Hobgoblin - You're insight and experience with 1/72 has been very helpful in years past, so I gotta ask now... what are your thoughts on 1/72 vs 15mm fantasy?
I think one big advantage of 15mm fantasy is that there's just so much more available. With 1/72, you've got the Dark/Light Alliance and Caesar ranges, and that's about it. Also, some of the Caesar stuff (adventurers and skeletons, notably) is out of production. By contrast, 15mm offers a huge spectrum of fantasy ranges (Mirliton/Grenadier, Blood Dawn, Chariot, Essex, Battle Valor, Demonworld, Splintered Light, Black Raven Foundry, Eureka, Alternative Armies/TTG/HOT, Khurasan, Tin Soldier, Irregular ...). On top of that, a lot of the new 3D-printed 10mm/Warmaster stuff from various manufacturers can be scaled neatly up to 15mm (I don't think it would work so well at 1/72 - at least not for humanish types - because of the proportions).
A big tick for 1/72, though, is that you can generally rely on different manufacturers' models being in scale with each other - because 1/72 actually is a scale! I'd say 15mm is about the worst for this - especially when historical and fantasy ranges are mixed. Unit basing can offset this quite a lot, but it's a consideration that doesn't really apply in 1/72.
I'd say that 15mm tends to be much better for element basing - especially if the elements are bigger than the typical HOTT/DBA-style three or four figures. That's largely because 15mm figures tend to be designed for wargaming whereas 1/72 stuff is often made for dioramas (I think). It's not a universal rule, and it probably applies more to historical 1/72 than fantasy. But 1/72 sets do tend to have a high proportion of outlandish poses that are hard to fit into units. You're more likely to get unusable poses in a 1/72 set than a batch of 15mm models. Spearmen or pikemen can be a particular problem in 1/72 - lots of models in that scale are brandishing their weapons in odd ways that make them hard to rank up as wargames units (HaT figures are often an exception here).
That said, 1/72 works very well for 25/28mm element basing - especially HOTT/DBA elements with a 60mm frontage. You can usually work make most figures look good in a strip of three or four, and that set-up is forgiving of even the most 'exotic' 1/72 poses (of which there are many - people being shot or stumbling or whatever). And because those bases are usually a single rank, you can base the figures up before painting them.
In general, 15mm is better to clean up and paint; soft plastic is always a bit of a pain, and the harder details on metal or resin are nicer to work with. That does, oddly, tend to make 1/72
quicker to paint: the details are shallower and you sometimes can't do much more than 'impressionistic' painting (there are exceptions, notably with Caesar, where the plastic is more like that used in Reaper Bones). The biggest armies I've painted in recent years have all been 1/72 because they're easy to get to a 'good enough' level (and hard to get much beyond that!). Recently, I've been painting some 15mm elements, and I'm fairly confident that I'd have got at least three of their 1/72 equivalents done in the time it takes to paint one 15mm base. The upside is that the finished 15mm looks cleaner and better overall.
Bendy weapons can be a problem with 1/72 - especially with Caesar. Conversely, Caesar plastic takes superglue very well and can be cut
and drilled to replace bendy weapons with metal or plastic.
Both scales benefit from 28mm monster options - anything that's meant for 28mm will work fine with 1/72, and any brutish 28mm humanoid is likely to look OK as an ogre or troll in the smaller scales (occasionally, a decorative skull or other body part will be a 'tell', but even those can be rationalised away as ogre skulls, etc.). For example, I've been finishing off some large Reaper Bones orcs based on 40mm squares. They make good ogres in 1/72 and 28mm, but they also work well as giants in 15mm; I'm planning an all-giant army for Fantastic Battles.
Which do I prefer? Well, I've had much greater success in finishing 1/72 armies and, consequently, have played many more games with them. But now that I'm getting some viable forces together in 15mm, I suspect they'll ultimately be my favourites - they've taken much more work, but they look the better for it.
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