The Shape of Future Projects, Collecting and Gaming

[T13A]

Hi

The 'look' of a wargame has always been important for me (it's probably just coming up to 60 years since I got my first box of Airfix figures for 2 shillings). I like the table and troops to look something like what I am trying to portray. A small number of figures (particularly in the smaller scales) representing a battalion or what ever just doesn't do it for me. I have recently gone up from 24 to 40 figures (15mm) representing an ECW foot regiment because I liked the 'look' on a You tube video of a 'For King and Parliament' game. That said I am trying to concentrate on my favourite periods (to be honest I have never been the type of wargamer who flits from period to period and project to project) and use rules that have a good 'balance' (IMHO) between playability and realism (again IMHO) but importantly can be played in a realistic amount of time.

Just my tuppence worth

Cheers Paul 

[steve_holmes_11]

Why all the hate towards 28mm?

It's all fun and games, no matter which scale you know 

Probably two things:

The rational complaint is that the scale is too large for battle (as opposed to skirmish) games.
There are a number of practical reasons for that - Peter Berry from Baccus 6mm has produced a polemical piece on the "small is beautiful" theme.

https://www.baccus6mm.com/includes/news/28mmmyth.inc.php


I suspect the other one is a natural human reaction against a tyranny of the majority.
If you only attended shows, and bought wargame magazines, you could be forgiven for thinking that 28mm was the only size in town.
My google searches frequently reveal new manufacturers who don't feel the need to state the size of their figures (Hint - check the price, if it's between 4 and 6 pounds per figure then you're in 28mm territory)
I also recall the last 4 or 5 shows I visited were dominated by several large 28mm manufacturers (No bad thing), but then there were 3 or 4 times as many stalls that sold the same suppliers products.
Lots of shopfronts, but disappointingly little choice.
So you could characterise the fans of other scales as hipsters (avoiding the mainstream), luddites (resisting inevitable progress) or reactionaries ("coming over here, taking our games").


Sometimes the nonconformist needs to stand on the street corner and "Preach a little louder, brother".
This really should not fall over into hate, I think often the harsh words are said in jest, and with little consideration for how they're read outside the immediate company.

[steve_holmes_11]

So's tiddleywinks, but we'd be annoyed at the competition from them.

I think we would immediately fall into a "heated debate" about appropriate scales, painting styles, terrain and house rules.

[Raider4]

If you only attended shows, and bought wargame magazines, you could be forgiven for thinking that 28mm was the only size in town.
I also recall the last 4 or 5 shows I visited were dominated by several large 28mm manufacturers (No bad thing), but then there were 3 or 4 times as many stalls that sold the same suppliers products.
Lots of shopfronts, but disappointingly little choice.

Exactly my experience.

[steve_holmes_11]

Agreed. I'd always thought that was the only 'odd' thing about the way Pendraken do things (I think they do packs of 18 in the European Late Medieval range?). To me, packs of 12 figures would be perfect for the command packs, although I do get it may not be that way from Pendraken's point of view!

A minor quibble, in light of Pendraken's general excellence at all things.

Pendraken are quite happy to supply part packs.
It's not like Old Glory who want to sell you 50 Bren gunners (or none).

[FierceKitty]

...(to be honest I have never been the type of wargamer who flits from period to period and project to project)....

I am shocked...shocked!

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

I am shocked...shocked!

Well Felines do have a limited attention span ! 

[steve_holmes_11]

Well Felines do have a limited attention span ! 

And French captains are easily shocked.

[Chris Pringle]

I no longer aspire to building large armies and large units. I'm also attracted to wargaming on smaller tables. It's a comfortable way to game, doesn't require a fantastic amount of figures and can produce very entertaining games that can be played to a conclusion in 2 or 3 hours.

I'm not saying large, epic games will not continue to be played - of course, they will - but I sense that there is a growing momentum towards smaller games with smaller units and smaller armies. Does anyone else feel this way? If so, I wonder how that might impact on gamers buying patterns and how manufacturers should package their products in future. What are your views on the shape of future collecting and gaming?

Once upon a time there was no internet, nothing to do on Sundays, far fewer facilities or amenities of all kinds. Now the competition for our time and attention is much more intense, so people's available time (and space) for wargaming is more constrained. If a game took all weekend, that used to be a positive virtue; now, such longwindedness is mostly impractical. Hence the appeal of games that can be fitted into a 3-hour evening session on a modest table.

This was certainly a big part of the motivation for us in creating "Bloody Big BATTLES!" - we wanted to fight the whole of a big battle like Gettysburg, but to finish it in an evening, and without having to set out 5,000 figures on a basketball court.

I'm not a dabbler myself, but I think the many skirmish-type rulesets currently popular are attractive because the small armies required let people dabble in a wide range of colourful periods without huge investment of time or money.

So while the epic game will always exist, I do see the future favouring more concise games.

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
https://groups.io/g/bloodybigbattles
http://bloodybigbattles.blogspot.com/

[Leon]

Agreed. I'd always thought that was the only 'odd' thing about the way Pendraken do things (I think they do packs of 18 in the European Late Medieval range?). To me, packs of 12 figures would be perfect for the command packs, although I do get it may not be that way from Pendraken's point of view!

As paulr says, it's really due to the space in a mould and what we can fit in it.  If we put 15-18 command figures into a mould then we need a similar quantity of something else to fill the other half, which isn't always feasible depending on the range/period.  We could just put the usual 30-35 figures in there and sell them in 15's, but then you're either throwing half a spin away every time you run the mould, or keeping them as spares for a future order.  These days we have spares trays for that but we didn't have those for the first 20-odd years!

Some of the more recent ranges have had half-packs where we think there's a lower demand for that troop type, things like the Napoleonics, Indian Mutiny, ACW, etc.

[FierceKitty]

Not a personal concern here, but your SYW mounted officer with sword pointing forward is very dashing and animated. You did five regiments' worth for me as a custom job, but I suspect there'd be takers for a standard pack of them.

[FierceKitty]

Well Felines do have a limited attention span ! 

Ever seen a cat watching a mouse hole?

[Leon]

Not a personal concern here, but your SYW mounted officer with sword pointing forward is very dashing and animated. You did five regiments' worth for me as a custom job, but I suspect there'd be takers for a standard pack of them.

Which one's that?  Is it one of the officers from a cavalry pack somewhere?

[FierceKitty]

SYA 13  I think.

[steve_holmes_11]

Interesting stuff, I'd imagine many of us are facing the same issues - wanting to shoehorn more gaming into our schedules, living room tables and budget.

First up, the hobby space is exploding with skirmish games, elves and dwarves have recently been joined by small boats, sailing ships, stompy robots, tanks, ww2 figures and all manner of gang warfare.
Skirmish games tend to be aimed at 28mm (A good use for the scale in my opinion), have a low figure count, but require a lot of effort on the scenery side to compensate.
Rules vary between good and awful (a gimmick, some glossy photos and £30 for the rulebook - and then there's the supplements).
The limited nature of the forces mean that games are quick, you'l often get a "dud" with one side rolling a couple of criticals and it's over almost before it started.
When this happens it's possible to set up again and have another game.

I'm a lot more interested in reducing the time and effort required to put on a battle.
Reducing figure count and table size are an easy way to achieve this, but it doesn't work in all cases.

I believe the Rules hold the key to smaller and faster battles.
Some rules are designed for a "realistic" game, and resist all efforts to streamline a game.
Others lend themselves well to scaling down.

If you're wanting small units on a smaller battlefield, the following features will help.
* Simple streamlined mechanisms that don't depend on matters of millimetres for movement of shooting - if you're scaling down, then those hard to measure distances will become impossible to measure.
* One or few elements per unit, with minimal attention to drill and formations - there's a size below which elements aren't viable, so an easy way to shrink a unit is to use fewer elements, this tends to spol games that rely on element removal for casualties or strict arrangements for formation changes.
* Fairly limited interactions between units: things like 3 units in melee against 4, needing to know how many front rank figures are actually in contact, and over-literal interpretation of "in cover", and representing skirmish detachments all get tricky as the representation shrinks.

So a good set of rules will permit small battalions on one or a few elements, probably uses counters rather than stand removal to show casualties and doesn't get over-obsessive about small overlaps.


Once this is done you can concentrate on your army.
This is where personal taste comes to the fore, with a caveat that some units will look better than others in small numbers.
* Pike and shot looks a bit odd if the infantry are alternating pairs of pike and shot.
* Having a command group for every 3 element battalion can look a bit busy, it's often better to place the flags and drummers with just the senior battalion of each brigade.
* Some items like Tanks, elephants, chariots are usually represented singly, and it's tricky to shrink them further.
One way to compensate for smaller units is to step down a scale - replace those 28s with 10s or 6s and avoid some of the issues of small batalions.

My experience is that you don't get much of a game with a handful of formed units on each side.
Army (should that be regiment) break points are threatened by one bad morale test, and the game is over before it has started.
You want to retain scope for players to send an attack to a flank, deploy a reserve etc, and this requires a decent unit count - perhaps 8 minimum and 12 or a few more for a typical game.

Finally the issue of ground scale.
Smaller battalions imply a greater disparity between figure scale and ground scale.
* It's good practice to reduce movement and shooting ranges in line with battalion frontage, otherwise you'll find ultra agile cavalry and cannon enjoying the run of the field.
* Ground features, occupy far more land than intended - the city-block sized cottage.


At this point it's worth mentioning that grid based games like Square Bashing, To The Strongest, Blood Bowl have no specific scale.
The grid takes care of all measurement, so they should be among the easiest rules to shrink.



So far, it's all looked like bad news for Leon.
An exciting way to play games with far smaller armies.
And smaller armies mean smaller sales.

I'm here to say it ain't so, and explain why.

First up, gamers are gamers, and usually bloat their projects.
Westmarcher's initial post illustrates this in the third paragraph.
He begins contemplating a brigade of Austrian infantry, and quickly adds Grenadiers, Hungarians, Artillery (several types), Cuirassiers, Chevauleger, and I'm sure there were some Grenz and Landwehr in there too (if not there soon will be).

The smaller table does mean fewer figures in each battle, but the gamer knows that having a range of different figures on the "sub's bench" means that the next battle can feature a rather different force composition.
Variety staves off familiarity and boredom, maintaining interest in a game.

The other thing about gamers is the love of the new and shiny (even the best mate varnish cannot put them off).
If it takes 6 months to paint a large army, it will be a year before opposed forces are ready.
If a smaller army can be prepared in 6 weeks, you're ready to go in 3 months.
And when you enjoy those games you'll soon think about adding in some allied forces (OK this doesn't apply for the American Civil War).
Syracusans, Numidians and Spaniards can join the usual Rome Vs Carthage bust up - so you may end up buying more, but you'll be getting a lot more gaming.


So, to summarise:
* Shrinking a battle wargame does not result in a skirmish.
* Some rules are more shrinkable than others, and the key lies in the rules measurement, basing and casualty mechanisms.
* Keep en eye on the look of your units en-masse.
* Scale movement and range distances in proportion to unit frontage.
* Grid games are generally easy to scale.
* You'll get your armies on table faster.
* You'll likely want to collect extra armies.