Scale 3: Hex Maps Versus Tabletop Terrain

Carrying on a bit late from the first and second part of this articles, I'd like to conclude my musings for the time being. For me, there are three basic things that one can do when, for instance, when playing BattleTech using miniatures on a tabletop with wargame terrain:

1) Change the size of the area fought on
2) Field more models
3) Change the range of the weapons. 

Area

Using a smaller table is by far the easiest solution that comes to mind. Playing a game on a table top of 2' x 1.5' offers little advantage over using the map boards of the same size. However, making the table larger means that you will probably want to have more models on the table, otherwise four mechs per side tends to look a bit lost.

More Models

BattleTech combat tends to slow down as you add more models. So much so that I wonder whether there is much to be gained from the effort required for the work to set everything up? You need an awful lot of time and patience to play a very large game of BattleTech. So if you want to field more  models you would need to streamline the rules to allow a quicker resolution for each turn.

Weapons Range

Altering either the ground or time scale appears to offer some hope.

Changing the time scale will increase the movement distance, but not the weapon ranges. Whereas changing the ground scale increases the weapon ranges, but doesn't alter the time scale.

However, this can lead to problems, as related earlier, with changing the emphasis of the strategy and tactics. It can all lead to the situation where either mechs race around the battlefield unable to hit a target, because they're not in range, or targets can be hit, but it takes so many moves to close that shooting has become far more effective than the original game designers intended.

If it takes ten turns to close on a target, each turn say is only 5 seconds long, then you've effectively doubled the weapon damage, since you are now firing the equivalent of twice per turn.

Conclusions

As  can be seen, from examining the the various factors above, the increase of space needed can preclude, for some people, the opportunity of having the ground scale the same as the figure scale, because every hex would translate to four inches. This would mean that a table would have to be 60 inches by 68 inches per hex map board.

This only leaves the time it takes to play a game and the scale time it is supposed to represent.

I think the ideal miniatures game would be one where the actual time to play was equivalent to the time the game turns added up to, where the ground scale were equal to the figure scale, and each model represented one of its kind. However, I wouldn't hold your breath trying to achieve this goal. The last point is one that we are unlikely to be able to resolve, so we will have to live with a compromise.

One out of three hardly seems a good batting average, but I think you have to remember the nature of what we are trying to do.
   

Scale 2: More About Scale

The trouble with using a ground scale smaller than the figure scale is that  models will be bigger than the terrain features. This is especially true of buildings that are in scale with the vehicles, because what appears by linear measurement to be quite large area often ends up as just enough room to fit three small buildings. Hardly the town it is supposed to represent?

Put another way, a village scales up as having multi level hovels!

On the other hand buildings to the same scale as the terrain will be dwarfed by the vehicles, and the problem is made worse in games like BattleTech, because the mechs already dwarf buildings as a matter of course. Then there is the problems of representing roads, rivers and woods when ground scale to figure scale generated distortion. At the end of the day it can all look ludicrous, and undermine the purpose of having the miniatures and terrain in the first place, which is of course to make playing the game easier and things look more realistic.
  
Let us consider the problems in detail and go back to our hypothetical 6' x 4' wargaming table. At 1/300 ground scale it is the equivalent to an area of 18 x 12 hexes, whereas a similar hex mapboard equivalent in 1/900th scale would be an area of 2' x 1.5'. Therefore a six by four table is similar to using four Battletech map boards at 1/900 ground scale, but only one map board at 1/300.

Now if we took the Atlas, with its auto-cannon 20, and placed it on the table at 1/900 ground scale the range of its weapon is 30 centimeters, but if you were to use 1/300th,  then the range would leap up to 90 centimeters. At the larger scale the Atlas would dominate the whole table with its 180 centimeters (six foot) diameter of fire, which would mean that the emphasis of the game had changed. The area to move in is such that all the combat is now taking place at very close range from the start, and this leaves no room for manoeuvre.

This would cast a different light upon the the types of mechs it would be advantageous to field and change the nature of the game.

However, using the 1/900th scale also has its problems. Since the ground scale is so much smaller than the model one, there are going to difficulties when fighting in and around towns, for reasons stated earlier. Also, our table has now become much larger which is not necessarily the advantage it first appears to be.

This is because play testing has shown that there is a relationship between the size of an area to weapon ranges at the sort of model densities which are fielded. Battletech slows down considerably when you get much above a dozen models on the board. The use of 1/900th scale on a six by four table means that the game will literally eat a dozen models, and you'll wonder where they've all gone. Most of the action will take place in the centre with everything milling around each other.
  

Scale 1: Scale Conumdrums

Setting a ground and time scale for a game allows one to calculate movement rates, and furthermore provide a frame work for the number of actions that can take place within a turn; whether it represents one minute, or one hour, or one day. However, one problem that emerges from this basic process is that table top wargames almost always end up with a discrepancy between the figure scale, the ground scale, and the time taken to play a turn versus the time the turn represents. This comes from the desire to have games that are not just small skirmishes, or gladiatorial fights, but rather play out large-scale clashes between armies.

In BattleTech for instance, the rules state that each hex is 30 meters across, and serendipitously each hex on the map board is approximately 32mm across the flat sides, which means that the ground scale approximates to 1/1000 scale ratio. If the models were to the scale of the map boards then a man would be around 1.8mm high, and a mech would be about 12mm tall.

For comparison, in OGRE/GEV the hexes are stated as being 1500 meters, or 4950 feet across. Now let me see that would make the scale of the vehicles, very, very tiny indeed. Quite clearly the models are being used as counters in this game, as they are much larger than the ground scale. Whereas in BattleTech the use of models makes it feels very much more like a miniature wargame.

Even so, we still see that the models in BattleTech are are three times larger than the ground scale. However, this is not unusual thing to see in table-top wargaming, as using a smaller ground scale allows the game to represent a larger area on a table. The traditional wargaming table is often six foot by four foot (1.8 x 1.2 meters), and the use of a smaller ground scale to figure scale often goes hand in hand with another concept of having a model represent a multiple of itself.

Still, one can see that there are quite a few problems that stem from any decision that changes the ground to figure scale.

When game rule really start to break down is when trying to represent fighting in cities with large numbers of units. This results from the disparity between figure and ground scale that  breaks the verisimilitude of the game.

Let's look at why this happens? Take for example figures at one three hundredth scale that are approximately six millimeters high, representing a man six foot tall. If you then play a game on our hypothetical standard six foot by four foot table, then you get an area of approximately eighteen hundred feet by  twelve hundred feet in size. Sounds enormous. It isn't, not when you think for a moment about how fast a vehicle that can move through it in under thirty seconds when travelling at a modest thirty miles per hour.

This is why the ground scale is usually smaller than the figure scale.

It's a typical catch twenty-two situation where the solution leads you back to the problem. Never more true when trying to fight in a built up area, as ground-scale comes and bites you on the leg like a demented pit-bull terrier.

One answer is to keep the disparity between the figure and ground scale to a minimum by using smallest figure scale possible, because this will keep the ground scale reasonable for the area you wish to fight over. The other answer is to write the rules so that the problem disappears as an abstraction. Neither answer is right, and neither is wrong, but when you have rules that try to account for everything, you end up slowing down the game, and that is a problem.
  

Little Big Mechs

  
There are several problems when converting playing a game of BattleTech on a hex board to playing the game on scenic terrain boards that are at once obvious, subtle, and often bogged down by hidden assumptions.

The obvious point is that very few terrain boards have hexes drawn over them, so you have to convert the movement point allowances of BattleTech into something that works with miniatures on an unmarked playing surface. This is not too hard, and there are various well established rules that have stood the test of time. Unfortunately the specific details will have to be changed, since they weren't written to represent mechs forty feet high.

However, the subtle problem is quite a fundamental one. Boardgames deal with hexes which are measures of area. Miniature games deal with linear distance.

Let me put it like this.

On a board, if two mechs are three hexes from each other, the nominal distance is ninety metres, but a mech is not thirty metres wide and could therefore be standing at one edge of the hex, as could the other mech. Hence they are nominally ninety metres apart, but potentially between sixty and one hundred and fifty metres away from each other.

Of course this doesn't actually matter in the boardgame, because the ground area is clearly defined by the hex pattern, so that there is no confusion over what is implied by the weapons range, and the players know that the rules are fair to both sides.

This is not the case with a table top game where such looseness would cause problems, so a measure is normally defined as the centre-to-centre distance between models.

The final problem is one that has weighed down the traditional wargame for years, as it makes underlying assumptions about the structure of a wargame. This is something that I am very concerned with. The lengths to which the arguments have gone have caused ructions amongst miniature wargame enthusiasts, and have been going on and off for some quite considerable length of time. Put simply, what do the models represent?