I am at the point of taking the plunge into 6mm gaming and I have been toying with the idea of doing something with Danish king Valdemar Atterdag’s invasion of Gotland in 1361 or perhaps his attack on the island of Öland the year before. It is assumed that King Valdemar brought between 1800-2000 troops with him to Gotland while the Gotlandic peasant army he faced in principle could amount to as many as 5000 troops, which most likely never was the case. Actual numbers are of course ultimately estimates.  

I was hoping to find some advise. Firstly, how would you, as more experienced 6mm gamers, go about recreating the invasion of Gotland? How many minis would you use to convey the sense of scale in the armies? 1:1 or half the numbers? As a long-time 28mm gamer it is really hard for me to get a sense of this as well as how much space, say 1000 6mm minis actually take up. Secondly, I am looking for a good set of rules to fight medieval combat in 6mm. I was considering a scaled down version of Hail Caesar, but would any of you have a better suggestion?

Any advise to a complete 6mm beginner like me is appreciated.

Cheers

Martin

Martin,

I would say as a general rule a 6mm figure has a frontage of about 5mm. So Baccus figures are generally 4 figures in a strip 20mm wide. I am afraid I don't know much about the time you are planning to do but usually people would use 2 ranks of figures, for say Horse and Musket battles. For medieval I would guess you might want to use more  - 3, 4 or maybe more ranks. For 17th century battles I use 3, 4 or 6 ranks of infantry for different kinds of units. So if you had 1000 figures in 4 ranks and they are packed together by my maths that would have a frontage of 1.25 meters (about 4 feet in Imperial). 

Remember Cavalry are going to take up more space than this for the same number of figures.

Obviously you can change this by altering the number of ranks and having gaps between units but I would guess that you will probably also want to reduce the figure scale. So I would work backwards from the available table size you have. So your 5000 men if all infantry in 4 ranks would need a table about 20 feet long at 1:1. As you are likely to have a smaller table than this alter the numbers to reflect this. A scale of 1:5 in 4 ranks would mean you need a table about 4 feet long if they are all infantry & perhaps 6 - 8 feet if there are a reasonable number of cavalry.

Sorry I can't help you on rules but hopefully this will help with scale, unit size, etc.

I remember vaguely the campaign you are looking to recreate being covered by an article in one of the 'glossy' wargames magazines. ( Wargames Soldiers and Strategy I think, but do'nt quote me on that!)

Although I think they will have used a larger figure scale than 6mm, I'm sure some of the approach adopted can help you in what you are aiming to achieve.

Here is the one, WSS 75.

My 6mm ancients are based on a 25mm frontage which gives room for up to 4 or 5 (depending on pose) infantry in a rank and at a squeeze 4 cavalry.

My battlefield / dining room table is about 1.6m x 0.9m and my largest battle to date (photos on my website for those with too much time on their hands) which featured a total of 1,400 figures, but there was very limited room for anything other than a straight forward advance.

As the Baron stated earlier define what your A for Ambition is in wargaming at 6mm is and then figure out what the other A's (authenticy, abstraction and aesthetics) need to be to meet that.

Thanks for your thoughts,

I will do some further thinking on this. At the moment I am trying to visualize how many minis would be needed to give the opposing forces the correct feel of size without necessarily doing it 1:1. The scales you provided are very helpful here. As stated, I am a complete beginner when it comes to 6mm, and I find the whole thing of readjusting my mindset to another scale very intimidating…!  

I was aware of the article in WSS, but thanks anyway, and, with all respect to the author, I was not particularly impressed with the look of the game presented in the magazine. The scenarios as such look fine but when taking a look at the photos in the article it very clearly demonstrates the challenge of doing a thing like Valdemar Atterdag’s invasion of Gotland in 28mm. The thing just looks completely off in the article where a rabble of around 40 minis on each side represents the thousands of combatants in the actual historical confrontation.   

I will ponder all of this further.

Cheers

Martin

Sounds like a pretty boring battle to play out - a one sided massacre of poorly armed peasants.  It's going to be difficult to find an opponent to play the peasants.

If you said that 2000 men were 10 deep that gives a line 200 men long.  That's 1000 mm for a typical baccus figure .  I would say doable at 1:1 due to the greater depth of medieval battle lines and smaller size of the armies.

If you based them up 8 deep and 8 wide on a 40 mm base then they would each take the place of four 28 mm figures in a typical ruleset.  You'd need about 30 bases for 2000 men.  It would certainly look amazing (and take quite a while to paint!)