"Playing Field of Battle 2 with 15mm?" Topic

Friends, anyone out there playing Brent Oman's Field of Battle 2 Rules in 15mm? Any tips or tricks or is it quite straightfoward?

Its all written for 25/28mm with a couple of off-hand references to smaller scales. Using 15mm should allow me to fit a larger battle on a smaller table than 25/28mm. Is it as simple as cutting measurements, ground scale and distances in half? Obviously basing needs to be the same for both armies and I'm the sort that will check battalion and squadron frontages against the ground scale to ensure they are close to historical frontages.

Anything more complicated?

Nick

Straight forward. FOB2 is pretty loose on basing requirements as it's a fairly abstract game that's more about command control than worrying about scale. When I did it in 15mm I used 30mm square bases with 6 figures (2 rows of 3) per base. That means a 4 base unit is about 5 inches wide in line formation. I just used the normal distances in the rules and it worked fine. If I wanted to compress things to fit more stuff on the table I would have made my own measuring sticks where 20mm on the stick = 1 inch of game movement.

As I said, ground scale isn't a big deal in FOB2. For instance, in the Franco Prussian War of 1870 (which the author of FOB2 plays), a 1000 man Prussian battalion would be around 333 yards wide in close order. A French battalion early in the war was under strength due to mobilization issues and was around 600 men (about 200 yards frontage). Yet the author fields both as 4 bases when he uses FOB2 to play FPW (See some table shots on his blog here -> link ). As a matter of fact, FOB1 had more weapon types than FOB2 does – when your infantry can move across the table in one good run of cards, a range difference of 1 or 2 inches doesn't really matter.

To get to your question, yes, you can cut the ranges in distances in half and it will work just fine.

My gaming group uses Piquet and/or FOB all the time, as we play with one of the Piquet authors.

4 15mm infantry or 2 cavalry on 1" squares.

4 bases for inf/cav. 2 artillery bases.

Yeah no problem at all.

I have played FOB1 (not a lot of differences between editions) quite extensively in 15mm. In fact, I have a French vs. Austrians game setup in the basement right now that I've been playing. Keep your basing consistent and everything works fine -- and I just use the 28mm move distances for 15mm.

Thanks guys, as it happens my infantry are currently based as 4 figures on a 1" square and cavalry are 2 on a 1" x 1.5" base with 4 bases to both a battalion and a regiment.

So it should work, thanks