"Setting a ground scale" Topic

I was thinking, what does a designer consider when setting up a games ground scale. It made me think as I have recently seen a game which had, in my personal opinion, an inappropriate ground scale. That made me think as to what and how we set our own ground scales and what other folk use to set their games ground scale?
Being modern period gamer, my pet hate is Tank Parking lots. That means Tanks need to be spaced apart by some measure based on some logic. The standard figure, there are some documents on this, is that closer than 40m spacing means that a hit on one vehicle can allow an almost 100% probability of hitting an adjacent vehicle closer than 40m, it's recommended that 75m is better. So how does that effect ground scale. Well and I admit this is in part aesthetics as well as practicality. Place two tanks adjacent, then that for me must imply a penalty. So what distance apart is a reasonable gap for both aesthetics and practically to monitor? We settled on about 2 tank widths. Now it' too be obsessive is impractical and whatever is chosen needs to have a bit of flexibility. But that is a good indicator. We chose a simple scale for 1/144 of 1mm represents 1m. If we set a distance of 40mm between nearest points on a tank we get a center to center spacing of about 60m. Not perfect but it keeps stuff looking sensible and allows a reasonable monitoring of a critical parameter. That means a platoon of infantry will cover ideally about 250m (250mm ground scale) and with the typical 500m spacing (the platoon covers the 100m+ either side by fire to me it does not look unreasonable. We did some work and due to some assumptions the optimum spacing for a platoon is 600m but that given other issues seems a reasonable compromise. Thus we have for a 1:1 ground scale. At greater than 1:1 I have never worked out how do it sensibly, for instance in Northern Europe a platoon may need to deploy over more than one field. That can make for big bases that span more than one field and then it to me seems very hard to reconcile with the real world. To me not to do so would make a game I personally would not want to play. So ground scale to model scale is key issue for myself.
So what are the key issues that set your preferred ground scale?

Please not this is a thread in the Cold war section, It is not intended to cover other periods like Ancients or napolionics. If you are interested in this issue for other periods please make your own thread, not hijack this thread.

partly it helps to scale units as well. I like CD as stands are platoons. using the 1"=50m scale a 15mm model takes up roughly the same area as a platoon does and having a couple inches between stands is not an issue. Also, there are fewer models on the table (7 vs. 31 for a Soviet Tank battalion)

I think with small scale soldiers it is fairly easy to represent an engagement at a 1-1 figure scale and accurate ground scale. For larger battles, I think you need to start with a ground scale first and then decide how many figures/models equal a unit. Example, if X type of company defends on a 300 meter front, how many inches do we want 300 meters to be, and how many models do we want in that space? At this level, I think you have to go with whatever makes sense and is pleasing to your eye. I do not care for the tank park type of rules. While that look may fit in with the ground scale of the rules, it is just so aesthetically unpleasing to my eye that I do not want to play the game. To each their own.

If you don't already have the information, you might find these interesting.

PDF link

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We've played 1:1t type games using 6mm stuff and 1/300 ground scale, so 12" = 100 yards. Fine for a WW2 company attack on a 400 yard frontage.

We rapidly went up to 15mm, using the same ground scale, then halved the ground scale…. It still looks OK to us.

Tbh I mainly play grand tactical and operational games, so one base is anything from a platoon to a brigade. Ground scale anything from 1" = 50m, to 1" = 5km.

Jamming a whole panzer Corps into the sorts of frontages units had at Kursk means tank (halftracks, lorry, artillery etc) parks all the way! But I don't see many gaps between divisions on real operations maps.

79th PA Thanks. I have seen it and ued it before but section 5.11 does show interestuing detail. In a combined formation 4 tanks take up 400m frontage. Being a bit optermistic that is 1/5th of tank's extreme normal tank range or 8" at 1"=50m. That means if you want to represent even vaugely credibly, how much space they take up a single tank representing a platoon would need to be on a base with a 6" frontage (assuming you are not going for the full 400m max). That is a very big base, potentially 2/3 of a Northern European field. That base is going to spend a lot of time ballanced on top of hedges OR you have unrealistic/very rare terrain, that to me as a simulator would be utterly implatabl;e. I play for simulation not just a game.

I have some military maps from the cold war, they provide very detailed terrain. Clearly this detail is required by the military. To play on anything significantly less detailed would be a failure to get any sort of fidelity into the game. Again some folk care little for reality which is there perogative, but the relationship to the real world sufferes tremendoesly.

I see the dilemma. Maybe an option is using four 1.5 inch bases. 1 base has the model and the others represent occupied space, which you can noodle around the table to better conform with the terrain.

As mentioned, you could play tank scale as ground scale if you use 1:300 figures, 1 foot would be 100 yards. Then on a 6 foot table you could deploy what 9 tanks properly spread out.
If on the other hand you assume no one is really going to deploy that close together you can assume the area the model occupies includes a standoff distance.
Thus you could declare the turret is the location of the tank, the body the standoff area and so a 300 scale tank could easily fit on a 6-900 scale battlefield. at 1:900 scale your tanks would be 3" apart.
Or you could assume the standoff area is going to be historical (75m), and thus the size of the tank is the size of the standoff area, then you end up with tankparks hub to hub but the ground scale would be (assuming the 1:300 scale tank is 1/3" wide) 1:2500 or so.

79thPA an interesting solution but not one I see many folk addoptuing but it does have merit.
Murvihill the point is that tank parks to mee look ridicioulus so your last suggestion for me would be no go.
Interstingly on another thread Mako11 noted tanks should be at least 1 hull appart, not too bad a suggestion for setting a groundscale.

Interesting nobody other than 79thPA has suggested a solution for multi tank representation as a single element. I can't as I have none. 79thPA is the first I have ever seen.

Another option would be giving each tank a zone of control. This would be easier for hex based rules. Use 2" hexes and a tank has a ZOC of 2" hexes around it like in a board game to represent the space taken up by a platoon. If the ZOC is not maintained the enemy gets some kind of bonus since the armor is "bunched up."

I have found in 1-to-1 unit scales that a ground scale of about 3-to-1 to the models is not noticeably distracting or distorting. So 1000-to-1 ground scale (1 meter on the table = 1 km in the game) for 6mm (300-to-1) miniatures works well in my book.

I can push that up to double it, 2000-to-1 for 6mm units, but at that level I start to stress over the distortions. I just don't like two lane roads that are 100m wide, and weapons that can't range to the other side of a parking lot.

But for cold war (and newer) conflicts, 1 to 2km is just not enough range to put tanks on the table. Even infantry weapons today make those ranges too close for any real maneuvering. So it takes a lot of gaming space, a "board" that is maybe 3 x 5m, to give an appropriate area for tank formations (anything more than individual tanks) to operate at a tactical level.

I used to use a large portion of my garage floor for cold war games that involved company combat teams defending vs. battalion scale attacks. My knees and back won't give me that opportunity to do that anymore. So in more recent years it's been mostly WW2 (let's me cut down the ranges a bit) on a ping-pong table (2 x 3m of game table) for me.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)