"15mm Buildings" Topic

Where is best place to get some buildings for 15mm Civil War?

Stone Mountain do some nice ones, as do Musket Miniatures

I've always been happy with the quality and price of the resin buildings by JR Miniatures, but there are a number of good manufacturers out there. If you're in the UK, Hovels might be a cheaper alternative, and if money is no object, you can even buy them painted.

Don't forget paper models too. Start with Paper Terrain good service and nice products.

BTC has been my primary source for years. He carries or carried most of the popular lines.
VR
James Mattes

If you are looking for resin buildings our line is available. We have added the Gettysburg headquarters buildings. Also, a wide variety of fences, bridges, crops, earthworks, etc.
Jim McCarron, musketminiatures.com

Buildings in Turmoil's line of Gettysburg buildings work very well for both 10mm and 15mm.

Please check out our full line of Gettysburg buildings. bnturmoil.webs.com
We all carry a couple of generic Civil War era buildings. I will be continuing work on many Gettysburg buildings that have not been done before. I just finished the mold for the Codori house, and the Codori barn will be completed within a week. Then on to the Klingle farm, while proceeding with my plans for the Lutheran Seminary.

John
bnturmoil@yahoo.com

If you want buildings that are basically the same size get the 15mm Musket line and the 15mm Hovels. These are 2 large lines and together will give you well over 20 buildings.

I think the JR miniatures are 10mm buildings and much smaller than the above 2. The Buildings in Turmoil look to be closer to 10mm and would probably work well with the JR buidings. I have neither of these lines but had some JR in the past.

Here is an example of a couple of our buildings next to 18mm Blue Moon Miniatures.

I'll second Scott Mingus' post. You can't beat the quality and selection from Buildings in Turmoil. I've picked up everything they currently offer and cannot wait for the new stuff!!!!

The buildings in the photo above are nice (I have a set) but they are closer to 10mm not 15mm. Also, it was mentioned above:

"I will be continuing work on many Gettysburg buildings that have not been done before. I just finished the mold for the Codori house, and the Codori barn will be completed within a week. Then on to the Klingle farm, while proceeding with my plans for the Lutheran Seminary."

Not sure if you meant to suggest the examples you listed hadn't been done before, but the Codori house and barn and the Lutheran Seminary have all been made previously. They were originally put out by Scenic Effects in the 1990s but went out of business. Monday Night Productions is selling some of the pieces Scenic Effects used to make. The Seminary is one of them, as are the Codori buildings.

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and

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Scenic Effects used to make the Trostle farm house but the molds were lost so that one is no longer available and is in high demand, and strangely enough no one has done the Trostle barn to go with it. I've considered making the Rose farm and barn myself since they are the most prominent buildings other than the Trostle farm in that part of the battlefield yet no one has ever offered them. They would be fantastic for Wheatfield, Rose Woods and Peach Orchard scenarios.

As for finding buildings it never ceases to amaze me how many folks sell terrain for use in ACW 15mm games at convention flea markets. That is my best place to find buildings. I have built up a collection of over 50 buildings and enough small out-buildings, fences, wells, hay piles, etc to fill an entire layout. And nearly all of it has been well painted and ready to game with at flea market prices. Granted you can't really plan for a scenario by trolling flea markets for a year or two looking for pieces that show up, but if you have time and a little patience you will likely be rewarded with some excellent finds to build up your collection of Civil War buildings and farms.

jpipes, Yes, the buildings are closer to 10mm in scale. I play in 15mm and like many others that I have talked to, like the smaller scale so that they don't take up as much room on the gaming table.
And because they are smaller, I also want a similar scale for the Codori farm and Lutheran Seminary. You must must not have seen my site in a while. bnturmoil.webs.com I completed the Trostle house and barn a while ago. Here they are.

The Rose Farm is definitely on my list also!

If you ever do any of them in 15mm I will be first in line to purchase them! I understand about wanting your buildings to take up less space, but there is something odd about the men in my units being taller than the first floor of the building they are standing next to…

I loved the Scenic Effects buildings. Though listed at 15mm they were actually more like 20mm. They fit in perfectly with Musket Miniatures HO scale ACW buildings.

They are what some folks call large 15mm. They work especially wonderful in regimental scale games.

It's the old ground scale versus figure scale problem. Either you have to shrink the buildings or they end up taking up far more space then they should unless you're portraying units at 1:1.

If you have a 15mm scale building that's 3 inches along one side, and your units are regiments of roughly 20-30 figures (representing 300-400 men) and they only have a frontage of 4-5 inches, that would make the building hundreds of yards long.

If the actual building is 40-50 feet along one side, in order for it to match the unit ground scale, it would have to have one-inch sides but be 3 inches tall to match the figure heigth! They would all look pretty strange…

That is assuming that buildings have some critical factor in the rules you are using, such as block line of sight or can be used as strong points or something. Assuming that isn't the case their relative size isn't as big a concern. This is doubly so because most farms and houses consisted of a series of buildings and smaller barns, outhouses, pens, stables, etc. Having a single barn represent the entire farm complex is an easy and simple solution to the concern about scale distortion.

Your math doesn't add up either. Regiments weren't hundreds of yards long in the civil war. How would a regiment that is 4-5 inches long next to a 3 inch building make that building hundreds of yard long? In many cases single unit frontage was the same or just shorter or just longer than typical barns on the field.

The Bucktail regiments of Stone's Brigade around Mcpherson's Barn at Gettyburg on the first day are a good example of this. They were deployed in front of and to the side of the barn and overlapped it on both sides. Using a standard 1x1 base and units with 5-8 bases per formation I am able to replicate nearly the exact same unit-frontage-to-barn-ratio as depicted on maps of Stone's Brigade on the same spot. Add in the previously mentioned fact that buildings don't effect much in the rules and they can represent so much more on the battlefield than just a single structure, the fact they match the figure scale as well is simply a nice aesthetic bonus.

Quick math here on the ground covered by a regiment. Assuming 400 men for a reduced-strength regiment deployed in two ranks, men standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Each man takes up roughly 2 feet, so that's 2 men for every 2 feet. 400 men would be 400 feet or 133 yards. A larger regiment of 600 men would be 200 yards.

At Gettysburg, probably the largest Confederate unit was the 26th North Carolina, with 843 men. Placed in a line formation, it would have taken up 280 yards.

At Antietam, one of the largest Union units was the 125th Pennsylvania with over 800 men. It sustained casualties of 229 men at that battle, and like the 26th NC would have covered a very wide front when in line.

McPherson's Barn link is 61' x 40.6' or roughly 20 x 13 yards. Even a very small regiment of only 200 men (66 yards wide according to above calculations) would overlap it on both sides by a more than the width of the barn.

The barn, even considering any outbuildings would be dwarfed by a Brigade, and should probably barely be considered for that level of gameplay. But they look nice, so just for aesthetics you could add a few 10mm scale buildings to dress of the table with.

firstvarty1979, I was thinking the same thing!

Great info, thanks for posting. I can see how this would be a concern at the brigade level, or in a game with a ground scale making regiments fairly small, but certainly using something like Regimental F&F with so many stands it becomes far less of an issue. I also again point to the fact that very infrequently do buildings actually impact the rules and it's critical to not forget how much other stuff they represent when on the table. The McPherson farm was actually very large and consisted of multiple barns and other buildings. Having a single barn in their place seems like an acceptable compromise.

Having a single barn represent the entire farm complex is an easy and simple solution to the concern about scale distortion.

I'm not saying that's wrong. It's just a different way to look at the situation. It's an interesting perpective to me, because it is a distortion itself for a single barn to represent a farm. If you're going for a realistic looking effect, I would take the multiple smaller buildings, which from a distance is not really that noticeable.

I once saw a 10mm civil war game with very very small buildings. The height of them was no bigger than the figures themselves, but it was an extroidinary visual effect. That is when it hit me that smaller buildings work well. But to each his own!

The McPherson farm was actually very large and consisted of multiple barns and other buildings.

Unfortunately, the others are all gone now! :(

The Klingle Farm is a good example of a more intact farmstead.

Having a single barn in their place seems like an acceptable compromise.

I Agree!

And speaking of farm buildings at Gettysburg and their impact on that battle, I found this a while back, and it's an excellent description of how one little fight could have big consequences.

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