"Ground scale figure scale and table size" Topic

When I was designing rules back in the 1980s, the scale ground, time and troop scale was very important.
It was often hard to make terrain makers that except for man to man skirmish, buildings need to be of a smaller scale than figure size. Often a building would cover 150 yards on the table due to ground scale.

Which is why many rules treat built up areas as… areas. I'll often use building models a scale down – 10mm buildings with 15mm troops for example.

Let's make two assumptions. (And please do not bring up the old chestnut "It's a size, not a scale!")
1. The scale of a 15mm building is accurate.
2. The scale of a 15mm figure is accurate.

However, the figures are supposed to represent 20 men as in WRG Ancients, or 60 for a game like Empire.
In column, a battalion of the Old Guard can hide behind a shed.
It's worse with 25/28mm.

I have two basing conventions I use for my 28mm AWI. I have skirmish 1:1 figures based on 3/4" OD washers. But this even works 🙄 at 1:5 figure to man.
For battalion level, I'll put 3 figures on a 2" frontage.

At higher levels, terrain can indeed represent an area.
At skirmish level, one can legitimately say that a tree is a tree, and it can't be moved if it "gets in the way" of the gamer's deployment wishes. To my shock and dismay (😄) I once saw players in a 1916 IRA game push buildings aside so a truck could "fit" down the space between them. It never occurred to them that maybe it couldn't fit, like in real life. 🤷

To my shock and dismay…

Too funny. The players presumably weren't from Europe, where that situation is likely to occur.

I've drifted fully into the "does it look OK?" camp, but then I'm playing science fiction games.