"What would 1/2500 scale land battles really look like?" Topic

Apologies in advance for a rather rambling post, in which I don't quite know how to formulate the question I'm trying to ask

I have a problem. I'm thinking about gaming ancient and medieval land battles in 1/2500 scale (~0.75mm) or thereabouts, with units represented by "blocks of pips" similar to the 2mm figures from Irregular. (In case anyone is wondering, there would also be some 15mm or 28mm figures used in some way as "troop type identification markers" of sorts, but that's beside the point right now.) My motivation for this admittedly madcap scheme is to game the largest-scope battles of antiquity and medieval times with a 1:1 figure ratio, terrain that is in scale with the figures, and a ground scale consistent with the terrain and figure scales. For a big battle like Trebia or Marathon played on a table of "ordinary" size, the ground scale is bound to be somewhere in the vicinity of 1/2500.

Anyway, in trying to plan this project I've run into quite a few snags. The one that has me stuck right now is that I have a hard time "seeing through" figure ratios and the abstraction they entail in massed battle wargames, to form an understanding of what these battles actually looked like from a bird's eye view. I mean, in games like WAB, Warmaster Ancients, Hail Caesar, FoG, Impetus and even DBA that use figure ratios (which, by the way, are often left deliberately vague – it's not always clear whether a figure represents 10 men, 100 men, 1000 men, or some other number), what is the true appearance of the element that a unit or stand represents? Is it a single block of troops or a configuration of blocks spaced apart "lengthwise" and/or "depthwise" in some way (and if so, what kind of configuration)?. How many ranks? How shallow could a formation effectively get by "ranking down" to a wider frontage, and how deep by "ranking up" to a narrower one?

Naturally, I'm aware that "ancients and medievals" is a very big field and there's bound to be some variation between periods and martial cultures in terms of what their practical formations looked like. I can only pose these questions in a very vague and nebulous way as I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark right now (there are some things I do understand, especially that unit depth is often hugely exaggerated in 28mm and 15mm wargames using figure ratios, but there's much I don't know). So, any kind of insight would be greatly appreciated, whether direct answers or suggestions for books, articles, websites or, indeed, movies with historically accurate portrayals of large battles.

At some later point I might also want to expand this project to cover various horse-and-musket wars, mid-to-late 19th century wars (especially the big non-colonial ones), Sengoku period Japan and other periods/settings. But that would probably overcomplicate things right now.

What would 2mm be--1/900? That is not what I see when I google it, so forgive my ignorance of math. I think going to 1/2500 would be excessive and little different from using irregular cardboard counters.

Very interesting idea, though.

I was thinking alone the same lines as Rwphillipssti about the "look" of the thing. At this scale there would be hardly any "height" to the army units, and so in effect you would be playing with simple blocks. I know this is not what you are thinking, but why not have the ground area that a unit would cover rendered in thin plastic or wood (MDF?) with a 15mm figure stuck to the top of the block.

Now of course what that does is replace a number of figures with ONE figure representing perhaps several thousand man. Probably not your idea. (I toyed with something similar many years ago, but did not take it past the "formulation" stage).

From a practical point of view any block would need to have some depth to enable picking up and moving, I use the ultra thin 3" wooden bases from Litko for my 6mm Napoleonics, for example, and they are (from memory) 0.8 mm, so these would be almost perfect for the "height" of one of your units in this scale.

They are just big enough to pick up cleanly, so might work. Imagine cutting these into various "area' shapes representing either uniform "pike blocks" for example, or an unruly Celtic mob.

I'm also rambling, apologies.

Interesting, but not sure of the really practical point as at this scale how would units be differentiated without the "artificial" addition of a larger scale figure which seems to defeat the objective?

Good luck.

TMP's ancient hobby reference section ( TMP link ) puts 2mm at 1/805.

I'm fully aware 1/2500 probably sounds excessive to many people. I don't think of it that way, though. It's the only way I see of getting around figure ratios and ground scale ratios, which have always been a pet peeve of mine. Even 2mm requires figure ratios and ground scale ratios unless one is playing on a giant table, at least for "big big" battles like the aforementioned Trebia and Marathon (perhaps not for "little big" ones like Hastings). I also think 3D battlefields can look cool in 1/2500. Card counters on a 3D battlefield doesn't sit quite right with me, and it's not much of a stretch to go from card counters to 3D "blocks of pips", perhaps made from ProCreate or something such using a press mould.

As I've said, I've run into several snags, so I'm not certain about the feasibility of this project. But I'm not interested in discussing that right now. I'd like to get past this one snag, before I start dealing with some of the other ones like the difficulty of modelling 1/2500 terrain (how to do modular rolling terrain, teeny tiny roads, etc) or the fact that most rulesets have abstracted their missile weapon ranges to be ridiculously long ("Enemy troops positioned a kilometer away? No problem! Fetch me my bow…").

"Is it a single block of troops or a configuration of blocks spaced apart "lengthwise" and/or "depthwise" in some way (and if so, what kind of configuration)?. How many ranks? How shallow could a formation effectively get by "ranking down" to a wider frontage, and how deep by "ranking up" to a narrower one?"

The answer, which you don't want to hear, is 'it depends', and in many cases 'we don't know'. The number of ranks in a phalanx was variable, depending on the situation, and there were clearly gaps between formations to enable them to manouvre and/or interpenetrate (despite wargames predilictions for shoving everyone in shoulder-shoulder), but many there were or how big is a matter of some debate.

Some things are better known than others, and a manipular Roman legion would probably look very like the 8,000 Spanish soldiers assembled to play them in 'Spartacus'.

Interesting, but not sure of the really practical point as at this scale how would units be differentiated without the "artificial" addition of a larger scale figure which seems to defeat the objective?

The point would be for the larger scale figures to be more like "identification markers" than the actual troops. Sort of like in a grand tactical computer game, or something such. I would probably use either flight bases or low black-painted plinths to make the figures look "removed" from the battlefield while being positioned next to the blocks of troops they identify. That's the general idea, anyway.

Pick a battle that you know the terrain it was fought over and the number of troops.

Google Maps the terrain, zoom in/out so that it fills your screen. Get a screen capture (Alt-PrintScreen in Windows) and paste into a graphics program (MS Paint will work).

Use a single pixel to represent one man. Start filling it in and see what you get. (Or you could use the scale of the map to actually figure out how big a man should be. My guess is it will be smaller than a pixel.)

In your original post you asked what ancient battles looked like from the air.

IMO, one aspect that most wargames don't handle easily is that units (at least for close order) were not very deep at all relative to their width. For example, an 8-deep phalanx would probably be 1.5 m depth per rank (or roughly 12 m). 1000 men drawn up 8 deep would be 125 wide. At roughly 1 m per file, the footprint is 12m deep by 125 wide, or roughly 1:10 depth to width.

Games usually get that badly wrong. Even a DBA base at 15mm deep by 40mm wide way over-represents unit depth (1:2.7), and other most games for 28mm figs exaggerate depth even more (especially if the rules give combat bonuses for additional ranks), often rewarding players for deploying around 1:2 (depth to width). It does wierd things to the tactics – yes troops got advantages at the immediate tactical level for added depth, but at the battle level, commanders worried more about matching or exceeding the enemy frontage…

If you look at that 1:10 foot-print for 1000 men in an 8-deep formation, in 1/2500 scale it would be 4.8mm deep by 50mm wide.

To represent a Greek phalanx, a simple line with that footprint would probaby look about right. Simply extend the line according to the number of hoplites the army contained.

The same number of Republican Romans in manipular formation, with 120-man maniples drawn up in 3 lines of 40, with 2m frontage per man, could be represented by 9 or 10 blocks each 2.4 mm deep by 32mm wide in a checkerboard pattern.

Other formations would vary a lot – with skirmishers and cavalry being quite open and covering more area, but probably still keeping a roughly 1/10 depth to width ratio unless there is a historical reason to do otherwise (such as cavalry wedges or rhomboids).

To me the interesting thing when you start looking at the issue from that perspective is that some of the pros and cons of different tactical doctrines become more apparent – such as the greater frontage, with equal manpower, that a manipular legion could achieve compared to a simple phalanx. The next step, though is accurately portraying the relative combat abilities of the maniples vs the phalanx, and that is tricky!

I think the main decision you would have to make is whether to use standardized frontages for elements, with each representing a greater or lesser number of troops. Or to fit the base-size to the historical formations the armies used, and have a wider range of unit stats.

Sounds like a cool project anyway!

What ever happened to those card Micro Ancients, Napoleonic and Colonial wargames from the 1970's/80's. They would be ideal for this. Were they not marketed by Tabletop Games? We had many happy games with them when 25mm figures were too expensive. The rules came with army cards for Romans and Carthaginians, with extra card armies available for purchase.
The units varied in strength and dimentions (width and depth) oaccording to the number of troops in the unit and their 'order' (close, loose or open). I remember some mega games using double army cards per side, one of 2 Byzantine cards against 2 Sassanid Persian cards along the length of a dining room table with card terrain and roads and rivers 'chalked' onto the table.

yes pattus magnus, in those card armies I was talking of the Roman cohorts 2-10 were about 1.5 cm frontage and 0.5 cm depth, whereas the pike phalanxes were abount 2 cmm square. Roman 1st cohort proportianately bigger. Loose order units wider and deeper, open order wider and shallower. Cavalry/elephant/chariot units in proportion.
The good thing was, by using known sizes for the units you had, you could fabricate your own armies by multiplying the proportions in the Wargames Research Group army list books to give you the correct number of units and their strenths.

I was revisiting 2mm, thinking that maybe it is more doable than one might think. An Irregular 2mm base of Roman infantry is 20 figures in 2 ranks, so a 6000-man legion at 1:1 scale would be 300 bases. I would think a 6x12 table MIGHT be able to pull this off.

Here is a cool link, btw, which could be your inspiration (scale model of ancient Jerusalem):

link

Ha!

And people thought I was daft about advocating for 1mm figures.

Of course, I WAS only joking, but still………

Vindication is sweet……….

There was a manufacturer of 1mm figures, some decades ago… Knight Design IIRC.

hrm…

I'd go for massively oversized unit flags rather than a largescale unit ID figure, personally.

@Jarrovian – those Micro Ancient games are available again on Wargames Vault, from Hurlbat Games.

Rwphillipsstl I've been working away on 2mm armies for a couple of years and your right the figure ratio absraction is a pain. I started with a 1:4 but the depths were to much.

At present it's 1:2 so 12 Roman Legion blocks equals a cohort, on 60mm wide bases this gives roughly 4.5ft by 7.5ft spacing but that's really parade sizes.

What started as a wee DBA project grew into a " I'll do Mons Graupius at 1:2". So far about 75% Roman and 95% Caledonian done.

At 1:1 a Legions 4ft wide so yeah at least a 12ft table. Sadly 8ft wides the biggest I can do so I'm stuck with 1:2 ratio.

None of this helps the OP. Sorry OP.

Oh about IDing units I don't bother, figure groupings on bases give an idea of troop type so are those fellas in the shiny armour Elite or recently formed in new kit ?

Oh about IDing units I don't bother, figure groupings on bases give an idea of troop type so are those fellas in the shiny armour Elite or recently formed in new kit ?

That's where I'm torn. I'd like the possibility of having mixed troop quality, but I'm not sure that there really was much variation in less than Legion unit sizes.

As this chunk of history isn't my focus, would you see Legions brought up to strength with a bunch of new recruits, or was there some kind of tactical-unit "steadying" going on?

I've read somewhere that the troops in a phalanx had the most experienced men in about the 3rd rank, with the next two 'steps' (years experience) below them in the second and front ranks. This way, as the first couple ranks took casualties, the phalanx actually got better. The most inexperienced troops were placed in the 4th (and farther) ranks, so that the efficiency of the Phalanx as a whole didn't just fade with fresh recruits. Whether that was here on TMP or in some chunk of Historical Fiction, I don't know.

If there's a significantly greater difference between the lightly-armed skirmishers and the fully-armored line troops than among the various fully-armored troops, I would be inclined to not worry about the various troops of the same type, giving them all the same morale (or varied for their army, assuming that Romans are a different troop quality than Macedonians, for example).

Like this?

Thanks boywundr x, I still have my originals in the loft

You know, just thinking outside the box, but have you given any thought to producing this sort of game using a light table?

An 8X12 would be relatively easy to fabricate from some 1X4 strapping and a single sheet of 3/6" (or so) plastic. You can buy very large sheets of varying thickness and opacity at quite reasonable prices. Just check the phone directory or online in your area.

With a light table, you could use pieces of translucent plastic (like the gels used for spotlights on stage, etc) for both terrain and units. Blue versus red, etc. In a way, it makes it into a large boardgame or map game, but you'd get a good view of the battle lines if you used opaque colored lines and had the terrain done with translucent or transparent colored gels.

Some flourescent tubes mounted around the inside of the frame could backlight the whole thing.

I know that you're thinking this could be a lot of work and money, but to be honest, it would probably cost about the same as building your blocs, terrain, etc. One other advantage is that you could also write directly onto the surface with white board markers…….

Anyway, that's my 2-cent's worth.

Lion in the Stars

When I said I don't bother IDing units I meant more along the lines of say you where fighting Greeks blocks in 8 ranks are obviously Hoplites but until you contact them you don't know if they're Sacred Band or City Militia.

It's just the way I view Ancient Warfare.Generals would have an idea what kinds of troops they would face but only a rough one.If you remember in WRG you revealed weapons,armour and morale at deployment.Quite unrealistic to my mind.

Great thing about 2mm is the comment " You can't tell what they are." You're not meant to, Generals would see bodies of men and horse in Close,Loose or Open order and make plans from that limited Intel.

"What ever happened to those card Micro Ancients, Napoleonic and Colonial wargames from the 1970's/80's."

I still have mine, along with Micro "Modern" aka WW2.

When I said I don't bother IDing units I meant more along the lines of say you where fighting Greeks blocks in 8 ranks are obviously Hoplites but until you contact them you don't know if they're Sacred Band or City Militia.

Ah, gotcha.

It's just the way I view Ancient Warfare.Generals would have an idea what kinds of troops they would face but only a rough one.If you remember in WRG you revealed weapons,armour and morale at deployment.Quite unrealistic to my mind.

Never played WRG, but I know what you mean. We have FAR better information about what the opponent's capabilities are as tabletop generals than our historical counterparts did.

My experiments in 2mm are driven by the same concepts. It becomes very apparent that the formation depths we have been used to with popular sets of rules are wrong. Seeing a Napoleonic British infantry battalion with scale frontage and depth you begin to understand how French commanders would keep launching columns against them. They just look so fragile. It made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. That's not to say the rule sets we grew up with were bad they just focused on different aspects of the battle.

The rules my friends and I came up with are centered on the concept of ground scale. There are no exaggerated missile ranges. The scale of miniatures used is completely irrelevant, it is the size of the company "base" that determines how many men it represents.

There is no reason why terrain cannot be made to the ground scale. We just preferred our buildings and etc. to visually match the miniatures, which for us were 25-28mm. But you could just as well, as I say, build terrain to the 1:360 ground scale. That is small enough to accommodate ninety percent-plus of all the ancmed battles. For the giant handful you could prepare ahead of time for special conditions without needing to alter the ground scale. "Hastings" is a big battle, that's because most battles were not that big and c. 10K to a side is very big indeed. Ancient "giant" battles, e.g. Cannae, are still often stacked up, not stretched out to the widest limit of troop availability, and even where they are stretched out, the depth of the table does not have to exceed c. six feet. A very few exceptions exist, e.g. Manzikert or Hattin, where the fighting extends for miles of depth because these were running fights. But a fudge can be resorted to: consider the armies to be on the move, and only adjust distances between according to differences of speed. The terrain, being necessarily open, is regarded as more or less featureless as any tactical advantages are concerned, there are none. So modeling the terrain for such open battlefields is no more than representative anyway.

Imho, any miniatures smaller than 2mm are probably not capable of being modeled with any distinction so why bother.

A ground scale of 1:360 would allow 64 "miniatures" to be placed on a 20mm x 20mm base in close order. That works out to eight men wide by eight men deep, or a miniature being 5mm tall. And that represents every man without any miniatures-to-men ratios required. 5mm is a very visible miniatures scale, you can actually see visible differences in troop types….

I agree with Great War Ace.

I've been experimenting with sculpting micro scale figures for years. My wee little 1:350 napoleonic figures are readily identifiable on the table, though I think more due to the fact that I can fit 60+ on a 40x15mm base. However even at this size they still do not lend themselves to anything beyond a divisional sized game if portrayed at 1:1 (in terms of those grand sized ole' Napoleonic battles). I had tried getting them to 1:500 or about 3.5mm tall, but the muskets and bayonets just won't cast that small without looking like tree trunks. Very frustrating.

Because of this frustration I've been sculpting an 'operational scale' set of figures for an ACW project the past several months. They are very small, and sculpting them is almost akin to doing a 'bas relief' sculpture rather than a true 'sculpture in the round'. Interestingly, when doing the math, there's literally just a few tenths of a millimeter difference in height when dealing with scales under 1:1500 or so..ranging from 1.2mm tall for 1:1500 down to 0.71mm tall for 1:2500. That's a mere 0.5mm height difference, visually, for a lot more terrain gained. The drawback is that a line of 0.71mm tall figures is nothing at all to look at, as they offer no visual differentiation between forces. At 1:1000 you still can appreciate (and paint) some uniform details, so I've stuck with this scale for my current project. I just can't see how you can visually appreciate individual figures at anything below this apprx 2mm threshold, unless you're ok with a purely 'board game piece' look to your units, of course.

Cheers,
Bob