"Napoleonic Wargame Buildings" Topic

All

I'm at the stage now where I want some buildings for my 28mm Napoleonics. I'm gaming the Peninsular and I'd like a few buildings to make a small village or some objectives.

However I imagine 28mm buildings would be huge – would 15mm or 20mm be suitable instead?

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks in advance

Ferg

Hi. I think a common approach is to go one size down. So 20mm would seem fine. It's the approach I have. I have not considered 15mm, although if the "true" ground scale is taken into account, it would be impossible to have even a modest village in 28/30mm without dominating the board.

It's all a compromise, and the 'one-scale-down' seems a workable one.

I'd agree with the above, down a size. For villages I have a cobbled area defining the boundary and I just put two or three buildings on it.

Okay cool

Any decent buildings you can recommend?

Ferg

Use the Italeri 1/72 plastic buildings they are a bit large for 20mm and look good with 28mm

crescent-root.com/index.html
Crescent Root are effective, with choices in 3 sizes, including 25, 20 and 15mm. I played an 1813 game with 25/28mm miniatures and 15mm buildings and I thought the presentation brilliant! Easy to obtain from the states.

PaperTerrain do a great range of card buildings, modern and old. These are designed to have the building fit over a damaged building base, so you can lift off the top to put figures inside or remove the top to leave a ruin. They make them in 6mm, 10/12mm, 15mm, 20mm and 25/28mm.

I bought a Mediteranean Village, Mediterranean Church and a Vauban Fort, all in 15mm to be one scale down from my 20mm (actually 1:72 plastic) figures. They were cheap and look great.

They are run by Scott Washburn, who participates in this forum. His company is in USA but I ordered from UK and they were delivered promptly with no problems. Their website is:

PaperTerrain.com

Rod

I like what Hovels has done if you were to scratch build:

A figure to scale could open the door and likely touch the back wall. 15mm foot print but with 25mm details

I have three buildings from this range:
link

Including the large market hall building. With all of these you can place men in the buildings to represent that they are occupied, and the scale seems reasonable enough. I guess it's worth bearing in mind that houses and commoners buildings would have been a lot smaller and simpler than the equivalents now – most people would only have one or two rooms.

I went with 28mm houses, on the basis that a couple of the bigger houses could conceivably represent a village.

The other thought I had was that I could use them for Peninsular War skirmish gaming, which of course has not happened yet.

Anyway, I went with the following Grand Manner buildings:

link

I use 15mm buildings, they are a convenient size when trying to give the impression of a village, hamlet and town.

Grand Manner buildings sure are nice, just a little meheavy on the pocket for me, at the moment any way.

How about our Mediterranean range:

See the full listing for the range here:link

They come ready painted, and being polyurethane foam, are nice and light and very robust.

Our Spanish buildings range -

link

Great set of rules, but like "nochules" said they do take some thinking and planning. You will need the base rule set to go along with the latest supplement to have all the rules.

*edit*
what the heck?what i typed was about 6 times longer then this, and actually pertained to the topic at hand. Editor, i got bugged!!

ferg ol'boy you need to think about the other figure scale, the figure ratio.

For Empire ratios which is 1:60 or rules with similar ratios 15mm buildings have the right balance of footprint versus verticle scaling. Only the most outrageous pedant would call you to account…… so about 30% of convention goers

I think that when you start to approach 1:20 ratios then 25mm buildings have the right balance of footprint versus verticle scaling.

It is obvious when you think about it, frontages and footprint should coincide to some degree.

For me it is also a good idea to set some rules for building numbers ie 3 building for a hamlet, 5 for a village, 7 for a town. From experience this seems to work providing good visual clues to the battle field topography.

my shillings worth

regards
dave

These are worth taking a look at

link

Couldn't be bothered writing out the post again, but to put it simply one building puchase will provide you with about 10 quite individual lpooking buildings and that is before you start playing around with tiny details. Of course you can also scale them down to suit 20mm and 15mm.

regards
dave

My preference is for buildings that suit the figure height, I don't want it to appear that we are fighting in a Lilliputian world and that a well mounted general can see over the top of a peasant's cottage. Ground scale is mostly to pot and while we try for a suitable vertical scale for trees, we do not for hills and mountains. In my opinion, a 28 millimetre tree is going to make a 15 millimetre house look a bit like a gingerbread cottage.

Also, large buildings cause problems for manoeuvre, which they did, they serve to block line of sight, reducing the billiard table effect so common in Wargames.

If you are worried about figure ratio, then why not have the same ratio for the buildings. How often does a town or city have the correct number of buildings in it, (Never?) so the city of Leipzig is never a true city on the battlefield. We just throw a number of suitably styled buildings on the table and get on with it.

It is a matter of personal preference, Your game, Your choice, but if you do go down the 15mm for 28's route, consider that the troops will probably be looking in the upstairs windows from outside. 28mm houses for 28's will look so much better.

Hope this helps

rabbit

Unless you are going for 1:1 skirmish, I would recommend dropping down on scale.

Also, another recommendation for Paper Terrain cardstock: excellent value and quality.