers

For modern towns I would add two more things; the mentioned twist in the main road + at least one cross-road.

Now I am as willing to learn as the next guy, so I would love to hear and see pics from people with other views. Scenery rulez, man. Interesting thread.  

Cheers,
Aart

EDIT
Here's another one from Will's site. Now that is a town.

[mollinary]

Hey Aart,

    I don't think we have any real difference of view here, merely different compromises to make - and I think they are different in 6mm and 10mm.  They boil down to ground scale and table size.  For Gravelotte St Privat, we had a table 16ft long and 7ft wide, but it needed to fit 7 villages (no towns really, Gravelotte at the south end of the board is the largest, but it is still only a village in 1871) and 7 fortified farm houses.  At 10mm building scale they take up a lot of ground, so the only viable compromise I could see was 6mm buidings.   Play a large 6mm battle on the same table, and although you use the same buildings they would meet your visual requirements better. Curiously, I have been lucky enough to get to know Bruce Weigle over the last few years, and to drive him around Bohemia, southern Germany and northern France looking at battlefields.  I agree a thousand per cent with your analysis of his work on terrain, his battlefields are simply unequalled - but even he admits that his buildings are 20-30% undersize.  When you see the field overall this does not look at all obvious, but close ups around the edges of some of his villages do show guys whose heads could look into the bedrooms.  That said, I still think he is the best out there.  Another compromise I make, but I think you would be unhappy with, is I like to make sufficient space to allow troops into the villages with their feet/bases still on  the ground (although not all the players in the big game used it!). This means quite wide streets and gardens. The thing that destroys the image for me is bases standing on walls, or floating across the top of cornfields!  Agree with you, interesting thread .

Cheers,
Mollinary 

[Aart Brouwer]

Hey Mollinary,

indeed, this thread is getting interestinger and interestinger. 

Bother me sideways, so you've actually walked beside Him, and spoken to Him, and He to you? Must have been a very pleasant outing. I once did a tour of the western WWI front with a good friend and I still cherish the memory. In your case, collecting the words directly from His mouth during such a tour must have been quite an experience.

I'll admit I never noticed the slightly smaller scale of His buildings, but since you pointed it out I see the same bits and corners of His townscapes where the difference becomes obvious. That gives me some serious food for thought. Though I would still maintain that the 'towniness' of his set-ups is due to the specific composition with twisted roads and such.

Tell me, did He ever elaborate on his choice of houses? It occurred to me that his scratch-build houses are all more or less similar in size, build, colour. Maybe this has a particular visual effect as well.

Cheers,
Aart

[mollinary]

Aart,

     Yes, the trips were good fun.  I think the "towniness" of his stuff is also something to do with scale. At the smallest scale, my eyes tend to get drawn to the town as a whole, rather than the individual buildings, and at 6mm -25% scale they do not have an obvious vertical dimension which is out of scale with the horizontal ground scale. So they sit IN the scenery, rather than ON it. Bruce's buildings are multi purpose, and are not permanently attached to his terrain. Most of them get re-used again and again on new boards. But what makes the difference for me is his habit of producing some individual/iconic larger buildings which set the context of the battle. Churches in particular do this very well.  I don't know if you are familiar with Bruce's YAhoo Group "1870" to support his rules?  Debates about his terrain and buildings turn up regularly, and he has added  a file setting out his techniques.  Worth a visit.

    My final (probably!) take on this is that my concern is mostly focussed on the look of the table as a whole, that it looks like a battlefield covering some Kms.  Taking in the bigger picture, the scale of individual figures against buildings drops out of sight, and you are looking at scale of clusters of buildings, units, hills, woods etc.  If you then take close up photos of the buildings and figures, you are not really looking at the most important dimension for me.  MY problem with larger scale buldings is even if you have a relatively small ground scale of 1" = 25metres, then your buildings are some 50metres tall! Somewhere, in all our battlefields, we have to make a compromise.  This thread has helped me to recognise why I made the ones I did!

Cheers,

Mollinary

[Aart Brouwer]

Mollinary,

you are absolutely right about the necessity for compromise. And I understand why your scale choices enabled you to lay that superb table for Gravelotte St Privat. If one of these days I put two pingpong tables side by side for an 8mm (Adler) scenario with several build-up areas and a lot of 'space' in between, I will certainly emulate your style and give priority to the bird's eye view. For smaller set-ups with close battles in towns, however, I think I will still prefer the lay-out I mentioned with slightly oversized houses. Anyway it's given me a lot of food for thought, thank you very much.

I think your Gravelotte table makes it clear that love of scenery is not merely an exercise in visual nit-picking or hyper-aesthetics. It reflects one's love of detail, of nature, of colour, human habitation, the patina of history that gathers on a landscape - in short: love of life. I have no doubt that you will agree, and some hope that even He would agree if He ever visited this humble forum.

Cheers,
Aart

[Leon]

...if He ever visited this humble forum...

He would be very welcome!

[Steve J]

I made some desert buildings a couple of years ago to scale for use with 15mm figures. Although they were completely accurate scale wise (I am a professional modelmaker by trade) they simply looked too big on the table.

Having seen some of the Timecast buildings that we used for the SCW game at Colours up close and personal, they were definately smaller than 10mm when figures were placed next to them. But more importantly, they looked right on the table, which to my mind is the most important thing.

So ultimately, I think it is important to go with something you feel happy with on the table. Hope this helps.

Steve J.

[Aart Brouwer]

Mollinary,

we're probably going to lose some readers who do not consider our subject as vibrant and exciting as we do, but so be it. 

I have joined the yahoo 1870 group and read some of the good stuff, including Weigle's file on building construction. He states that His building scale varies from 1/350 to 1/450. The 1/350 ones would be the same scale as the H&R figures he uses! Remember that these are not really 6 mil but actually 5 mil. Only the 1/450 houses would be distinctly smaller. But then Weigle adds some lines on his 'mass effect':

[...] all the detail that you include assumes an exaggerated importance because your viewers aren't expecting to find much detail at all. [...] Remember that your viewer isn't primarily looking at the buildings... They just have to look sufficiently realistic to not be embarrassing.

Weigle calling his cityscapes 'not embarrassing' would be the understatement of the year in wargameland. 

I think I have just found the sort of compromise that might suit me: some buildings of the 'proper' scale, some slightly smaller buildings, the whole group massed and laid-out in a tight and somewhat skewered formation along a twisting road or two.

My planned 14 houses might just do the trick, or I may have to add 4 or 5 slightly smaller ones. I have the feeling I'll be coming back to this subject..

Cheers,
Aart

[fred.]

Good discussion.

I think the whole relationship between models of buildings, real towns and ground scale is both interesting and complex.

One of the biggest compromises is do you want streets that can fit based figures on? This then leads to hugely wide roads, and the ability to see straight through a "town".

I have been slowly putting together an Arnhem bridge board, and went with 1/300 ground scale. I've used  a variety of commercial houses, but for some I have scratch built I went for mixing the ground scale of 1/300 with a vertical scale of of 1/150.



More photos at http://www.kerynne.com/games/ArnhemBridge.html

There is enough space for manoeuvre here - but there is still be problem of where to put stands representing troops in buildings - the floating on the roof looks rubbish - but is easy.

Then there is the opposite problem on most game boards of trying to represent a village or two separated by a couple of kms of ground. The photos you have provided give a good look of a village - but I'm not clear how the figures fit into the village?