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.
  

7th Demi Brigade Légion Etrangère T&OE

Well now that at long last I have these babies painted it's time to organize them.

Originally I was thinking that all my Pan European Federation models should just be the 7th Demi Brigade Légion Etrangère, but a demi-brigade is just a regiment by another name, and I feel that what I will ultimately be able to field onto the table top is more like a full on brigade.

  

So, my plan is to use my GEV force as the armour core, along with infantry in their Seguro GEV PCs, as the basis of my 7th Demi Brigade Légion Etrangère. I will then add some LGEVs as the recon company attached to them.

All the Tanks, missile tanks and super heavies will form another regimental size force, which may be inspired by a French formations too. I know that the super heavies will be paying homage to the French Char 2c, and be named as such. I shall to research some French tank forces for inspiration.

Here is a picture of the next batch of models for my Pan Euro force, as you can see I have assembled my Fencer OGRE too. Whatever next? Will wonders cease?

Yesterday I received in the post my Warehouse 23 order that has another six GEV Seguro personnel carriers and infantry, six more LGEVS, and 72 Pan Euro infantry with support weapons.

So, I'm going to base up the infantry today, as these are needed for the Dragonmeet convention demo game I'm running on the 1st of December, which sounds like a long way away, but time flies and they need to be done in time. 

As a bit of a side project I've even gotten around to starting work on my Combine force, for those times when I need to support my OGREs, and gasp, shock, horror, probe... I've got my custom sculpt of the OGRE Ninja out to start work on finishing it.

This model has just sat around for years gaining dust, but now its time has come. The maturing phase is ending.

Finally,  it has arrived.

Oh, yes pure Combine Mk4 Ogre goodness. I can see why this was not put into production after the test models, because it's one enormous model, and size wise I can see the logic of not having a Mk4 that is larger than a Mk6. Anyway, I have plans. Muwuhahahaha...

NB: Since posting this I've renamed this force 7ème Brigade Blindée, just in case you're reading this and are confused by the two names.

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?
   

BattleTech Canon 3

  

As I have mentioned in the two previous posts I have after my jury service found myself musing on rules of law and playing with the idea of the consequences of having canon versus apocrypha.

One of the recurrent themes on the official forum is that Catalyst Games Laboratory is somehow moving the game back to its one true path, and that the things that happened in the MechWarrior Dark Age by WizKids will be corrected, and that the game will get back to its core values of being about hundreds of battlemechs swarming across battlefields conquering all before them.

Unfortunately none of this is true.

CGL has pretty much the same core of creative people developing the BattleTech franchise as when it was owned by FASA. The original creator of BattleTech owned Whiz Kids, and the current line developer has said on several occasions that while details might change in the new Dark Age, they will not be rewriting the future of BattleTech.

Furthermore, I would add that BattleTech the game has never been about massed battles, and while we see stories of the massed conflicts in the Inner Sphere, the board game as always works best at the small and personal level of a lance/troop/platoon per side. And there is a reason for that, and the reason is fundamentally embedded within the rules as they were originally written. Furthermore CGL seem driven to make that more so, not less so. Judging by the enormous rule books that they have published that go ever more into the minutiae of things to do with battlemechs when playing a game.

What I do is just ignore all the extra rules. Keep the game simple. Keep the game flowing along nicely. YMMV.
   

Traveller: Imperial Navy Crew

 

Another treasure trove of past work that I painted in the mid to late eighties. and the last of my 15mm posts until I paint some more figures. The above are a mixture from Citadel and Laser Burn that I used in my Traveller campaigns to represent the officers, and gentlemen of the Vilani/Solomani Imperial Navy.

Dress whites says it all, and of course there has to be a lady for the Admiral to escort to functions where the players would be trying to run a scam, or fulfill a contract, as part of the campaign.

I always played these as British Inter-War Naval stereotypes, and the players use to hate the fact that they were treated as the low-lifes that they were. Fun times and games to remember.

Pure Citadel Traveller Space armour figures, which I used as Imperial Navy Marines.  If these arrived it was a signal that the proverbial had hit the can, and that the players were well and truly out of luck. 

I remember one memorable game where the players had split into two groups on board a crashed starship that had sunk under a methane sea.

One group was using the survivors as slaves to try and get off the world, while the other team ran a resistance group in the ventilation shafts. The game ended when the marines arrived, and past actions came home to roost.

And another mix of figures to represent the general crew players might meet when boarded, or on shore leave. Less formal situations for the latter encounters, though they might lead to bar room brawls of course.

Looking at these figures I think that the white uniforms could do with an ink wash to add contrast, but like everything else they will have to wait, as I have much higher priority figures to paint.

Traveller: Vargr Dogs of War

The dogs are back in town. These are Citadel figures, who did a lovely set of eight different poses for their set of Traveller Aliens. I had planned on doing up a whole platoon of these, but got put off by by the complexity of the Striker rules, and when BattleTech came along, moved my small unit combat allegiances to it.

However, with TooFat Lardies about to do an SF set, whose title is Quadrant 13, which has already been labelled as Tentacles by their eList members, I might well be tempted to start playing with all of my old figures.

Could use my Daleks too!

While writing this post I remembered I still had some other 15mm figures hanging around. What I found were a single Aslan, and Droyne, but that I also had three Martian Metals K'Kree too.

Very tempted to put these on the bench and paint them up. But that way lies the madness of having too many projects on the go at once.

Muwuha, ha, ha, ha...