"15mm or 6mm for sci fi skirmish." Topic

Hello there folks, long time lurker first time poster. I have always played in 28mm (then 32 then 35 due to progressive scale creep) and as such have always played games that have figures designed for them. Due to baby and incoming second baby I have had to scale back the space alloted to toys.

Anyway, I like sci fi skirmish (no more than 20 dudes a side) and can't decide whether to 6mm or 12mm. I would much prefer 6mm but I can't seem to find figures with enough personality or that don't come in groups of 30+. I've seen the Angel Barracks stuff, which i dig, but would want more choice. Otherwise I'm gonna have to go 15mm and the dream of a 1'sq table will die :)

Depending on the size of your playing area I would recommend that you use the biggest size of figure you can. I would say 15mm is an absolute minimum but you could easily go for 20mm or even bigger. I happily play skirmish games on a table 4ft by 2ft6ins with 28mm figures.

15mm. One advantage is that you an use much of the same terrain as your mass battle rules

Go in 15mm and measure in CM or half inches. Then make yourself a battlebox:

link

P.S. Yes, in 6mm troops tend to be more generic and are sold in bigger packs.

That said, the Brigade Infantry in 6mm comes pretty cheap.

ScaleCreep.com

I like 15mm. There is a ton of stuff available in that size. It works well for smaller skirmish, but if you want larger fights, go with 6mm. There are getting to be many more options available in that scale, and it is growing.

Adler miniatures (now Darkest Star)had some nice ones,
Micro World has good sci fi.

Playing area is gonna be 2 foot square or less. 28mm+ is out just because of price really, minis and scenery. I think i'm gonna go 15mm. As lovely as Micro World's and Brigade's stuff is, for every 5 guys i use there'll be 30 odd i don't.

I've already found 15mm.co.uk and am loving their stuff. Especially LaserBurn. Who else would you guys recommend checking out for 15mm minis with character? Something other than power armoured troops.

Well, Brigade has an extensive range.

Rebel Minis do some very cool non-power armor types.

Ground Zero Games (GZG) has a huge range as well.

Khurasan…

Blue Moon….

MicroPanzer….

There's something fun about playing with individually based 6mm on a tiny battlefield. While all is smaller, you can put it on the dining table and sit down to the game, so are much closer to it. You can do that up cheap, though finding the selection may be a challenge. Might be more fun if you were playing with some sort of hex rules rather than having to measure. But you'll be able to do most of your measuring with a ruler.

andy

Zombiesmith…

RAFM has the Citadel Traveller 15mm line
link

Its largely a matter of personal preference, base size, cost per pack etc are largely the same between the two scales. I like 6mm because buildings are cheaper, and 15mm for better variety of figures. Both are equally fun. Check out Pfc CnC if you haven't already, they have a lot of characters in 6mm.

Until 3 mm is available in quantity, 6 mm for large skirmish fights, 15 mm for smaller fights.

I skirmish in both scales. They lend to different sorts of detail levels. I find using power armor troops vs. normal troops and vehicle encounter to be much easier in 6mm due to there generally being longer ranges involved (and a 2'x2' 6mm table makes ranges "look right") whereas I prefer 15mm for close engagements (where a 2'x2' table can give some good maneuver room, but still keep the fight close quarters).

If it comes down to a matter of economics, $100 USD in 6mm will get you much farther than $100 USD in 15mm. If you want to focus on character and detail you should probably steer towards 15mm.

6mm … period …

For 20 dudes games I'd go for 15mm…

Thanks for all the info. Sadly Khurasan and Micro Panzer are down at the moment so I shall have to be patient.
What ranges would you recomend Legion4?

15mm is the traditional skirmish scale but 6mm is very attractive.

More scifi individuals have been made in recent months, the terrain is very cheap and you can get a nice assortment of vehicles for next to nothing.

You could also play on a 2x2 foot table and still have it feel huge.

15mm – as much as I like some of the 6mm out there I not convinced by it as a scale for individually based infantry figures (12mm/10mm is my limit).

I'd second RAFMs old Trav' range if you like Laserburn, which is my probably my favourite. Though more recent ranges from Khurasan and the like do produce better miniature.

Also having a couple of young kids and a terminal shortage of space and cash gaming in 15mm hasn't resulted in the wife demanding I sell up…

Two great scales

I stare in wonderment at onslaught miniatures 6mm stuff….but have never taken the plunge…

I love 15mm !

Dropship horizon has most of the manufactures listed with a few exceptions…..all are great guys to do business.

Micropanzer gitungi
Khurasan Felids and thrainites
Brigade models tanks and vehicles
Armies army insurgents
Top gun grav armor
Ravenstar horrids
Rebel minis Comanche vehicles
Ion age

Are some of my favorites they mostly line up well but humans come in different sizes….

Welcome to either scale….you'll be glad you switched whichever scale youchoose

15mm. You can play Ambush Alley games on a 2x2 table measuring in inches, 1x1 table if you use cm.

15mm is honestly as small as I would go for skirmish games where you need to be able to ID individual weapons. I have a LOT of 15mm minis, I chose 15mm to let me re-use as much terrain as possible.

In both scales, you can also repaint cold war and ww2 figures and convert vehicles for low-tech militia and the likes.

In my opinion, 15mm.

I'm not scale snob and love 6mm. I've dabbled in 6mm skirmish only because I've got a load of 'spares' from Epic and the like. link If you are starting from scratch you are right – to get a good 'selection' you've got to buy far more than you will use. 6mm skirmish, with magnet boards and the like, looks pretty cool though.

However, 15mm is the most flexible for your purposes. Loads of great stuff available which I've happily been collecting and painting in the last few years. For ranges and painted examples my blog might be useful for you Prewarsalad.

Cheers
blog.warchest.co.uk

More useful stuff. Thanks again guys. I think I'm gonna settle on 15mm. I want more individuality for my guys. As I say I'm looking to play games with a dozen or so guys a side so individuality is essential really. Sadly it will bump the price of terrain up, but there you go.

Ion Age looks lush, not overly inspired by the rules though, also quite large sides for my liking :) I do love that it is individual dudes however. They will probably be seeing some of my money soon. Can not wait for Khurusan to go back online as their stuff is gorgeous.

While I remember, and not wanting to skew your 15mm choice which I think is correct, Angel Barracks recently started production on a new range of 6mm character models which you may have missed.

link

Khurasan is indeed great stuff thought there is a load of really good stuff both in the US and UK not to mention Poland assaultpublishing.com – I recently order a bunch of Odział Ósmy Insurgents which are great (warning: metal used likely to be far harder than you are use to cleaning but well worth the effort). link

I'd recommend looking at Critical Mass, their mercenary line is an excellent source for small figure packs with lots of character. Brigade, Rebel, Darkest Star, Micropanzer, Khurasan and of course GZG…we're spoiled with choice!

What ranges would you recomend Legion4?

For 6mm :
- Onslaught
- Microworld
- CinC SEM & Sci-fi ranges
- GZG
- Old Crow
- Darkest Star
- Brigade
- Khurusan
- Angel Barracks
- Dark Realm Miniatures
- GHQ Wehrmacht '47 range
- Battle Tech
- Zombiesmith 6mm Quar

One other thing to add to the chorus crying out for 15mm – the ranges from various manufacturers match up really well. My collection includes figures from Bombshell, Khurasan, Ion Age, Rebel, GZG, and probably a few I'm missing, and they all look great together on the table. The difference between the slender figures of Khurasan and the chunky AA figures just looks like the natural variation in human (and alien) form. The difference between 15mm and 18mm is not nearly as pronounced as the difference between 25mm and 32mm.

Yeah, most of the stuff out there is quite compatible, and in scifi, you can always attribute small differences to planetary origin, genetic manipulation or whatever.

Mostly, it's not really noticeable in 15mm, even between smaller figures like Laserburn and bigger ones like Khurasan.

I used to be quite 'anti' 1/100th (as in 15-18mm). I viewed it as a compromise between a big scale for big games (what used to be 25mm and which morphed over the years to 32mm) and 1/300th for big games.

Why stand in the middle of the street? I used to think.

I have to say my opinion has changed.

For me, while the larger scale is wonderful for painting and really cannot be beaten for over all wow factor and effect, the smaller (1/300th) is – for me – usually too small to do anything with other than great big battles for the most part.

Don't get me wrong: lots of people do small scale actions in 6mm – I've done some myself (though not skirmish with individual infantry, that's for sure).

But – for me – 100th (15mm) is, I now realise, just the best compromise I have found: big enough for as much detail my old eyes can hack. Small enough to do big games without looking stupidly like a tank park. Easily skirmishable and equally do-able – and small enough – for actions with multi-based infantry.

I've also noted that – allowing for scale creep (and the fact that SF vehicles seem to be quite large) it's not a million miles away from the Airfix figures and tanks I played with as a child!

If we were talking tools, then think of this analogy: it's great to have a set of spanners of all different sizes to do all the jobs you need fixing – if you have the space and a big budget. Normally I carry a Leatherman Multi-tool which does most things well enough that the spanners become a luxury.

I'd love to have all the armies I want in all the scales I need and – to be fare – I do indeed have quite a lot of them in 1/35th and downwards.

But 1/00th is the best compromise I've come across so far.

Your mileage may be wildly different…

John T

Just this week I have been weighing up the exact same issue. I plumped for 6mm, and for about £20.00 GBP have procured a couple of hundred miniatures to paint up and play with. I have five different factions, all infantry with some heavy weapons. I will be basing individually.

My main issues were space (both storage and table) and cost (both monetary and time to paint). 6mm has solved both of these for me. Any miniatures I don't paint can be stored in a tiny box under my bed. Those I do paint, can also be kept in a small box under my bed.

Next month, or for Christmas I intend to procure some vehicles, and possibly resin terrain. I am already raiding the bin, and spares box for terrain features to make, though.

I find myself being far more excited about 6mm than I ever was about my 20mm collection stored in the attic.

Thuseld it sounds like you'll be playing much larger games than me.

I'm a 6mm nut, but for skirmish gaming it seems a bit fiddly for me. However I've never tried it and there seem to be others who enjoy it so certainly not impossible.

I started off thinking I could run skirmish in 15mm scale with individually based miniatures until I ran a couple of games and no one could identify any of the weapons each man carried. It was discouraging since I invested quite a bit of time and money building up a foot locker sized collection that now sits unused. If you are going this route I suggest you play on a 2'x 2' table and have a raised table so the miniatures are about a foot away from the players eyeballs.

I considered basing all of my 15mm for big battles then changed my mind and went with Epic 40k 6mm so I could have battles with large vehicles on the table.

I went with a larger scale 28mm for skirmish and run Space Hulk style games. The players can at least identify the miniatures and the weapons they carry. I have been collecting 40k ( infantry) stuff and regret my choice ever since I found Denatus's website. If I had to do it all over I would have copied what he did…

link

I have had the opposite experience, we've played lots of 15 mm and I have never had anyone have problems telling weapons apart. But I agree denatus's website is a great source of inspiration for any scale.

I multi-base the 15mm figure I use for Slammers games so what I'm about to say might not be entirely relevant, but…

I too have trouble sometimes seeing what folks are armed with!

I have settled on 4 man bases for the standard infantry (no matter what they are armed with – assault rifles, SMGs etc) and three man bases for the specialists – support weapons and RPGs etc.

Even a person with old eyesight (ie "me) can spot the differences across the table for 3 and 4 man bases (and the shoulder launched weapons are usually obvious so that's easy too). Oh and Snipers go one or two to a base.

If I was doing individual basing in 15mm*, I'm afraid I would have to resort to ether painting a primary colour edge to the base to denote weapon types or adding a number of rocks to the base or something.

It's not that I can't see, you understand, but I want to be able to see them across a table top.

Often a quite big table top!

John T

* And for 6mm this is the same but even more!

Well the goal is to play very small games on a 2x2 table so telling 15mm figures apart shouldn't be an issue. Blasters and Bulkheads and Five Parsecs are going to be my games of choice, after a long and expensive period of rules reading.

Space Hulk like games will deffintiely be occuring with boarding actions. It's a shame you have a big pile of unused models just lying around in 15mm, I suppose I could be persuaded to take them off your hands :)

I am just starting to write and test a 6mm version of Gruntz but it won't be skirmish, it will be about groups of 6mm platoons on small bases and lots of vehicles/tanks etc. Not sure this helps in anyway but I tend to skirmish in 15mm.

Purely as a point of interest back when I did jump from 28 to 15mm scifi skirmish in the early 2000's I actually found it a bit of a culture shock while gaming to get used to the smaller size. Even though I was 6mm gaming with Battletech on a regular basis, shifting down to 15mm as a skirmish did jolt visually and gaming wise. However I am sure you could skirmish in 6mm, it is only just a case of getting models you can move easily, so perhaps larger bases despite the small size?

Mentioned above for 6mm Skirmishing, Angel Barraks has just released his range of 6mm character miniatures to the general populace. A must for anyone considering 6mm Scifi skirmishing I think.

link

Oopsy Daisy, just order a set and then some. You never know – one day that idea of a portable skirmish board will happen…

Jimboba, I think I know what my Jan., 1, 2016 order will be!

Thanks.

I'm a 15mm man myself. I love the scale for the reasons stated above. Here's a few of my armies:

link

Went for 15mm and have ended up making my own low-tech, post-apoc rules. This has resulted in me actually using a bunch of 15mm fantasy sculpts from copplestone castings.

Will get them all up when I finally finish painting them.

It depends on what you want. 10 or 15mm giant robots does not work. If you want tanks and infantry then 6mm can seem a bit small. So the answer depends on what kind of game you want to play.

10mm Giant Robots can work, there's a lot of 1/144 scale Gundams out there to borrow.

But I only own 1 setting for 6mm gaming: Robotech RPG Tactics. I went a bit nuts on my KS backing and have an absolutely absurd number of Valks (and not anywhere near enough battlepods).

Otherwise, I play in 15mm for platoon+ per side and 28mm for Squad per side.

Well then you'd probably already know my RRT site…..

link

How do you base 6mm individual figures? Since I already use pennies for 15mm I'm not sure what else I could use…

Small washers with enough magnet-attracting content (for storage and magnetised battle boards). Ones I use are 6 or 7mm across.

You could use some of the 6mm bases already available …

Most of those are for groups though unless I'm mistaken, I already have some of those. 6-7mm washers is a thought, thanks Jimboba :)