FrankTrollman wrote:Zinegata wrote:Yes, it's cool but the problem is that interesting small-scale combat systems do not scale well to regiment size. If you want to make your individuals and squads interesting you will end up getting buried in detail and busy work when you're fielding an army above the game's ideal scale.
You're conflating design difficulty with impossibility.
My exact words regarding the matter is that it's a "problem", not an "impossibility".
Having a single game that handles 12 models on a side and also handles 300 models on a side is actually well within the realm of possibility. The 300 model army just has to be represented as 20 or less "units" where most of the units are ~40 model regiments without a lot of intramodel variation. It's a design challenge, obviously, but it's not that big of one. Such a game would probably bog down at a thousand models on a side (or even 30 models, if they were all heroes and monsters), but that's not a huge problem if you're trying to get people to collect fantasy miniatures with your game.
Splitting down the number of models into an easily digestible number of units is the easy part - that's pretty much the same as wargame scaling. If you want a playable Eastern Front game then your units should be 50,000+ men apiece in a war involving millions; so you end up with a manageable pile of 20+ units to command instead of fiddling over 3,000 counters.
The problem with the transition from 12 models to 300 is that you're presuming a much more consistent army composition with many individual figures that have an identical stat line at 300 models. The mindset when you have a small collection by contrast is different. The guy with 12 models would prefer a more diverse collection of models each with their own individual characteristics.
To illustrate: The 12 model "army" can be likened to the Dirty Dozen. You have 12 individual models, each of which has its own name and special ability. You can have a Lonely Sniper, a Grizzled Sergeant with sword skills, a Crazy Flamethrower battle couple, etc.
But once you scale the army up to 300 models you
can't have each model have their own name and backstory. Band of Brothers for instance ultimately focused primarily on the
officers who led the company instead of featuring all 100+ members of the unit; because if they did it would be 100+ episodes long and would have lost its viewership midway through the series from the boredom of watching yet another generic private with a Southern accent.
Now, a "solution" could be a way to eventually promote your "Dirty Dozen" to become the officers of your enlarged unit; and the design challenge is how to make their transition from individual soldiers to small-unit leaders seem consistent (e.g. how will the Lonely Sniper transition to squad leader? Will he just give a flat bonus to his squad? Will he just continue lone sniping and use his squad as bait? Etc).
The thing here is that it still makes it necessary to start investing in large numbers of relatively generic units. From buying $2-3 individual "hero" units you now have to start spending $20 to get each of your old heroes their own squad. You can't just keep buying individual models, and if you do most of them
have to eventually lose their individuality and be another identical stat-line mook.
Which means it doesn't entirely solve the problem you were pointing out - people will still be
forced to collect a large number of identical models at some point; and fall into the current trap wherein people have to shell out big bucks in large spikes (instead of a slow, incremental growth) just to start playing at the regimental level.
Your solution - allowing various armies to mix together - doesn't entirely solve that; because if you simply didn't collect enough men of a certain type then you won't even be able to properly field them as a unit until you buy more men of that type. It would just work primarily for guys already buying a whole squad at a time, but not to the people buying individual figures at a time as you described here, which I feel is a very smart insight into how people "flirt" with the hobby:
When people first flirt with the hobby, their collections are going to be eclectic. A unit of knights, some goblin archers, a manticore, some elvish spearmen, and a mummified wizard. Or whatever.
Edit: Bloody quote tags.