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Particularly: Why are there two scales?

10mm vs. 15mm

I dont see many 10mm armies around, i think 15mm stuff came around because people liked the extra detail, but 10mm is great for early periods where you want hundreds of models.

Also certainly in the UK 20mm historical wargaming is popular, alot of support in the way of 1/72 / 1/76 model kits and its cheap as hell to start.

malfred wrote:Particularly: Why are there two scales?

10mm vs. 15mm

Why not?

10mm has the advantage of being close (but not quite) identical to the n-scale railroad stuff, allowing a lof of use of cheap plastic terrain. (My biggest problem here is a lot of the N-scale terrain available in the US is a sort of "old fashioned Americana" theme that doesn't work too well for a lot of sci-fi. There's some good Japanese kits, though, as well as random pieces like quonset huts that can be adapted.

10mm is a relatively recent scale -- it didn't exist when I started figure wargaming (early 80s.) 20mm was popualr in the 60s and 70s then became used mainly for moderns, since it matches 1/72 scale kits fairly well. It has started to make a comeback for other periods.

That said, the fact is that 15mm has tended to inflate to 18mm, and there is an intermediate 12mm scale now, though very few ranges are available.

There are enough 10mm ranges to do most of the popular Ancients armies.

List of available wargame figure scales in metal:

2mm
6mm
10mm
12mm
15mm
20mm
25mm
28mm
28mm (heroic)
54mm

In plastic:
1/72
1/35
1/32

Pendraken has been doing 10mm everything for a while now. Not sure why it has recently caught on. Warmaster is 10mm, and the Warmaster Ancients features a bunch of 10mm figs in the photos. 15's were king for a long time as an alternate to 25mm and get that 'massed troops' look or as a cheaper alternative.

15mm is still king in the UK. I don't think either scale will drive out the other. My Ancients are all 15mm or 25mm but I have considered a 10mm army for Warmaster.

10mm allows you to put twice as many figures on a common base size (the base size being derived from the immensely popular DBx series of games) to produce more of a mass effect.

Warmaster Fantasy by Specialist Games is in this scale. While WHF is a skirmish battle, Warmaster is army scale, and it fits onto the same table.

The general reason for variable size figures is a combination of table size and scale. 40K is really in the wrong scale for futuristic sci-fi battles, since even a leman russ would be able to shoot a distance the size of a gymnasium if it was shooting "to scale". To many, this looks silly or "doesn't feel right". Therefore 40K Epic is around and has adherants b/c it "feels more real".

It's one of those "tastes great - less filling" sorts of questions.

a.

All of my fantasy armies are 15mm.

40k in 15mm would be great, but it's hard to find the miniatures with the right amount of gothic/scifi in them. Most 15mm scifi is "hard" or near future.