Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So, I've played Warhammer Fantasy for... a long time, about maybe 30 years or so.

And it's great! It's a fun, quirky game and we had lotsa fun over the years.

But there's one thing that always bothered me about it, and one which newer editions only managed to exacerbate, which is that by the very nature of the scale on the minis, a WFB army always looked... well, less as an army and more like kind of a small band of guys that are there to fight with another small band of guys. And for me, the new ToW base sizes kinda lean on more into that, as now they look more separated from each other.

Now, I remember back in the day that the game always said that the miniatures on the table were representative of whole armies, and that each mini was supposed to represent a bigger group of guys, like 3-5 guys per mini or somesuch.

I've been hearing decent stuff about ToW as a game, and what I've actually seen looks interesting, and seeing as now the bases are a bit bigger, that got me thinking: what if I put multiple, smaller minis on every base? That way you could still use them "rules as-is" but the physical representation would cater more to my personal leanings.

So, long story short, I ended up picking some Dark Elf Warmaster STL files, which I separated and upscaled at 150% to about 15mm scale and put 4 guys per mini, and it looks like so:



The above would be a unit of 15 spearmen with a full command group. And to me it looks fabulous. It looks like an actual regiment, hefty and big.

So I started painting it:



And at the scale the minis are a joy to paint: Warmaster minis have exxagerated details that work fantastic at 15mm, and they are very nice and easy to paint.

The end result of the full unit is this:




And a quick comparison with 15 of my old Cult of Slaanesh spearmen units, 15 to "15", with a movement tray for the old ones to make it fit the new base sizes.



I'm personally very happy with how the smol guys look, and now I'm thinking that I want to do a full 1.000 points army, see how it goes.

This would be a small mockup of what I'd like to do:



The already finished spearmen, two units of 10 crossbowmen, a repeater bolt thrower, 11 Black Guards plus a general, 11 Witch elves plus a hag and two units of 5 dark riders ^^

An awesome solution, though fiddly and time consuming! I merely think of the army pieces as representing an army, say 20 infantry per 25mm base. It makes a lot more sense than a 6x5 formation of soldiers marching around, 30 men isn't a unit!

Did they ever do a fantasy epic game?

BTW, Your stuff looks amazing, I am jealous of your talents.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Did they ever do a fantasy epic game?

You mean like Warmaster?

Yep Warmaster was the "fantasy epic" game of its day - its even the only time that Araby had a full army (even TW Warhammer doesn't feature them despite them having the full warmaster army).


The idea of armies being armies not bands is always something that 6-20mm scales have always been able to do better at than 28-32mm scales. Mostly because doing it at the larger scales becomes such a huge investment in money and time that most people just burn out. Or even if they don't it takes years to over a decade to achieve BIG armies.

It's why many of us are keen to see Epic and Warmaster as games back on the market because they create a very different dynamic. In a Warmaster scale you really CAN have a dragon set fire to whole squads of infantry whilst in AoS they might lose to only 20 spearmen.


I'd also say there's another aspect that the smaller scale game do better - support. 28-35mm games often feature very little in the way of non miltiary models. There's no camp followers; smiths (unless its a dwarf magic smith); attendants and so forth that would follow and enable an army to work. The supply train and so forth.

Smaller scales, because the models are smaller, can fit all those things on the table AND two armies and have room to actually play well.

Never heard of it, have to add that to the list of GW games I've never seen (including Man o' War and WH Historical).

Albertorius - how are you going to account for special freestanding units that are supposed to be one person?

Are you going to resize them too?

We could only be so lucky to have GW release a Warmaster tie-in for TOW the way they did Legions Imperialis.

It is a superb idea, as long as you like WH/The old World rules and dislike Warmaster.

RustyNumber wrote:An awesome solution, though fiddly and time consuming! I merely think of the army pieces as representing an army, say 20 infantry per 25mm base. It makes a lot more sense than a 6x5 formation of soldiers marching around, 30 men isn't a unit!

That was the official abstraction at the time, but as I said, it always looked a bit off to me, so... here we are xD

Lathe Biosas wrote:Did they ever do a fantasy epic game?

BTW, Your stuff looks amazing, I am jealous of your talents.

Thanks! And yes, as Cap'n Facebeard stated, Warmaster was the Epic equivalent. An absolutely fantastic system, too, which has spawned a number of games, inside and outside of the GW ecosystem.

Overread wrote:The idea of armies being armies not bands is always something that 6-20mm scales have always been able to do better at than 28-32mm scales. Mostly because doing it at the larger scales becomes such a huge investment in money and time that most people just burn out. Or even if they don't it takes years to over a decade to achieve BIG armies.

It's why many of us are keen to see Epic and Warmaster as games back on the market because they create a very different dynamic. In a Warmaster scale you really CAN have a dragon set fire to whole squads of infantry whilst in AoS they might lose to only 20 spearmen.


I'd also say there's another aspect that the smaller scale game do better - support. 28-35mm games often feature very little in the way of non miltiary models. There's no camp followers; smiths (unless its a dwarf magic smith); attendants and so forth that would follow and enable an army to work. The supply train and so forth.

Smaller scales, because the models are smaller, can fit all those things on the table AND two armies and have room to actually play well. I would only need to make the bases a bit more scenic.

Agreed, and good points.

Lathe Biosas wrote:Never heard of it, have to add that to the list of GW games I've never seen (including Man o' War and WH Historical).

Albertorius - how are you going to account for special freestanding units that are supposed to be one person?

Are you going to resize them too?

You mena like characters and the like? Basically the same: the important part is that they have the same base, so you either simply resize them and put the individual character on the same base, or you add a couple of bodyguards to the whole. The idea would be that 1) it changes nothing, base size and profile wise, so that you can play the game exactly as-is with no changes and 2) that it looks distinctive enough on the battlefield that you know what it is without issues.

For example, big guys like the general on black dragon or the war hydra? Well, we know that they need to be on 60x100mm bases, so... we can simply resize the Warmaster minis and put them on the base:



Same base size, same element, recognizable, and it will play exactly the same, given that in Warhammer height was usually not much of an issue, scenery wise.

chaos0xomega wrote:We could only be so lucky to have GW release a Warmaster tie-in for TOW the way they did Legions Imperialis.

Dunno, given how much GW has been fething the minis designers that kept Epic alive while they were faffing about, I kind of rather they didn't

 Albertorius wrote:

Dunno, given how much GW has been fething the minis designers that kept Epic alive while they were faffing about, I kind of rather they didn't

I mean what do you expect GW to do? Those mini designers aren't paying GW for the rights to copy their old model designs. Or to create unique designs to keep the format of that game alive. It's either copyright material GW owns that the firms aren't playing a licence for; or competing firms in the market that GW is in.


Honestly I'd love to see GW do Warmaster AOS. AoS has bonkers huge armies and events happening and there's basically titans in the setting. I'd love to see a Warmaster for that game since they could cover so much new ground for each army; and the world and setting!

Yeah, i dont have any sympathy for people who steal orher peoples ideas and try to profit off it. Thats the risk they took when they did so, and part of the game they decided to play. It comes with the territory, so to speak.

And I don't really much care about current GW's prices, policies and practices, to each their own I guess. I do actually like AoS's setting and ides, though, and I feel is much less derivative than WFB was, so that's good.

I can't really see neither Epic nor WFB "stealing" anything from GW for years and years when GW could not be bothered to actually do it itself. I would even say that those "thiefs" kept the interest in the scale, enough so that GW eventually saw profit to be made.

And WFB is so very generic that speaking of "thief" is... interesting, given everything GW itself "borrowed" form other IPs or from history itself.

Anyways, if GW ever does make anew Warmaster, we could expect that the same that happened with Limps will happen here: they will only support a small subset of their own setting (or just the new AoS stuff in this case) but will go out of their way to make sure that only that is available (not that they actually need to, mind, as GW is the 900lb gorilla and basically everyone would play with only their stuff anyways, but eh).

I mean it’s a skirmish game like 40K

But like 40K you can also just view it as a small part of a larger battle.

I like what you are doing.

Bretonians would be amazing at this scale, a sea of charging Knights.

I disagree that WHFB or WHTOW is a skirmish game. There is an implied scale (explicit in 6e, IIRC), of around 15 to 20 troops per model. Someone back in the WH Ancient days calculated this, based on the average frontage of a Roman legion, based on the ground scale of the game (determined by weapon ranges, & historical ranges). Obviously, there is some leeway here, & isn't exact.

So, your army of 75 figures can represent an army of 1125 to 1500 troops, particularly since the movement rules for WHFB resemble much more large units maneuvering, rather than individual warbands. Thus a small-scale mass battle game.

AoS is much more a skirmish game (with individual movement, similar to WH40K).

Warmaster occupies the niche of a large-scale wargame, of 10 to 15K troops.

Of course, if you CHOOSE to interpret WHTOW as a skirmish game, where your unit of 20 figures represents 20 guys, that's your choice.

Damon.

Pretty sure theres an old white dwarf article that made clear whfb (and by extension TOW) is 1:1 on how many troops each mini represents.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Pretty sure theres an old white dwarf article that made clear whfb (and by extension TOW) is 1:1 on how many troops each mini represents.

Just because some staffer at GW says it in WD doesn't make it sensible. I've always held that most wargames have a flexible concept of representation. Ergo heroes and leaders are 1:1 whilst troops, tanks and so forth are often 1:MANY with that many being fairly non-standard. I just can't see rank and file 10man units charging dragons to work 1:1. One breath of fire and those 10 warriors are going to be toast.

You can see this over time as the game grows and things like rank and file unit limits change a lot. Heck AoS 2.0 started with some very big 30-40man units and now cut them down to half that size on average. Meanwhile TW Warhammer has individual squads that have as many units in them as whole armies on the tabletop.


It's just not practical to say to people "yes you've got to buy, assemble, paint, transport and field 500 infantry per division on the battlefield

Pretty sure it was actually rick priestly or one of the designers that said it was 1:1 but... ok, weird flex but you do you

Equally, as I stated above, 6e WHFB was explicit in figure scale; it was in the book. I don't have 6e rules anymore, so I can't reference the page. But I distinctly recall it being in there.

So while Rick Priestly may say it is 1:1, other rules writers disagree.

Damon.

Lars Porsenna wrote:
Of course, if you CHOOSE to interpret WHTOW as a skirmish game, where your unit of 20 figures represents 20 guys, that's your choice.

It is! Because otherwise I'd just use cardboard tokens . Because, be that as it may what you said above? What it looks on the table? That's a skirmish. And we're playing a miniatures game for the looks.

WHFB and AoS? Look like a skirmish, whatever they are supposed to be.
Warmaster? Looks like a battle.

All there's to it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Pretty sure theres an old white dwarf article that made clear whfb (and by extension TOW) is 1:1 on how many troops each mini represents.

As I said above, I seem to remember them saying 3-5 guys per minis, but I can't really remember the source.

I am 90% sure the 5th edition said each model is 10 to 20 people.

If you want to go down to that scale I would recommend 3mm fantasy by Micro world Games.

 Albertorius wrote:
WHFB and AoS? Look like a skirmish, whatever they are supposed to be.
Warmaster? Looks like a battle.

All there's to it.

Not really, given units behave explicitly as very large formations. So which is "correct"? They look like skirmishing units but they behave like massed ranks. It's all just beardy semantics really.

Personally suspending disbelief about my minis representing larger number of units is easier to swallow than 18 bowmen standing in three ranks having to awkwardly wheel and shuffle around the board with limited firing and not being able to do anything about five wolf riders standing behind them.

 RustyNumber wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
WHFB and AoS? Look like a skirmish, whatever they are supposed to be.
Warmaster? Looks like a battle.

All there's to it.

Not really, given units behave explicitly as very large formations. So which is "correct"? They look like skirmishing units but they behave like massed ranks. It's all just beardy semantics really.

Seeing as we're talking about personal likes and dislikes... well, duh, yeah. It is ^^. There is no "correct". There is "this vibes with me" and "this does not vibe with me".

Personally suspending disbelief about my minis representing larger number of units is easier to swallow than 18 bowmen standing in three ranks having to awkwardly wheel and shuffle around the board with limited firing and not being able to do anything about five wolf riders standing behind them.

To each their own


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Samsonov wrote:
I am 90% sure the 5th edition said each model is 10 to 20 people.

If you want to go down to that scale I would recommend 3mm fantasy by Micro world Games.

A bit much for me,but I'm pretty sure it would look great too.

The smaller figures do look good. Ironically even 15mm figures are likely to have far fewer participants than an actual battle would, if we're talking the kind of numbers from historical battles.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Pretty sure it was actually rick priestly or one of the designers that said it was 1:1 but... ok, weird flex but you do you

Attempting to tie down WHFB to any particular miniature-to-soldier ratio has always been an exercise in futility.

If you want to believe the 1:1, you're basically looking at all battles being skirmishing parties accompanies by an unusual number of beasts/heroes/wizards/warmachines/etc. If you want some other ratio that has been mentioned, you're welcome to have at it, but none of them has been long-established as "the truth".

The same holds true for ground scale. Why are all these titanic battles being fought on a football pitch or two?

WHFB, AoS and 40k are Comic-Book Fantasy settings and games. Just embrace that, have a good time, and don't think too hard about it.
Leave fiddly un-fun things like Scale, scope, compression and realism to the historical gamers.

 Eilif wrote:
The smaller figures do look good. Ironically even 15mm figures are likely to have far fewer participants than an actual battle would, if we're talking the kind of numbers from historical battles.

The scale where you basically just end up with textured rectangles to represent units is certainly the only realistic one to use for 1:1 antiquity wargaming!

 RustyNumber wrote:

The scale where you basically just end up with textured rectangles to represent units is certainly the only realistic one to use for 1:1 antiquity wargaming!

You can do pretty well with 3mm or so. At that point your looking at tiny little points for people, but they can at least be recognized.

My preference for 28mm has always stemmed from my love of painting and wanting to actually be able to see the miniatures I spent so long working on while playing the game. So, I suppose I am somewhat biased against smaller scales, but the examples posted in this thread look quite nice. 28mm will always be the scale for me, but this thread has been enlightening.

 Eilif wrote:

 RustyNumber wrote:

The scale where you basically just end up with textured rectangles to represent units is certainly the only realistic one to use for 1:1 antiquity wargaming!

You can do pretty well with 3mm or so. At that point your looking at tiny little points for people, but they can at least be recognized.

I have about 2,000 individual 3mm Romans or Celts painted up and based. Ancient armies were typically 20,000 men plus, so I really need twenty times that number to do two armies at 20,000 men each. I've calculated that if I left no space between units, fitting them in as tightly as I could, each 3mm 20,000 man army would be ten foot wide by one foot deep.

Anyway, every scale has its advantages and disadvantages, but I would say that those 15mm dark elves are looking pretty good!