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So I am going to take the plunge into 15mm models. I have painted 20,25 and 28mm before but never this small.

I am looking at doing 2 armies to start with.

Army 1. I would be doing a Roman mixed Auxiliary Cohort

Army 2. would be something to battle against this. My initial thoughts were Britons, but i'm not to fussed, i'm slightly tempted to do Parthians.

My question are these

would 15mm be okay to do cohort sized battles without taking up a massive amount of space?
even if this was possible what is a reasonable price for 15mm models
where can i get these from that look good. Anything I have seen looks like it is lacking so much detail it looks like a kid has sculpted it. I know there will be a lot less detail at this scale but surely better than what i have seen.

If by cohort you mean around 480 men, I think you'd have a rough time fitting all those models onto even a big gaming board (painting that many guys would be a hefty task as well). But I don't know, maybe it's doable. I have a hard time intuiting how many models will fit comfortably on a board.

At my flgs some guys play Hail Caesar at 15km pretty regularly, and I have seen a whole range of different armies that have good models. I don't know the manufacter they use, but I know there is a diversity of good historical models in 15 mm scale. Even at that scale, I'm pretty sure hese guys play representatively....I'm not sure what they use as their ratio between models and how many men one model is supposed to represent.

If you live near a hobby shop it might be worth it to visit and ask if there's anyone there playing 15mm historicals, and find out how they do it.

Good Luck! (Next time I visit my flgs, if I remember I'll ask how they do it. These guys are almost always there every time I go in )

If you're going to be building two armies where 1 man = 1 man might I suggest going down to 6mm? At that point a normal 6'x4' table should suffice, your armies will be significantly cheaper to build, and painting that small can be done ridiculously quick (block painting for the win at that scale!)

Not to mention, I don't think that 6mm armies look bad on the table at all...

You need to get an idea of the rules you want to use. It sounds like you want to do a sort of very large skirmish game. Do you want individually based models? Most Ancients rules are for mass battles, with one stand of figures representing a fairly large number of men.

If you want to have more figures on the stands, you can use the size stand for a larger scale, and put more than the specified number of smaller figures on it. For instance if the 28mm stand requires four figures, you could probably fit eight or 10 figures of 15mm size into the same space, or even more 6mm figures. If you drop down to 2mm figures you probably can do 1:1.

As you are building two matched armies it doesn't matter if your figure scale and basing is different to most other people's armies.

15mm figures are widely available for practically any Ancient army your can think of and some more besides. They typically come in packs of 8 infantry, 4 cavalry, or 3-5 command. The cost of a pack is usually about £3 depending on manufacturer. There are also chariots, elephants and various artillery, that are priced individually.

A good way to buy complete armies is the "army packs" done by various manufacturers. These bundles are a bit cheaper than buying all the codes individually, and give you a realistic selection of figures that you can add to with individual packs to tailor your list.

Note that army packs for DBA are cheaper and smaller than army packs for dsay Field of Glory, because it is a smaller, fast play game and uses fewer figures.

My play group picked up FoG: Renn to try and while we were contemplating scale, we quickly discovered that 10mm gave serious cost savings over 15mm. Going with 10s I managed to pick up two 900+ point armies (Poles and Turks) for FoG for about $200. Just one of my armies in 15mm would have cost about that much or more due to the amount of cav in each force.

Thanks for the feedback guys.


6mm although cool I think is a bit too small a scale for what I am after. I’m trying to get a balance of realism in terms of numbers (as in cohort size rather than legion) but still be large enough that the models have some detail to them and not just look all identical.

I’m looking at battle rather than skirmish and I would most likely be basing them together not individually so would likely but 8 to a base.

I might have a look at 10mm as I am looking to do 1:1 if possible without having to use a massive table size. I might have a look at the army packs, however im being difficult in that I want to run a roman army, but as its only cohort size I want it to be representative of a mixed auxiliary cohort which could have been posted into an outpost on the far ends of the empire

10mm only allows a smaller table if the rules use a smaller base size. In my experience, rules that use 10mm figures, such as Warhammer Historical Warmaster, generally use the same base sizes as 15mm and put more figures on each base.

DBA allows a 15mm army to fight in a two feet square area. DBA armies are smaller than most Ancients mass battle rules, but you can expand a DBA army into a larger army just by buying more of them. There is even a "big battle DBA" which is basically triple the normal DBA.

See Fanaticus.org for more info on DBA.

http://www.fanaticus.org/

You could just take a Roman list from DBA, delete all the Legionary units and replace them with more Auxilia and Psiloi.

My group just took up Hail Caesar at 15mm, halving all ranges and movement distances.

It works surprisingly well.

I liek the romans and parthians from this range

http://stevebarbermodels.com/

has anyone used these before and if so can you confirm if they are okay, and how do they fare with mixing from other companies, size wise.

I think I will be going down the 10mm route and will slowly build up a full mixed auxillary cohort, and convert some ballistas as well to go with these.