I've still never fully decided what conclusions to draw from that. It mostly depends on how cynical and vitriolic I'm feeling.
Perhaps it's to due with the suppoort structure around games?
Most fantasy and sci fi produces have a facebook page, blog, forum,twitter, instagram ect, a hundred lines of communication to say to their players "show your support, tell us what you're doing, let us know, spread the word!"
And whilst more recent historical rule sets like Saga and the warlord sets also have this, Alot of the rule sets produced for BIG games are either no longer being handled by their author, or are kept within a small group of players and only really promoted on forums dedicated to that game, made by the people playing it.
For example, The sword and the flame ,a very famous historical rule set with its own wikipedia page, has no obvious facebook presence , no social media presence, and no unified website from what i can find.
"GOOD!" you might say, But if you aren't at a club where someone is already playing that rule set then it isn't going to get new players, especially if you aren't making the effort to promote it yourself.
In short, I think fantasy and sci fi producers incentivise their player base to share more through images and articles where the myriad historical rulesets stick very much to their core demographic of show attendees or people they already know.
It's called 'not moving with the times'. It's so easy to promote a game or rule set these days but if the people trying to do so are still in the SAE and catalogue without pictures mind set they're going to have a very insular outlook and appearance. That pesky internet thing is to blame. It's not how it used to be in my day.
I hear even Citadel have a website these days!
Yes, it's dedicated to the destruction of 6mm historical wargames. ;)
My guess? The bottom is gradually dropping out of the 6mm market - as I say, always something of a niche interest anyway - and the chap that owns Baccus is simply raging at the dying of the light...
I guess I'd feel the same if it was my business. But it may just be down to demographics...
Like I always bang on about, miniatures wargaming is a 3D visual hobby -
Especially if new blood gets breathed into it - for instance what if GW got back into Epic?
I think it's worth picking up on this point.
Whilst I don't wish to diminish the skills of anyone that plays 6mm, I believe you have to be a very good modeller to make 6mm miniatures and scenery "Mesh" - By that i mean, look like a cohesive and some what realistic scene when on placed together.
I'm not saying there aren't amazing 6mm modellers out there, There obviously are! but they aren't as easy to come by as 28mm ones and are much harder to photograph!
Bases and the borders of terrain will always get in the way , But with 28 and 15mm you have a big enough figure to negate some of this and counter the part of your brain that says "I am looking at a figure on a base on a mat "
Whilst 6mm battles may look amazing from a distance, They suffer on close examination. A 6mm base of figures on a table that isn't expressly modelled in very find scale will always look like it's carrying around a very sturdy dias to stand on, and the many brush marks or patches of highlight will stand out above the sculpted detail they're sitting on.
Big swooping shots of battles are fun but make for terrible magazine content, because you end up not really being able to see anything expect some blocks on a board.
It's a shame, But magazines need nice pictures because most of us buy the magazine to look at first and read second, And tiny scales very often don't hold up to that level of scrutiny.
http://lordashramshouseofwar.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/10mm?updated-max=2014-02-15T09:00:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=6&by-date=false
Lord Ashrams house of war has some amazing 10mm images , you can see that an insane amount of effort has gone into making them look as good as possible.
The lack on non-28mm stuff can be only be for two reasons - either apathy or no one's playing with anything else.
LAF certainly comes across as a forum for larger scale (28mm plus) stuff used for skirmish-type gaming.
"6mm wargames figure manufacturer in diatribe concerning how few people are buying 6mm wargames figures shock!" ;)
My guess? The bottom is gradually dropping out of the 6mm market - as I say, always something of a niche interest anyway - and the chap that owns Baccus is simply raging at the dying of the light...
I guess I'd feel the same if it was my business. But it may just be down to demographics...
Actually, I know from talking to Pete that Baccus are so busy they are struggling to cope with business (such as not being able to supply a USA distributor) - Pete's business is very healthy....
I think it is more a feeling, if you read the article and subsequent comments, that the magazines are drifting into their own niche of 28mm skirmish based wargaming and ceasing to cover big battle wargaming...
I don't have any opinions on this as I hardly read the magazines and mostly collect new armies in 54mm nowadays so I'm drifting into another niche... :-)
Mike
... just reflecting what wargamers are actually playing and modelling.
If it was me, I'd probably be using 28mm rules and filling up each 28mm-size base with several 6mm figures instead of one 28mm one. Imagine a Lion Rampant '12 figure' unit represented by 12 bases-worth of 6mm figures. Six figures to a base perhaps? More? That's a unit of 72-100 figures - just one unit of five or six. Is that 'big battle' enough?
I think I'd go even further, and say that in 6mm the visual strengths completely flip from the figures to the terrain.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I have no personal experience with 6mm, but it seems to me that 6mm completely inverts the terrain vs minis trade-off dynamic of 28mm, and IMO maybe some of the alleged problems of 6mm may stem from a failure to recognize and/or embrace that.
In 28mm, the figures can be very satisfyingly detailed and characterful, but terrain and vehicles are forced to be "foreshortened" in scale due to practical space limits. Even with the forshortening, terrain has to be big in a way that for many people forces detail to be sparse and simplified in order to be time/money efficient. This results in buildings and the like which often do not match the visual weight, density, and verisimilitude of the minis.
In 6mm, the opposite is true: figures are so small that they cannot be easily detailed, realistically proportioned, or individual, but the terrain can easily be decompressed into realistic proportions and sprawl, at a size that allows for detail of the same density of that of the figures to look much more "real" than on the figures, AND to be simpler to execute for a given scale detail than in 28mm.
So my instinct would be that when getting into 6mm gaming, the "visual appeal" focus should be on the terrain rather than the figures. Imagine, say, the city of Mordheim realized in 28mm (or 35, as the case may be), vs 6mm. In 28, you'd be dealing with a handful of individual compressed-scale buildings on a printed or textured mat. But in 6mm, you could do an entire district of the city in true scale, working in modules of blocks rather than buildings. You could easily play games on museum-style replicas of cities or landscapes.
The intent would not be to be cheaper than 28mm, rather you'd take the time and money and ambition you'd spend on the figures in 28mm, and in 6mm spend it on the terrain instead. Likewise, when you showcase 6mm stuff to hype the scale, you'd focus on impressively rendered settings before impressively rendered figures.
This is just the way it seems to me, and maybe I'm weird, but when I see pics like the one Fred posted on the first page, I feel like people are completely barking up the wrong tree by executing and deploying terrain pieces in 6mm the same way they do in 28mm. The philosophy of it feels backward to me, like they're inadvertently getting the worst of both worlds. 28mm knows it's visual strengths and plays to them, while 6mm is handicapping itself trying to play to 28mm's strengths instead of its own.
I feel like as long as 6mm is thought of as being defined by the figures the way larger scales are, it'll always be at a disadvantage in terms of visual appeal. 6mm's native strength is the terrain.
This is all about the aesthetic angle, of course. It's tempting at first thought to believe it's natural to focus on the figures since "it's the figures that really matter, the terrain is an extra", but this is actually false when you think it through. Gameplay-wise it makes absolutely no difference which you focus on aesthetically, since either or both can be reduced to cardboard cutout markers without effecting the pure game.
I play 6mm and 3mm but wouldn't bother posting on here to be honest about micro wargaming, there are other forums and groups that are based around these scales that I follow for news and eye candy.
Which forums do you reckon?
Whelp, I'll just have to Revitalize this forums 6mm fascination. To my elven legions!
Ultimately it is important to remember this
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg)
That a photo of a game, isn't a game.
I find that once I am playing a game, you rapidly become involved in the game and the simplest of terrain rapidly becomes a battlefield. But this doesn't mean that I am always wanting to improve the look of the game - and have upgraded my terrain mat recently, and want to remake bases for my terrain so they look better in photos. But these are quite low priority over painting troops!
Interesting comments Connect.
I'd suggest as well that the elephant in the room (Games Workshop) has made 28mm (or close to it - what are they? 30 - 32mm now or something?) the "default" scale. Everyone (everyone new anyway) starts on it and many people stick with GW for the majority of their gaming career. Thus the scale and techniques for it become so familiar that any movement out of it into a different scale is an uncomfortable leap (where's my paintable eyes? do I really have to brighten my colours to get the figures to look right? etc, etc). Flames of War is about the only relatively popular game that doesn't use 28mm. The others more than likely piggy back in some respects on GW's hold upon the market.
Interesting comments Connect.
I'd suggest as well that the elephant in the room (Games Workshop) has made 28mm (or close to it - what are they? 30 - 32mm now or something?) the "default" scale. Everyone (everyone new anyway) starts on it and many people stick with GW for the majority of their gaming career. Thus the scale and techniques for it become so familiar that any movement out of it into a different scale is an uncomfortable leap (where's my paintable eyes? do I really have to brighten my colours to get the figures to look right? etc, etc). Flames of War is about the only relatively popular game that doesn't use 28mm. The others more than likely piggy back in some respects on GW's hold upon the market.
Interesting comments Connect.In addition to being comfortable with the scale after experiencing GW, I don't think you can discount the value of a terrain collection in keeping folks from switching scales. Some terrain is multiscale, but most is optimized for one scale. Once you build a table full of 28mm stuff do you really want to switch scales? I dabble in 10mm and have built some terrain for it but I did start with GW and 28mm. Though I've not played a current GW game for several years I've got so much time invested in building 28mm terrain that I forsee it being my main -and nearly only- scale for a long time.
I'd suggest as well that the elephant in the room (Games Workshop) has made 28mm (or close to it - what are they? 30 - 32mm now or something?) the "default" scale. Everyone (everyone new anyway) starts on it and many people stick with GW for the majority of their gaming career. Thus the scale and techniques for it become so familiar that any movement out of it into a different scale is an uncomfortable leap (where's my paintable eyes? do I really have to brighten my colours to get the figures to look right? etc, etc). Flames of War is about the only relatively popular game that doesn't use 28mm. The others more than likely piggy back in some respects on GW's hold upon the market.
Before GW appeared 6mm was largely the preserve of a relatively small number of micro-armour gamers; its relative increase in 6mm popularity across a number of periods came after GW became established; I'm not even sure the two were connected.I'd agree with Arlequin, when I took up gaming in the late 70's, 6mm was the province of Kriegspeil types who liked the more strategic and bird's eye aspects of using small figures, or for Micro armour devotees. I had a couple of friends at UNI who liked the relative cheapness. I found this too impersonal and headache-inducing. I could never see the appeal personally, and at SELWG a few years ago there was a 6mm WWII game that was more like 'Where's Wally' or 'Spot the Ball'. Personally I could never go smaller than 15mm. As far as I was aware GW never got their claws into the 6mm fraternity to any great degree.
Adeptus titanicus/space marine/epic could even be said to have encouraged people into 6mm.
GW's impact was on 25mm if anything and raised the bar as regards battlefield terrain and the sculpting/painting of miniatures. Okay perhaps a drift to 15mm/6mm may have resulted from increased miniature prices, or from those wishing to project something that actually looked like a real battle, but I don't see how the Evil Empire stifled 6mm in any way.
... at least if you write o a magazine, someone pays you your worth as recognition.
I wonder whether over time, as a society we have become more inclined to instant gratification and less inclined to put the hard slog in.
I wonder whether over time, as a society we have become more inclined to instant gratification and less inclined to put the hard slog in. I can put a computer game up and not even read the rule manual to start playing, I just feel my way along and if I like it ect ect....
Their payment was super promt. I got £20 a page under Henry Hyde, but that has since dropped to £15 a page under the new editor (not his decision I would imagine).
By value / worth, I was making the comparison with blog writing, for which one is largely taken for granted.
For you can (and they do) do big battling with an all-encompassing Warhammer-style "spoon fed" system ...