"6mm Baccus Samurai" Topic

Hey all!

Just bought a bunch to paint up… have always wanted a samurai army!

Anyone have any links to neat appropriately sized stuff, like terrain, that they could share?

Also, thinking about basing… would like to do larger bases with a lot of guys on each, maybe even one base per clan… (I am not designing for a particular game, but for my own eventual rule set)… but how to incorporate spears, guns, archers?

I was thinking maybe EVERY base would have infantry, and then they would have additional troops at the front… more infantry, some cavalry, some archers, some guns… and that would determine the difference between them? Makes sense?

Nice, 6mm samurai is a cool way to get a samurai army that really looks like an army.

I sell some terrain for 6mm samurai through Mura Miniatures:
muraminiatures.com/products/6mm

As for basing, I'd say go ahead. As long as you're multibasing, there's nothing stopping you from mixing your troops: I'm even going to start doing it for my 28mm miniatures now that I'm rebasing my army from single bases to multibases.

I've seen some really great big bases for 6mm, and to this day I'd say that these are the best example I've seen:

link

I've based my 6mm armies on smaller bases than that, as I did them for FoG/DBA back in the days. So 40mm wide and 15, 20 or 30 mm deep. At that size it's harder to mix, but I could still cram in some infantrymen on my cavalry bases.

A good start would be to do as you say, to mix infantry in all kinds of bases. There'd be spear armed infantrymen in both missile and cavalry formations. Having a few infantrymen running next to the horses gives it a lot more mixed up feeling:

I've done small 30mm x 25mm bases, but I'm intending to put them together into bigger units. The only reason I've not gone for big unit bases is that I might want some mechanism for representing formations down the line.

I've also done some terrain, including some of Setsuko's buildings. I've posted some details on our club 'blog here:
wargamesasp.wordpress.com/2017/06/11/6mm-sengoku-progress

6 mm samurai are awesome. The pics that setsuko linked -- the Jim Louttit compositions are incredible. I am very similar to you in that I found the preexisting rule sets to be lacking since samurai armies were not blocks of carefully separated groups of identical troops. These armies formed due to feudal obligation and thus were (in my mind) more like what Louttit is depicting.

I am still in the research and development phase but am cobbling together some rules ideas which use the Louttit style basing which has mounted troops, yari infantry, nagaeyari infantry, and teppo/yumi infantry all on one base.

I am using the Takeda screen as inspiration:

So Ashram, what you are saying makes perfect sense to me, in terms of basing.

One thing is that in the course of my research I have found sources stating that wooden forts were very important during sengoku. However, only the castles remain. So I have not seen what these wooden forts looked like. I would love to see one such wooden fort depicted.

I am thinking of purchasing this castle:
papierschnitzel.com/samurai-castle-towers-released

There are some examples of woodwn forts in some of my ospreys and in some japanese books I have. Will be out travelling all week though, so I don't have access to them.

Mixed bases are definitely the way to go for this style of warfare. I've been pondering something along these lines for a while as it will fit nicely with our Polemos rules mechanics.

Japanese warfare works on very different principles to contemporary European norms and needs a very different approach.

I remember the rules discussion from last year. I just started revisiting it recently after effectively switching to 6mm. In 15mm the project was just too daunting.

Last time I was thinking about something similar to ACOS or Battles in the Age of War, where units are made up of bases representing the different troop types. But I think that's too fiddly. I'm moving away from that now towards each unit essentially being treated as a combined arms entity.

I've got a set more or less done, so we should get to try it out soon. It's not likely to appeal to most people as it'll be card-driven and probably grid-based. But hopefully in the next month or so I'll write up some ideas. I'd be interested to see any ideas or progress you've made with your rules dddd99 and Ashram.

Incidentally, there's some illustrations and descriptions of the smaller Sengoku forts in "Die Samurai der Sengoku-Zeit" (part 2) by Till Weber. It's all in German, though.

@setsuko – post away your sources or even a pic or too; I am definitely interested. Recently I have been liking to build things… scratch building or whatever it's called. I might like to make a nice fort.

@Baccus yes please make a good quality samurai ruleset and I think it will also help your samurai figure sales in tandem. It must be so hard to sculpt the past, but Baccus figures seem to "get it" and hopefully your rules will too. Looking forward to them.

@Rabelais – I am encouraged by all these people attempting to make rules. In fact, I have written about a 10 page draft, but I am constantly changing ideas and methods since I have only really made computer games before so wargame design is different since you cannot offload complex calculations to an unbiased and lightning fast processor. It needs to be simple but also a beautiful and strategic design. "I'm moving away from that now towards each unit essentially being treated as a combined arms entity." -- yep that is what I am doing too. By the way, I still value highly our last discussion where you introduced me to ACOS and Blucher I think too. Also thanks for the book recommendation.

What my latest method is to try to find good sources and gauge how much we can know from the historical sources and try to find a way to depict these historical stories in game. A researcher that I follow lately made a good point about the scarcity of sengoku sources. They were in civil war with no time to write or be historians; they left that to people of the Edo period haha.

I am a tortoise on this matter, but I am working toward producing a ruleset. Wish I had more time but I have a 1 year old son so I go as best I can.