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With the huge numbers of casualties and troops being thrown around in the fluff, are we to imagine that the average 40k battle is just one of the smallest skirmishes? Even apocalypse seems to be quite a small battle in terms of the numbers in the fluff, which sometimes include millions of guardsmen dying, and tyranid hordes without number.

So how does the average tabletop 40k battle compare to the average fluff 40k battle?

I generally imagine a normal 40k game as being part of a massive conflict, with the focus on one small section of the line being attacked or advancing.

At the local club one night, we had three tables in a row, each for a separate game. As it turned out after deployment, the three players on one side of the table were all CSM players, and the three on the other side were all SM players. It was more or less how I figure a 40k battle in the fluff would look like if you weren't focusing on one bit of it.

For the average size of 1500-2000, I've always considered it to be, primarily, one of the most important places of the battle. The tides of the battlefield are changed here and victories bring that side dramatically closer to victory. I think this is reasonable considering you can have the commander at the location (named character and the fluffy leaders that really shouldn't be at minor battles). That being said I sometimes think battles can be minor skirmishes or the remains of two armies duking it out desperately trying to catch a retreating target.

The difficulty was this game started as a skirmish game... and then became a large battlefield where the units you play are the deciders of the general premise (look at epic and imagine lots of troops running but they are too small to see for a conception of breadth). Because let's be honest. Having a large mass of tanks duking it out and the named characters and the DOOMSDAY WEAPON isn't really a skirmish

I always imagined a good board size would be 3x3 or 4x4, but that would be impossible for moving models around.

I also pictured the tabletop being a key objective needed to turn the tide of the larger battle.

anywhere that a names character turns up must be a major key point in a battle. this is sometimes why i prefer the nameless DKOK as its more likely that a conflict will happen without one of 50+ unique characters from the 40k timeline.

One important thing though is that battles concerning SM/CSM are extremely rare in the scope of 40K to begin with.
There aren't going to be 40 CSM facing off against 60 IG.
There would be thousands off guard versus thousands of traitors, and MAYBE a couple MEQ on each side who come in later, instead of charging up the field.

I think of any battle between with SM/CSM as the key point of a conflict that has been going on for a while, like has been said before.

The fact that you can field Space Marines in the first place would imply that the battles are for key objectives or whatever else. Even other forces in most cases wouldn't be fielding ethereals (Tau), Daemon princes, or Necron overlords unless there was something VERY special at stake for that skirmish (in most cases)

Heh. Theoretically you could do the following:

BFG game for control of space around the system and see how many troops get ot the planet. You could even do some kind of Planetfall mission to see what happens next.

Epic scale battles for the larger scale force movement of whole companies and regiments.

Any time in Epic scale where you get to a close range firefight take the troops involved and drop down to 40k to resolve the combat. Now given that a game of Epic may have several of these combats in each turn, it might take a while to play the whole thing, but it would be a more descriptive take on the whole process

Dont try to apply fluff to the tabletop game, it dosent work on any level. Most battles dont happen in the space of a football pitch, guns dont shoot 20ft, people dont use ICBMs on the front line, close air support wouldn't work in such a small space ect ect. The shift toward "big toys" like dreadknights and riptides makes it all the more ridiculous for what is meant to be a "skirmish" scale game, apocalypse scale games are better in that regard. Dont even get me started on the total lack of consistency when it comes to scaling the models. If you only looked at it in the very vaguest sense then yes the battles in 40k represent the pivotal engagements in a much larger conflict and even that is sketchy because the forces are always evenly matched.

To be honest as soon as they placed in named characters they ruined the skirmish.

Applying fluff to the tabletop isn't as hard as some people make it appear to be. It is merely a matter of "converting" abstraction into narration. A lot of weapons are, in their background, tailored to a rather close range - for example, las blasts have been said to lose coherence and thus power over long range due to particles in the atmosphere, and in general you could easily say that weapons shooting beyond their maximum range are just a automatic miss rather than the weapon lacking in power, just like a single attack must not be a single pull of the trigger but could incorporate the squad or character moving a little, peeking out from cover, yelling something to their comrades, and then giving off a few shots with their gun, all in the scope of a single dice roll.

I too have adopted the idea that the average tabletop battle is but an excerpt of the greater conflict. A single sector of a larger front (remember there were multiple beaches at D-Day?), one army's attempt to react to a flanking opponent, or the vanguard of two larger forces happening upon one another, or because one army is sending a raid to neutralise that ICBM that they've noticed getting prepped for launch. In the case of the Space Marines, it is even pointed out in their background that they operate chiefly by using their mobility advantage in order to strike at weak spots, so whenever the Space Marines find themselves fighting a numerically much superior force, something has gone seriously wrong!

If you want the bigger conflicts, there's a different game for that.

40k Battle Scale?

About 28mm.

Badum-tshhh


Kudos, sir. I actually giggled.

Yeah, so 40k scale is about 1/60. That means a 4x6" table represents a space of about 240 feet by 360 feet. For reference, that's 15% smaller than your average, non-grocery-store Walmart. That's the size of a parking lot in front of a movie theatre (or smaller).

40k battles are immeasurably tiny, especially compared to the fluff. While the planet may be roiled in combat all around you with millions of soldiers, your average 40k game is about the scope of you and your opponent fighting over a local bowling alley.

 Ailaros wrote:
Yeah, so 40k scale is about 1/60. That means a 4x6" table represents a space of about 240 feet by 360 feet. For reference, that's 15% smaller than your average, non-grocery-store Walmart. That's the size of a parking lot in front of a movie theatre (or smaller).

40k battles are immeasurably tiny, especially compared to the fluff. While the planet may be roiled in combat all around you with millions of soldiers, your average 40k game is about the scope of you and your opponent fighting over a local bowling alley.

That as may be, the scale gives a compromise between having nicely sized models that you have half a chance of painting and needing a board that doesn't take up most of the street to play on. If it makes it easier, the old Stargrunt rules used the abstraction that the actual soldier represented by the model was somewhere on the base, rather than being a colossus bestriding a tiny world. Of course that means that all scenery isn't to scale either, but when you get right down to it, does it really matter?

GW is written by writers with no military experience, no understanding of scale, and no reason to care. Thus you have minor skirmishes of a few thousand soldiers being declared major battles of uber epic pwnageness or whatever, when they're just laughably small scuffles compared to battles which involve millions on each side.

I mean keep in mind, this is the company that says there's a lower population in the entire Cadian System (with more than five planets!) than in the modern United States of America.

Already been many answers here, but, in Epic, which I also play, a single assault involving two or more formations is considered an entire game of 40k but is resolved in only a handful of dice rolls. So, as many others have mentioned, it's probably best to think of a game of 40k as simply one scuffle in a larger battle.

If it helps, any time GW quotes planetary populations, or the presence of soldiers (of any kind) in a theater of operations, just assume the Administratum clerk reporting that record to us made a multiplication error, and you need to add a zero (or two, or three...) to whatever is provided.

I prefer to think of the battle on the table as *the* battle. A small skirmish, scouting action, slave raid, or whatever.

Have always preferred the smaller scale myself though, but I think winning or losing a planet-wide battle with trillions of soldiers every Sunday is a bit much even for 40k

Hi!

Here, a blast from the past, when GW was open-minded, funny and tried some shot at cardboard wargame's world. If you look at the pics, you will notice that a whole Space Marine Chapter is represented by just a single counter -a powerful one by the stats, still- between fistfulls of them.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3177/battle-for-armageddon
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/174264/battle-for-armageddon

Even so, Armaggedon, which is one of the biggest war theaters in the galaxy, is not significatively bigger than 1944's Eastern Front. It's still tiny and should be, by it's size, just a footnote in the Imperium's military history.

As said above, the average 40k game should be viewed as the climatic peak of a bigger battle or as a specialized commando action where small elite forces try to achieve very significative tactical or even strategic objectives. Like in Guns of Navarone!