Reply To: Scales

[Brian Handley]

No I first must delcare my bias I am at the simulation end of the wargame hobby.   Inevitably whatever you are simulating, be it flow modelling or warfare there are limitations.   To me there is an optimum of about 5 to 1 on figure to ground scale.  Ground scale to me is a critical requirement.  Theater of the mind is OK but it becomes improvisation, it may be OK, but to some it lacks the craft put into a Shakespear play.   Without a Groundscale a Machine gun cannot outrange a rifle in the practical military sence so you canot model basic tactics.    If that is not your thing then perhaps its imaterial.   Figures would idealy be at groundscale but as said even that is not practical.  Its more about what items are key.   In our own games we play with 1/144 tanks on relatively open battlefields so the key is modelling sight lines and ranges similar to real wolrd maps.   At 1/144 figure and 1/1000 ground scale we can represent generally all linear features (walls, hedges, roads, streams and rivers all be it oversize, but as has been said buildings are much harder at this scale.  We can just about model the road pattern in an urban area that is not VERY dence, but the houses are far to few.  The best we can do generally is put on houses with no gardens packed a tight as practical.  Its the equivalent of a wall function in Flow modeling, the Mesh is far to corse to model the boundary layer,  you use a function knowing that in some cased this is fine in others its a daft assumption.   It depends what you define as key parameters in your simulation.  To me its always the game, the modelling aspect is simply for me a 3D board with tolerable reperentations, which  makes understanding the situation quickers and more accurate.

In some wargames the needs of accurate groundscale are subsumed by the desire to put modles on the table that in the real world would not be in such close proximity, neither is right or wrong they represent different requirements folk have for ther gaming.

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