15mm ACW terrain - What scales best?

[King Thor]

Hi there,

I am thinking of adding a 15mm ACW project to the queue.. 

Through the magic of the internet I have been able to do a lot of research on the scales of various miniature manufacturers, and am leaning towards Peter Pig and Blue Moon. I know Blue Moon is closer to 18mm.

That brings me to my quandary: how do the various minis scale with the buildings from terrain manufacturers?
I have been browsing terrain/buildings on the websites of Hovels and Peter Pig, but have not seen explicit comparisons, which is easy to find on the internet for the actual miniatures.

Does anybody have any suggestions/experience?

Thanks!

KT

[Mindenbrush]

I use Bluemoon ACW - they are taller than Peter Pig/AB etc etc - with 15mm buildings from Battlefield Terrain Concepts http://battlefieldterrain.com/ and find they work well for me.

[FifteensAway]

I'll get to buildings in a moment.  You cannot go wrong with either Bluemoon or Peter Pig but I would not recommend mixing the two ranges - they are very different in size.

I went for a while with 10 mm or smaller 15 mm buildings but eventually decided 'normal' sized 15 mm buildings worked better for me.  You can find a lot of buildings in Old West ranges suitable for ACW.  I'd give my strongest recommendation to Stone Mountain Miniatures, they have quite a few ACW buildings.  Peter Pig has some decent buildings, too, from the Old West range (and they have trains - get rubber track from Freikorps/QRF).  Check out Hovels buildings as well - though I don't recall if they have much suitable for ACW.  I stick with resin because I just don't like MDF - ugly as sin unless you put extra work into hiding the fact that they are MDF but popular with a lot of people.  And there seems to be a growing option of print your own building components but I haven't - and don't currently plan to - explored that option.

Hope that helps.  Oh, Bluemoon Old West buildings are an option but they are really big, designed it seems for genuine 1:1 skirmish game with room to get hands inside.  They are nice, just Big.

[Codsticker]

I received a number of ACW buildings from JR Miniatures (availanble from Noble Knight Games in the US and Magister Militum in the UK). Very nice sculpts but some of buildings suffer from air bubbles and obscured detail.

[FlyXwire]

King Thor,

It's a good question - and some or your decision might depend on how you plan to use your buildings - as area terrain, or as individual buildings for farmsteads to fight small battles around (and/or more decidedly towards skirmishes)?

The Blue Moon buildings are great, and they have open roofs for placing sharpshooters in, but their footprints can be quite large, and work against them for trying to reflect town areas that you want to be within a scale map area.

Here's a pic of a Gettysburg skirmish scenario I designed around the fighting for the Bliss farm.  The 1st picture shows my Old Glory15s (not Blue Moon figs) on multiple-figure bases, and interacting around the Blue Moon buildings -



After the above scenario, I opted to remount my figs on smaller bases, some of this coming from my desire to get my minis "closer to the action" - meaning, closer to interacting with the terrain, of which moving in and around the buildings was part of that consideration -

[King Thor]

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies, very helpful!

@Mindenbrush - Will check out battlefield terrain concepts

@Fifteensaway - I am the same mind as you, strongly prefer resin over MDF. I will check out Stone Mountain Miniatures

@ Codsticker - Does anyone have the rights to cast the JR Miniatures buildings?

@ Flybywire - Gorgeous pics, very helpful! It looks like they scale nicely with those buildings, out of curiosity what rules do you use? I actually have some 28mm (purchased the Perry Battle in a box set) which I planned to use as more of a skirmish style game using either Black Powder or Sharps Practice.

[FlyXwire]

Thanks KT!

I've modified Muskets & Tomahawks for the ACW, and we play it with 15s or 28s w/o modding the ground scale (something that was achieved when converting to the "rounder" stands mentioned above).



 

[Leman]

I have found that 6mm buildings work well with 10mm figures, so had a look at 10mm buildings with 15mm figures. It really didn’t work (I used some 10mm buildings from my SYW collection rather than buy specific buildings). Having said that Esconographia (sold through Pendraken) do a small range of ready painted ACW buildings, ostensibly in 10mm, but they are definitely at the high end of 10mm, and I have seen a 15mm game which used them and they didn’t look out of place.

While on the subject, although Blue Moon do some really unusual sets for the ACW (such as the settler’s wagon) I still prefer Peter Pig figures, particularly the option to change heads to produce more unique figures.