Let's talk about scale

 I feel like this shouldn't be such a difficult conversation to have with gamers, but apparently it is. The discussion of proper use of scale in miniatures games.

As a gamer I live by a pretty simple creed: the bigger the battle; the smaller the miniatures. I'm sure I'm not the only persomn who feels this way, but I will admit that I, what with my limited space for stuff in my apartment, may fall on the more extreme end of the scale. To me, the moment a game demands I have more than a dozen or so dudes I start asking about the scale of the models being used. Now this isn't always the case, as I do play Grimdark Future at 28mm. generally speaking, though, I don't want to need a ton of 28mm+ dudes to play a game that could probably work just as well at 15mm.

And this isn't to say that 28-32mm is bad. It's just that that scale works best, in my opinion, for skirmish games with small numbers of models. Look at stuff like Relic Blade, MERCS and Bushido: these are all skirmish games with low model counts of usually between four and six models per side. Relic Blade and Bushido both play a 2x2 table, while MERCS caps you at five models and plays on a 3x3. And it works there. 

Where that scale stops working so well is when you want to do big battles. Games like Warhammer 40k being the most egregious offenders with not only large numbers of models on the table, but then needing large models as well. Again, I play Grimdark Future (the suprior alternative to 40k's drivil) at 28mm and yes I'm aware of that making me something of a hypocrite. But I stand by the fact that anyone who bought Apocalypse sized shit for 40k pissed their money away. 28mm scaled titans? Yeah, nothing about that sounds smart to me.

To continue on the Games Workshop bashing for a second, remember Warhammer Fantasy? Remember how in 8th edition it was giant units of 50 models and then single units of giant models? That was fucking idiotic, and just plain bad game design. Tables were sparsely decorated with terrain because you had units with front facings of 400mm in some cases. 

And yet we know GW can do games at the proper scale, as both 40k and Fantasy had properly scaled games in Epic and Warmaster respectively. By being 6mm and 10mm they could capture those epicly huge armies without it being a clusterfuck needing massive tables and an entire weekend to play three turns. And those games got shitcanned, and instead GW kept pushing bigger and bigger models into their core games because people kept buying them because...actually I don't know why. I guess because big = cool to some people?

And what kills me is that companies are still not understanding proper scale!

Lets take a gander at Conquest: Last Argument of Kings from Para Bellum Games.

This is considered a starting point

It's a mass battle, rank n' flank miniatures game. Now, they did mkae the right call in the newest edition to do away with the stupidity that is individual model removal, but there's something that doesn't quite come across in the picture which is the biggest flaw in the game. Those regular infantry models? 38mm. Yep, they made a game at 38mm scale. Not only is this bullshit because nobody else uses this scale (and this is something I meant to bring up in my previous post about proprietary nonsense), but it's jsut a nonsensical scale. And then you want a mass battle game out of it? 

Who thought this was a good plan?

But people love their giant models, I guess. Probably why I still see people asking when they're getting a fucking AT-AT in Star Wars: Legion.

Wait, what? You want this in Legion?

No, this couldn't possibly be a problem

let's do some math here, if you don't mind. According to Wikipedia, an AT-AT is 22.5 meters in height. Now, Legion is 35mm scale (god dammit, is anything in this game normal?). If we use a base 1.8 meters for the average height of a human male, that means that an AT-AT, to be in scale, would be the same height as roughly 12.5 dudes. That's 437.5mm if I'm doing my calculations right, which would convert to 17.22 inches. That's damn near 17 1/4 inches in height. That's insanely impractical as a gaming piece, not to mention it'd be closer to 18 inches in length. Even on a standard 6x4 table it would be nearly half as long as the table itself. 

And people think this is a good idea? If you want a cool AT-AT model just buy a model AT-AT that's not going to be bigger than some dogs. 

And if you think I'm being unrealistic with my math, consider this. In Empire Strikes Back we see an AT-AT step on a snow speeder. Now, we have a model of said speeder in legion already, so we can get a pretty decent account of the size we're looking at here.

And this may be slightly smaller than the game's scale

That model is on a 100mm base, and it takes up basically the whole thing. Now, here's a still from Empire of one being stepped on.

Crunch

So each foot of the AT-AT would be, roughly, the size of that speeder. And it has four of the fucking things.

"Just scale it down to fit the table better" I hear some hypothetical reader say, but then what's the fucking point? You'd have to scale it down so much that it basically stops being an AT-AT at that point and might as well be some original creation that just happens to resemble an AT-AT. 

And it's not just Legion that this comes up in, I've seen people say that they'd consider playing Battletech if it were 28mm instead of 6mm.

Now, Battletech is one of my all time favorite games, and aprt of what makes it work so well is that scale. At 6mm the game functions correctly, allowing big stompy robots on reasonable sized tables with tanks and jet fighters to boot (and infantry to step on like above picture).

So let's do some more math, using this official poster from Catalyst Game Labs to give us an idea of size. It's worth noting that Battletech has been crazy detailed about all sorts of things with the mechs, but one thign that never seems to be consistent is how big they should be. It actually bugs me a bit becasue you can tell me exactly how many rounds of autocannon ammo a mech can hold, but not how tall it should be? So this is the closest we have to anyhting officially giving heights of various mechs.

At least it's something?

According to this, and apologies if it's hard to read, the Atlas, canonically the tallest, non super-heavy, mech as far as I'm aware, comes in at 14.85 meters in height. So using our 1.8 tall meter human as a standard this thing would be about 8 1/4 people tall, which when converted to 28mm would be 231mm in height. That comes to just over nine inches tall. Again, not even sort of practical as a gaming piece.

But maybe I'm being a dick using the biggest mech, so let's look at the smallest mech on that sheet: the Commando. It's about 12 meters tall, and is the lightest classification of mech in the game. How big would that be in 28mm scale? About as tall one of these.

28-32mm pilot for scale (seriously, what scale is 40k these days?)

Knights are, from what I can find, between 9-12 meters tall, so a light mech would be roughly the size of a 40k Knight model at 28mm, and that fucker is on a 170mm base.

Being 6mm allows the game to have some breathing room, while letting the mechs be the focal point without getting into stupid huge territory.

This is one of those game design 101 things: scale matters. it's why By Fire & Sword works, because it's 15mm it allows for big armies and units without sacrificing the gameplay. Same with Flames of War. Imagine trying to play a game of Bolt Action that replicated the size of an army in Flames of War. You'd need a tennis court to play it on and still have room to move stuff around with any sense of tactics. Even Warlod Games, notorious for trying to do all history at 28mm, has acknowledged that sometimes you need to use smaller models to accurately portray big battles and started giving us their Epic Battles stuff.

Games insisting on being 28mm+ when it serves little practical purpose just baffles me. Sometimes it may be out of the hands of the designers (such as licensed games like Legion), but when it's an origial thing I just don't get it. Is it jsut because that's what GW does? Stop trying to be like GW, it's not worth it and you'll never likely pull in enough of their brainwashed, sunken cost fallacy spouting sycophants to make it worth it.

Scale matters more than some people seem to understand. Big models can be cool, when done right and used sparingly (see Bot War combiners), but when it comes to making a game the practicality of these items being pieces for a game played on a limited table space needs to be taken into consideration. If shit gets too big, it stops being practical and, also crucial, affordable. If Atomic Mass Games did put in a to scale AT-AT, you think you'd really be buying one? It'd probably be $1,000. Hell, the not to scale Super Star Destroyer in Aramada was $250.

And it's not even like detail of the models is an issue, you can get insane detail on 15mm stuff these days, and the Warmaster community is showing how detailed to can make even 10mm models with 3d sculpting and printing. 

I think that's enough for today, apologies for this being such a long winded rant but I really needed to get this one off my chest. So, my fellow consumers, jsut remember to think practically about games in the future, and how big they really need to be.