Epic is one to one.

As to the orders - have you ever seen a body of soldiers trying to get their asses in gear in an organised fashion? I've seen UN troops managing to ram each other trying to get underway in a hurry. (A friend whos a former recon chap said they hammered a metal skirt around their vehicle so the crunching and other noises gave the driver a bit more time to react.) It takes time to shift from order of march to combat advances etc, not to mention the deshes armour does between cover and everything else. Factor in finding a target and firing and you would be amased how slow stuff advances. One of the reasons why the Challengers inability to fire that well ont he move is rarely a problem.

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'Abolish red trousers?! Never! Red trousers are France!' – Eugene Etienne, War Minister, 1913
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General Plumer, 191x

Epic is 1 to 1 ... but as others have pointed out, many games, especially most board wargames are otherwise. And based on my previous career, a lot ... or very little can happen in 15 min. of real time,  depending on where you are in the area of operations.  

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

I think Warmaster is on-to-one as well. It's just that, like in epic, there can be multiple models on each playing piece (stand, strip, base, etc.).

I think the give-away for whether a game is one-to-one vs. more abstract is if it has a scale stated in millimeters. WFB and WH:40k are 28mm (more or less), warmaster is 10mm, epic is 6mm, etc. That number is supposedly the height of an average person.

Not impossible at all. If you can't get all 10,000 men per side on the table you simply aren't dedicated enough to play that game.  

Don't say '1 man is 100' so you can pretend to have 10k, just fight with 100.

Trying to get enough minis to enact a monstrous set-piece engagement should be the goal of miniature wargaming, after all if you aren't trying to make it look like all those men are there you may as well just use counters.

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Fear is for the enemy, fear and bullets.
-James O'Barr, the Crow

You have the 1 model = 100 men, 1 platoon etc for numerous reasons. Take spearhead, the system is removed from commanding individual things, you worry about whether or not your platoons are still functioning.

Of course the other possibility is to use the CH multiple models to a base is one unit in the rules. Difficulty with that is scale. Even 6mm isn't small enough to fight battles using reasonable ranges showing a good fire team deployment for infantry. The larger the scale for the look of the models the more difficult this becomes.

Epic fudges it with its odd elastic ranges idea, but not everyone is happy with that.

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'Abolish red trousers?! Never! Red trousers are France!' – Eugene Etienne, War Minister, 1913
"Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography."
General Plumer, 191x

Well don't get me started on the "elastic Epic Range scale" !  Artillery should be in the next room or out in the yard ... a Deathstrike's range would be a football field or two(depending if it's a FROG, SCUD or Cruise Missile ?!) ... The average grunt could almost shoot across the table ... MBTs would be 15mm apart etc. ... so we have to "turn a Nelson's Eye" for playability, etc. ... and I understand that ...

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Well, there's always things to not be happy about. But we want our tinsoldiers out on the field anyhow. So it's a matter of least bad.

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It would be nice to get lightspeed,
so far we can only reach slight speed.- Erik M
092b85658e746a91d343e53509d357744e56f641

From the warmaster rulebook on the SG site

"The area occupied by a regiment of models is
assumed to encompass hundreds of warriors
including all of their supporting elements such as
mules laden with spare ammunition, surgeons’
wagons, preachers, servants, messengers, scouts and
all the paraphernalia of warfare. Never mind that the
actual number of warriors depicted is typically about
30-40 in the case of an infantry regiment – we must
imagine the formation whole and glorious as it
marches to battle! This abstraction, by which a few
models are taken to represent many more actual
warriors, shouldn’t concern us too much during play,
although it has a direct bearing on the way the rules
have been formulated."

Most historical miniatures wargames are like this. Indeed, with Warmaster, Rick Priestly wanted to emulate this. With this type of historical game, players wish to refight famouse battles, with gorious miniatures over beautiful terrain, and not cardboard tokens on aboard. However, not one of them wants to have to paint 10,000+ miniatures, nor does a single one of them have the space to play them even if they had that many!

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Several thoughts - As others have said, much depends upon what the game represents; Naval and air games usually are 1:1 scale representations while most land-based rulesets are 1: many. Morover, in land-based (or army) rulesets, scales range from "skirmish" games where troops are represented 1:1 (eg Warhammer 40K or Epic); "tactical" or "Strategic" (I use the terms loosely) where the latter use counters to represent many hundreds or thousands of troops, vehicles and ordenance; miniatures rulesets add figures to the counter to represent the troops and give the player an impression of what the formation would look like in reality. In Epic, each unit has a number of figures that are deemed to be a 1:1 representation of the real troops so between 1 and 5 real men or soldiers.

Equally in all games, timescales are abstracted to "the amount of activity that can pass in X minutes/hours" etc. In Epic, I have always assumed that each formation is moving simultaneously and fully active during the '15 minutes' of the turn. Moreover, you can notionally break the turn into three '5' minute actions, in which the unit can fire three shots (sustaining at +1), make a move and fire 2x shots, Double and fire a single shot (at -1) or march three moves etc. If we take the distance across the table to be of the order of 12 miles, it is not too hard to accept that the faster units are covering the 10 miles in 15 minutes or 'marching' at an average of 40 mph.

However, I suspect your dissatisfaction is actually in the way that 'tactical' and 'strategic' rules simplify and abstract the detail. Put another way, I suspect that you want to know whether 'Corporal smith' in the lead vehicle saw a suspicious object on the road and was able to swerve in time; and whether he was then able to retain sufficient control over the vehicle for 'Gunner Graham' to aim and fire at a target that suddenly came into view.

While this level of detail can be resolved in 'skirmish' games (including role-playing games, or umpire moderated 'simulations'), as others have pointed out, it is simply impractical to go through this level of detail with even moderate amounts of troops without the game continuing for a considerable length of time. Even 'computer-moderated' games do not really work because the game is essentially feeding information back to the player, who can only process a finite amount of information irrespective of the level of detail it represents.

So ultimately it all boils down to personal preferences and tastes, which game style and content you prefer, and what you want the game to represent.

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Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

Yes, I feel strongly Epic is 1 to 1 as I said, and I'm willing to over look a few things ... like the floating range scale.

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

I like to play 1:1 too, even when I know the rules say I've lots more men/tanks on the board I tend to react and use them as one only. To be honest it really doesn't bother me anymore, if the game plays well, it plays well and I enjoy it.

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I'm quite surprised by these results.
10% thinks 1=Many
90% 1=1

I would have guessed 50/50.

The way I see it is that the size of the battles don't seem realistic to me in a 1:1 setting. I agree that the formations used are 1:1 but they are overlayed to a game simulating battles that are alot bigger than the formations used. But I think JJ/GW did the right thing not declaring which way it's meant to be (considering how strongly some of you seem to feel in the matter).

/Staffan

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/Shoel
My Painting Corner

The actual fight is 1:1, but it's a cut of the battle as such. Thus it's both 1:1 and 1:"many". But it's not as much "many" as it's "front".

But then again it might well be 1:1, who knows how thin spread peopel are in a populated universe?

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It would be nice to get lightspeed,
so far we can only reach slight speed.- Erik M
092b85658e746a91d343e53509d357744e56f641

I really hope it's one to many. There's not enough green paint in the world otherwise.

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My shifting projects

Mark me for 1:1 for Epic, Flames of War, etc.  If I'm playing napoleonics, I'm OK with 1:many as long as it looks good.  Since I don't play a lot of historicals anymore (except for Flames), I almost always assume 1:1.

Also, the typical 3k IG army is a Battalion+ (how many companies? 1-2 Infantry companies and 2-1 Armored companies), while an Astartes force seems to be closer to a reinforced company on the table.

madd0ct0r, how do you think the 40k Ork players feel, when the cost of a Boy dropped to the same as a Grot?  The current 'typical' Ork army is over 200 boys at the 'Ard Boyz 2500 point size.

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