A Word on Ground Scale

A contributor on TMP (The Miniatures Page) commented on the Williamite Warfare adaptation with a cautionary note on taking into account the required ground scale. This is something I have never bothered about in the past - but then again I have not bothered to draft publicly available rules before. After discussions with my partner in crime Matthew, we are probably not going to this time either, so I apologise to anyone looking forward to that consideration because I doubt you'll find it here.

Having said that, if anyone has a further adaptation and wants to forward it to me at any time, please feel free to do so and I will post it here for others to share. I can always receive contributions at Geebards@hotmail.com and will design some sub-forum within this Blog to accommodate contributions - should they prove forthcoming.

AND why are we of this temperament when it comes to ground scale? Mainly it has to do with or preferred figure scale - 28mm. It is unlikely that we would represent anything larger than a section of any battle at any one time. Even with several thousands of points, we are unlikely to assemble a whole army for the battles of this period - they were just too big. This has challenged our figure scale preference and I earnestly feel if I were ever to move toward 10mm armies, this would be my period of choice: but in addition to, not in lieu of 28mm.

Because we wargame in 28mm, I believe our level of gaming is a 'zoom-in' or battle snap-shot and because of that, relative distances, battalion coverage and so forth seem less important than if we were re-fighting a particular battle over a re-created battlefield in its entirety. Another issue is our representative troop scales within 28mm wargaming. In short, there's only so far you can reduce your frontage and depth with figures of these sizes. A 20mm frontage is about as low as you can go. In representing a battalion arrayed according to national doctrines, the frontages of a battalion are going to be pretty much dictated by the miniatures themselves.

I have long dabbled with the notion of bases being the essential unit element in the game. This is not novel in any way but a faster play system would rely on bases rather than figure counting - less dice etc. This way, we could festoon our bases with as many figures as we liked and the base dimension would dictate the figure numbers - not the other way around. Ground scale would be more relevant to our thinking in such a system. As Williamite Warfare is an adaptation of WECW; however, this is not an option for this project.