"Wargamers unite, Multiplicty of scale" Topic

I do not care which genre is your interest. Frankly my interest cover just about all the genre. What I am totally sick of is all the scales out there.

We have 28/25/20/15/10/6/3/2mm. There are miniatures made in each of these scales which I think are great but I am not going to buy into figures in all the scales. Come on, we would be fine with 28/15/6/3mm which is still, IMHO, too may scales. You can game:
Operational 3/6/15mm
Tactical 6/15/28
Skirmish 6/15/28

Is it not time to tell the manufacturers what scales we are willing to support as well as voting with our $$$$?

While this is a rant it is also a very earnest attempt to see whether gamers would like to see the multiplicity of scales reigned in. What is next, 30/18/12/8/mm?

Al

If they did this, how different would your life be?

Regards

I love the number of scales available! It gives me lots of choice as far as cash investment, painting time, and playing room. I think the market will take care of any scales that are not popular enough to be profitable.

I'll take them all. Nobody is forcing you to buy them. I actually prefer grand-tactical in 28mm, but I also buy 15mm for some periods.

Hey, if someone can make a go of it in what to me is a "weird" scale, more power to them.

Hey, if someone can make a go of it in what to me is a "weird" scale, more power to them.

Like 6mm skirmish?

:D

"what scales we are willing to support "
All of them. OK so not really but damn close. I have almost all you mention – no 2mm or 3mm but I do have 6mm somewhere… but I also have 1/72 and 1/76 which I see as different from 20mm or 25mm because the look is very different between plastic and lead. I like all the scales and I only really do skirmish. I love going to cons and seeing all the different sizes.

We already vote with our $$$, and the winner is: All of them.

Regulation of hobby industries is pointless and evil, not to mention impossible.

Regulation of hobby industries is pointless and evil, not to mention impossible.

Made me laugh … pretty much defines not worth trying, then: pointless, evil and not possible …

What's ironic is that Allen57, with whom I do have some sympathy, neglected to mention two scales/formats I am working a lot with at the moment … 30mm flats and 54mm.

Phil

You also forgot 40mm and 42mm

I used to care.
I don't any more.

I never cared, nor I will start now.

Do what you want. Let me do what I want.

By the way: why has been crossposted to the Need more Boobies forum? Of course, there are different scales for boobies too, but I can't understand how a rant against the scale of wargaming miniatures is related with that relevant part of the female anatomy.

Most 15mm's are actually 18mm's if you measure them to the top of the head instead of to the eyes. Taller if they are wearing elevators or high heels….

Didn't there used to be a 12mm scale? Is it still around or did it become a victim of the iron laws of the marketplace?

Grelber

Different scales for different periods and styles of games.
Dont like em dont use em, personally never understood why we all didnt stick to 20mm, the perfect scale lol
L

Given that a lot of WWII and modern is in 20mm I doubt you will get your wish.

I really don't care for regulation of scales. People knocking all these different things out has to be good.

Does it get figures on the table and folks playing? That's what matters.

This is one of the reasons I use paper figures.

I suppose there should only be several flavors of ice cream and I will assume of course that they shall be the ones I prefer.
Regards
Russ Dunaway

OTOH some better labelling would be good – manufacturers selling by scale rather than 'size'.

Regards

I have the same army in 6mm, 15mm, and 28mm .. what – you say one should be scrapped?

In another thread I started a few days asking how good is good enough? TMP link then this sort of question is being disccussed from a different point of view.

basically I was asking if other professional sculptors always aimed for ten out of ten and did their best artistically, or if in order to get work you had to pitch a lower standard for a lower cost so retailers could make money selling castings of your work.

A recurrent theme in the responses is that fixed costs (like sculpting) have to be spread over the number of unit sales made.

If a retailer has to break even on selling just 200 of a casting then every penny saved on sculpting makes a difference to retail price, even if it means accepting poor sculpts since the sale of something like a single 28mm figure casting may be having to carry any where from £0.50 GBP for a poor sculpt to £5.00 GBP of the origination costs for a great sculpt.

If a retailer can realistically sell 5000 of a casting, then the difference in cost to the end consumer per casting between an amorphous blob and an amazing work of art is likley to be less than £0.20 GBP.

If you get to mass production sorts of levels of big business selling tens of thosuands of units a year then the original sculpting costs become trivial and everyone can have amazing masterpieces at dirt cheap prices.

Everyone likes choice, but have we chosen "choice" over affordable quality? Would less scales actually result in any perceived gain by focussing more money and sales on idividual products, or would sales be just as widely spread, just over lots of manufactuers all offering notionally identical products, none of which they could afford to make to great standards?

It's called "choice" and it underpins the Capitalist system. There have been 2 large scale attempts to defeat this system in recent years. The Soviet Union folded back in the early 90's and went back to "choice" and the People's Republic of China, which actually isn't run by the people really, or only a very few people at the top, and then even they have gone back to "choice" in the last 15 years or so, cos it works!

Looks like "choice" wins for the foreseeable future – good thing IMHO, a lot of us still like it. :)

It's a non-issue.

As long as there are people willing to sculpt in scale x, people willing to produce figures in scale x, people willing to buy the miniatures in scale x, then what's the problem?

Going to a single scale would make sense if you're dealing with a growing market – if there are so few manufacturers that it makes sense for them to agree on some joint measurements so that all products can be easily combined and thus spark a bigger interest in the hobby as a whole. Then they would all benefit.

But we are dealing with a saturated market. In those markets, you see a lot of differentiation, so one can grab the attention of the customer which has only so much money to spent. New scales is just the same as new periods, new rules, or new types of paint.

Or why do you think there are so many flavours of Coke? Same thing.

"have we chosen "choice" over affordable quality?"

I don't see how anybody could draw that conclusion.

Pull out an old miniatures catalog from the late 1980s or early 1990s and check the prices, then use an Inflation Calculator to adjust them, and you'll see that for most manufacturers, in most scales, figure prices have held steady or even dropped.

Then compare that late-1980s figure with a 2013-sculpted figure, and tell me which one is better quality.

PS – the only time I'm bothered by "excessive" choice is when it becomes harder to find the product that I like.

For example, I've used Colgate regular toothpaste for as long as I can remember. In the past 20 years, toothpaste manufacturers have made so many minute variations of their product that it can actually be hard to find the "old regular" kind on the store shelf.

However, that is because the store has a limited amount of shelf space, and more variety means that they have to purchase less of each type, or forego certain types altogether.

That's not the case in buying miniatures, which come from a variety of manufacturers and retailers, and are mostly purchased by mail, rather than from a brick-n-mortar store shelf.

As it's often pointed out on TMP getting any kind of consensus from wargamers is like hearding cats and it just won't happen. However, I'm finding that in my own wargaming I'm starting to concentrate on just a few sizes to try and rationalise things a bit better.
I've decided to stick to just three figure sizes: 28mm, 20mm and 15mm. They are close enough to one another that some terrain items like trees or rivers can get multiple use but they still let me do different types of gaming. I'm dropping gaming in any smaller sizes except for aerial or navel stuff which doesn't really need any terrain and trying not to buy into new games like Drop Zone Commander which would require a new size.
All the best,
George.

I'd like to point out that 30mm was one of the first wargaming sizes, followed shortly by 20mm, 28mm is the newcome, a scale I've never been able to adopt or like due to the distorted anatomy,deformed poses and exaggerated detail of so many of the ranges. Hard to understand why 15/18mm sculpters can do so much better. Presumably that is market demand.

I've had armies in 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 1/72nd, OS 25mm, NS 25mm with (occasional individual 28mm), 30mm, 40mm, 42mm & 54mm. They've all had something going for them.

If you limit size, you would probably have to limit style to. There are some new figures that are magnificent models worthy of close ups but I have no use for that. I despise the more common 28mm overblown detail, exaggerated anatomy and unnatural poses. Hard to understand why 15/18mm scultpors can usually do better. ,All of which has eventually led me to appreciate some older simpler, cleaner styles of sculpting and painting. They look more real when you stand back 4 or 5 feet.

Give me choice! and don't tell me what to like!

Unless of course everyone would like to adopt my favorite styles!

-Ross
gameofmonth.blogspot.ca

Al (the cat herder) threw this out to see what the reaction would be. I limit my choices of scale based on the type of game (skirmish, tactical, etc.) figure/ground scale. I would not begrudge anyone the scale of their choice but many times it seems scale of choice boils down to a sculptor providing a really cool figure of a particular size.

"If they did this, how different would your life be?" If there were fewer scales I would hope there would be more cool figures in those scales. Really, is there enough difference between 10mm figs vs 6 or 15mm?

BTW Old Glory, I am perfectly happy with 4 flavors of ice cream :p).

"I am perfectly happy with four flavors of ice cream"
Well -- the truth be known I am perfectly happy with one flavor as I am a reasonably boring person -- may I suggest however that this choice and oponion may not hold true for everyone out there so this may also be a bit of a selfish way of thinking?
Also, I do not undersatand why people think that if we go by "scale" this will somehow assure a perfect alignment in size? I just recently purchased two model western stagecoachs (nothing to do with this hobby) that were done in "1/16 scale" --the difference in the size between the two was enormous!! So much for that majic bullet.
regards
Russ Dunaway

Allen57,
Well having sculpted all 3 scales i can assure there is a distinct difference. Running off the scale sizes deosnt reveal the huge difference in 'volume' of the different scales.
We have gone for 10mm for our ancients because its just a lot better at showing the dress differences that are important in the ancient period, in 6mm tricky to show these differences.

Too true Russ have had the same thing in railway stuff.
L

I don't see how anybody could draw that conclusion

I don't dispute that over the last thirty or so years the quality of an average miniature has gone up more than it's price has. My point about "affordable quality" was whether or not this change is as pronounced as it could be and how these improvements have been funded?

The origin of our hobby is the evolution of toy soldiers into detailed collectables. I can't claim to have been there from day one, my introduction to the hobby as a gamer was very late 1970's early 1980's, and as a professional sculptor somewhat later.

In the 70's there were one or two great sculptors capable of producing figures which most would judge against modern standards as perhaps a seven out of ten, most however were only capable of about three or four out of ten. Now in 2013 the very best sculptors have pushed standards forward to create those ten out of ten masterpieces, but the biggest change is the depth of talent now available and capable of creating at least a seven out of ten sculpt such that no manufacturer should ever struggle to find a talented sculptor to work with.

So why if the average sculptor's ability has increased from a three or four out of ten to perhaps a seven out of ten, has the quality of a typical figure only increased to about a five or six out of ten?

Put simply the market used to be able to afford to pay sculptors to produce their best work. Typical rates of pay per figure haven't moved on any where near enough to keep up with inflation. Consequently most sculptors can't afford to deliver the seven out of ten (or better) that they are now capable of. If they were to charge as other artisan craftsmen do (perhaps the plasterer who sorts out the hole in your ceiling, or the mechanic that fixes your broken car) then most of the time for the sums of money changing hands for original sculpts you'd only be getting two or three out of ten and things would have gone backwards.

I'd say that many "improvements" perceived by the end consumers may not be brought about by real sustainable advances the industry can actually afford, but by those who produce and retail the products we buy being willing to work for ever reduced rates of pay simply to try maintain some sense of artistic pride or dignity in their work, or as a means of getting their hands on products they themselves wanted.

When a product can sustain high volumes of sales then it's design, origination, production and marketing costs become trivial to the end consumer and they can get great quality for low prices by buying mass produced. As this market gets ever more sub divided into smaller and smaller little niches we get closer to products becoming the private commissions of the wealthy, some of whom may simply try to re-coup a fraction of their costs by selling on a few additional castings to the one or two other souls who couldn't afford to commission the same thing. In the words of small children in the back seats of cars everywhere "ARE WE THERE YET?" Perhaps not quite, but is the Industry moving in that direction? Think about how few of your miniatures may now come from big profitable companies and how many from small one man bands giving their time up at the weekends who are essentially subsidising your interests by working for next to nothing to produce the products you buy. Then think about how many of the businesses you've just assumed to be big and profitable because of a swish looking web site and some nice packaging may also be just one man working from a spare bedroom three hours every Sunday afternoon recouping perhaps £500.00 GBP a year of the few thousand pounds he spent setting up a new product range!

It may not be a view everyone agrees with, but I also think it's a point of view few have ever considered.

May I suggest, In this market we are essentially selling "raw materials" to "artists" that will then apply their own "talents" to the best of their ability to produce a complete and finished product that they are pleased (proud of)with and feel "they" are the ones that have produced the actual piece of "art" --- in which they then proudly put on display along with all the other important accouterments needed?
This is why you see consumers with such strong feelings about such things as scale, quality, and even the medium = metal, plastic, resin,etc.
Most "art" markets sell a product that, once purchased is never going to be altered -- I highly doubt that the average collector of high end beonze statues also makes regular purchases of dremmels bits, scapel blades,files,glue, paint,etc for the continued enjoyment of that particular prusuit?

In that sense I suspect we sell a craft product?
Regards
Russ Dunaway

Old Glory, that's an entirely valid way of looking at things, and I don't doubt that people do take a great deal of pride in painting the miniatures they buy and doing so to the best of their abilility. To a certain extent then the original sculpts can be seen as just part of the process of manufacturing a craft product to sell to other artists, just like the glue, paint and brushes.

However I'm not sure many would see the sculpting of a miniature as the same as the mixing, bottling and selling of a pot of glue, as the extrapolation of that argument is that the sculptors should be paid simply like any other production line worker, that is they just get paid a flat hourly rate that goes up with annual inflation and rises in cost of living. Not a rate of pay that in real terms goes down year on year as they improve in skill and experience and are capable of producing a better product which will be more appreciated by the end consumers. If sculptors all worked that way manufacturers would have to be paying far more for their sculpts, or more probably getting far worse sculpts for the same cost which would satisfy nobody in the industry, not even the sculptors as we'd probably just give up and do something else all together if we were robbed of the last bit of artistc pride we take in what we do.

Anyway my point here wasn't to raise some sort of protest on behalf of fellow sculptors, simply to mention the issue of how ever increasing numbers of scales in the gaming market risks spreading resources more thinnly. That in turn results in lower sales of individual products meaning the up front production costs of setting up a new product line have a more significant impact on each individual sale which has to be born on someone's shoulders. Whereas if customers money can be focussed into higher volumes of sales of a smaller number of products they can be produced to higher standards for lower costs which I'd have thought all would see as a good thing.

By the way: why has been crossposted to the Need more Boobies forum? Of course, there are different scales for boobies too, but I can't understand how a rant against the scale of wargaming miniatures is related with that relevant part of the female anatomy.

Indeed it is not related at all, but in both cases I like all scales (well most of them anyway :-) )

Seriously, I like a lot of scales and I am glad there is such a lot of different miniatures and scales available. Just pick out what you like and what you can afford/store or whatever…..

What would be next? Only 1 type of basing for all the rulesets on the market?? :-)

Oh Dear!

I remember that Dick Bryant of the Courier over 30years ago, maybe 40, back when the HMGS was a borning, said that one of the reasons they were making the HMGS was to "force" figure manufacturers to make the figures they wanted and impose on them the conformity they desired.

When he said this I was astounded, and I told him back then. "You're mad!-- You'll never be able to do that!"

The problem your contention has, Alien57 is that the very people who want these other scales will buy them. They aren't likely to boycot the manufaturers of 33 1/3 scale if that's the scale they want. And what would the rest do who have other scales, say "We're not going to buy 28mm (their scale) until you stop making 2mm?

Do you see what I mean. What sort of sanction can you apply to the manufactuers that is not going to be self-destructive

There is one other thing to consider about the quality of sculpts that have gone up over the last 30 years, and that is that material used to make the sculpts has changed, as well as the materials used in molding the sculpts.

"If customers can be focussed into higher volume of sales of a smaller number of products they can be produced to higher standards for lower costs which I would of thought all would see as a good thing".

Has not really worked that way with GW and FOW regardless of how it happened??

One of the differences also is the type of manufactuer one is -- I have "free lance" -- (OG designers are on staff) designers contact me on a regular basis's looking for work and they immediately quote me a "price per sculpt" -- problem is I do not want "a sculpt" -- I need hundruds of sculpts and I need the line reasonably finished in a reasonable time or it's a waste of my money and the consumers money also ----as in the little story of the nativity scence from another link.
I think the prices, scales, quality, etc is in the end dictated by the market -- we don't drive --they do.

Old glory for years takes some pounding as to quality-- (I strongly disagree)-- yet 1000s of people prefer OG and not all based on just the price. For over 24 I have seen them come and go with all the theories,etc -- yet OG sales have been one to over two million $ in sales in 20 of those 24 years --- so people do really choose with their wallets?

By the way Adrain -- we could always use some more free lance work if you are ever interested?

Regards
Russ Dunaway

Al (the cat herder) threw this out to see what the reaction would be. I never said a word, honest.

Also, I do not undersatand why people think that if we go by "scale" this will somehow assure a perfect alignment in size? I just recently purchased two model western stagecoachs (nothing to do with this hobby) that were done in "1/16 scale" --the difference in the size between the two was enormous!! So much for that majic bullet.

You are quite right – I suppose that 1/72 has hardly guaranteed consistency either. Oh well…

Russ,

If you wanted drop me an e-mail (aidan@aidan-campbell.co.uk) I'm happy to talk about sculpting for Old Glory.

I think from previous posts I've made it's obvious that as an artist I'd much prefer to be paid to produce a low quantity of work to the best of my ability than produce a high volume of average stuff. It should also be apparent I'm quite realistic about the fact that if you expect to be paid for something then you get paid to make what's profitable, not necessarily what you'd do for free on your day off. Testament to what is proftable is a business that grows over the decades, rather than bursts on the scene with something amazing and disappears three years later.

As a full time professional if I can make a decent profit out of it I'll sculpt anything to keep paying the bills and feed the family (that what corporate and advertising projects are for). If I can't make a penny out of sculpting it then I'll do excatly what I want and do it my way in my own time. Most gaming commissions are about negotiating something inbetween the two extremes.

Who want's 300 of anything the same size? Humans aren't the same size. Their weapons and kit SHOULD be the same size for the same claimed "scale", but humans are different and I want my table top troops to reflect that.

We have this all wrong. Gamers will never change. What needs to change are some fundamental items. The entire mm scale business is a problem because 15mm means WAY to many sizes. Sure its good to have some variation but true 15mm look wrong next to 18mm. If it was a scale issue then 1/100 would be easier to stick too. A 7 foot figure would be taller then a 4 foot one but they would both be proportioned to 1/100.

Now thats never going to happen either but…

What we really needs is for someone to develop a new miniature manufacturing method that allows you to scale figures down from say 28mm to 15mm. Obviously 28mm to 6mm is a bit of a stretch unless it's a computer program designs to scale it correctly for casting and durability. (i.e. thicker legs/gun barrels)

Then you can play with any figure design in any scale.

3D printing is getting closer but they need some serious breakthroughs to make it work. I still want a RedBox style machine in every games store. Select the figure and the scale. Enter how many times you want it printed and swipe your credit card.

If we make one of those "Redbox" machines and rent it out at conventions, we could make a killing (after the kinks currently in place are worked out).

Quick note to all those say mixing different figure in same 'size/scale' is ok because humans are different sizes.

In 28mm, 1mm is approx. 3 inches. That means almost all of your men will be with in 2mm of each other, tallest to shortest. In 15mm it is 1mm=1/2 inch.

I agree that we should use ratios not sizes.

(By they way, 15mm is 1:110 or 115, not 1:100)

Re Measure to eyes/measure to crown.

eyes to crown is about 4 inches. That's 2 mm on a 28 figure. So lets stop this nonsense. Its easy enough to work out how tall the figure is really, even if you measure to the eyes.
(How tall are you?
5ft 6
That's not what this passport says
But today I'm wearing a hat)

From NIH and WHO data, average height for ethnotypes ranges from just under 5' to just over 6'. The average of the standard deviations is just under 1' (which has very different implications than the difference of averages being about 1'). Also, there are nine defferent morphologies (body types), of which 5, cover about 80% of the current population.

Based on experience with modern militaries, and even looking around the cube farm, 6" seems a little light. Six of the nine morphologies are present here (70 people). As you go back in time and get more homogeneous populations, you would tend to get more homogeneity within a force, but still have the potential for great variability, especially in "composite" units where the personnel for one "force" have been drawn from two distinct geographic areas.

I game in 72nd/76th scale. To me they are close enough as makes no nevermind.