Hi All,

In line with the contention that 28's generally look more like a bunch of blokes taking a flag out for a walk.

If anybody has had success in modelling BUAs that actually look like BUAs rather than one or two buildings in a field I'd appreciate some photos. I'm looking for ideas along the lines of Bruce Weigle's work but maybe built onto something like 60x60 bases or something similar.

Regards,

Steve

I think perhaps I would suggest the buildings from http://www.totalbattleminiatures.com/

Their 6mm Big Battalions range have a reduced footprint so you can get  more houses into a given area.

I use hex-based rules, and together with my Baccus French, they look like this on my tabletop...

That is a very nice looking set-up!

For my Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia I've gone 60mm modular sections so I can build bigger or smaller settlements

Hello Steve!

This is another area that is pretty trickey to deal with and can easily go amuck. The first problem is the scale of your game. Assuming your going with your brigade game on bases 75x75, means your frontage and depth are probably out of whack for a properly scaled brigade as they come in all shapes and sizes.

Next up is the buildings although height wise match the figures reasonably well the footprint of it is out of whack with your ground scale. So even a single building covers a lot of ground and actually represents a lot more then one building.

So the only way to try and compensate for these is to minimize your use of buildings as much as possible and use smaller ones where possible. All of this of course is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. So simply keep all of this in mind and use as few buildings as possible. Even larger towns or cities will shrink a lot in relation to your big brigade bases. That is why a lot of BUAs are simply shown as one or two buildings in 6mm.

To help overcome this problem even at my scale of a battalion 60x30 I only use a single building that looks like a farm house, put a field beside it etc. to make it look like a farm to represent most small villages/towns simply to please the eye. It looks like a farm on the table but the players know its a town. I also use some 60x60 for farms/villages/towns depending on the particular battle or where their located or add a few more 60x30 if I know it should be a bigger area or I need more buildings for the scenario. 

The other thing that I do is control the basing of the buildings. I only use 60x30, 60x60 and some custom bases. Most 6mm buildings will fit on these sizes. Total Battle Miniatures makes a number of buildings in 60x30 and 30x30.

In the end it's all simply a matter of what looks good to you and works in a practical manner with the size of your basing.

Hope this helps you in some way.

Best regards,

Glenn

Thanks all,

Some nice painting there, I can see a fair amount of work went into building that castle. I really like the river!

Yeah, I left out the critial info of the ground scale.

I must admit I've been eyeing off the TBM stuff for some time but at 1BW=300yds I'm never going to be able to put a TBM Hougoument on the table and call it Hougoument.

I definitely agree with the modular concept of BUA's.

With some rough calcs using 1BW=300yds gives me a footprint for La Haye Sainte of 0.2BW x 0.3BW.  A very quick look through the maps of the French retreat at Marengo are suggesting large farms of similar footprints.

I guess considering the footprint for an artillery base in MdE is 0.5x0.5BW which seems very large to me then tweaking the footprint of a large farm complex by making it a bit larger is within about right.

This kind of also fits the brigade base size in a conceptual way in that if you consider a standard brigade to be of approx. 4 battalions. Say the rough footprint for a battalion is then maybe 0.5x0.5BW .......and also consider that La Haye Sainte was defended by about 500 men (say a field strength battalion) then it's all about within coo-ee.

Regards,

Steve

I'm going to try and post two photos. The first shows approx 3mm buildings being used with 2mm figures, although I have also used these buildings with 6mm. Mainly from Irregular (IK range in the 2mm section, but much bigger than the regular 2mm buildings) but also some Brigade Models buildings. The second shows some 3mm Total Battle Miniatures buildings with 6mm Irregular FPW figures (these came out years before the Baccus ones, and I have now been wargaming for 50 years)

For big battles (not skirmish) I follow the notion that building scale should reflect ground scale more than figure scale.  So I use 1/1200 buildings for my BUAs.  These are readily available and look fantastic. In addition the increased realtive size of the minis shows them off.  Now most games I play are using a 1in=200yrds scale or a 1"=100 yards. For colonial wargaming, or AWI (and other european conflicts on the NA continent) I use 6mm buildings. My rules of choice for WSS is Age of Reason, so my 6mm buildings come out for that.  I am currently in the process of Migrating ECW/Italian Wars/medieval/ancients over to the Hail Caesar/Pike &Shotte rules, whihc i think will also use 6mm buildings.

Hi dourpuritan & jbickley00,

Thanks for that info! I actually already own a bunch of Brigade Model buildings so it's encouraging that you have also gone down this path. I was a bit surprised when I recieved them though because I wasn't expecting them to be so small. I've been holding off doing anything with them so far because the 6mm figures stand taller than the buildings.

Dourpuritan, those 2mm towns look great.

Jbickley, do you have any photos that you can post with 6mm figures next to your 2mm BUAs?

Have either of you tried increasing the height of the buildings by mounting them on higher ground (e.g. a raised area in the middle of the base) or some or trick? 

Regards,

Steve

If anybody has some photos of Baccus figures being used with the 3mm range of buildings produced by Supreme Littleness it would be great if you could post one or two of them on the forum.