Smaller than a Football Field

By patox, in Star Wars: Legion

Thought for the day.

Whether we're talking about the sport with the round ball or the other sport where the ball makes contact with a foot less than 20 times per game (on average), a typical Legion 3' x 6' battlefield when scaled up is smaller than a football field.

It's an interesting perspective.

(If you don't scale it up, you can fit over 2500 Legion battlefields in there)

NFLvsLegion.jpg

Soo... who's down for "Life Size" Legion?

Y'know, that's a really useful graphic/comparison to show how unrealistic it is for some of the vehicles that people want to see.

This is what I meant when I said that the average Legion battlefield is smaller than a Wal-Mart store.

If you correctly scaled a model Wal-Mart, it wouldn't fit on a Legion table. So paintball wearing Star Wars costumes inside a Wal Mart is live action Legion.

I suspect this why the layered terrain such as ewok villages and landing platforms are so popular, they add a lot of square inch-age to play on.

Man, either the game takes place over the course of a minute or everyone on the field had way to many death sticks and can barely walk

Both sides can't just go home and rethink their lives.

20 minutes ago, thepopemobile100 said:

Man, either the game takes place over the course of a minute or everyone on the field had way to many death sticks and can barely walk

Tactical movement, everybody is in like a half-crouch trying not to get shot, carrying 100 pounds of gear.

On the other hand, speeders must have a busted throttle or sticky brakes or something.

50 minutes ago, NeonWolf said:

Y'know, that's a really useful graphic/comparison to show how unrealistic it is for some of the vehicles that people want to see.

Ha! That’s a good one. None of the ranges in the game make any sense. A laser would easily shoot the entire length of the board, you could throw a grenade easily at range 4. It’s a game, not actual physics of weaponry.

This gets into the concept of a dual scaled game. This is common in other genres and usually gets mentioned in passing in the intro text. I'm not surprised it gets glossed over in mainstream gaming such as Legion. It's weird to me how gaming isn't inherently sorta kinda "counterculture with a heavy dose of academia" anymore.

The weapon range and movement ranges are scaled to each other, not to the figure's heights. So the objective is to ensure a realistic number of shots while people cross ground towards the firer, and nothing else.

So in real life, a bunch of archers with longbows can shoot about 12 times a minute with an effective range of 200 yards. Divided by the time it takes a good horse to cross 200 yards at 25mph (16 seconds), you figure out that the archers would only get maybe 3 shots at an incoming body of cavalry. This assumes relatively flat, empty, solid ground. Therefore, if designing a game with that data, you might make the range of a longbow 20" and the run rate of a horse 10". Regardless of the size of the models, which is chosen based on aesthetics, cost, and other considerations. Then you scale the tabletop to fit the number of miniatures and minutes per game you want.

Until very recently people didn't carry 100 pounds of gear, and in Star Wars they don't appear to either. We're gonna have to come up with a solution and stop carrying 100 pounds of gear eventually, as it's destroying too many knees and backs to go on this way forever. Crouching or crawling would be highly likely though: I always endorse trying not to get shot, if you get the chance to avoid it.

Edited by TauntaunScout
58 minutes ago, lukecook said:

Ha! That’s a good one. None of the ranges in the game make any sense. A laser would easily shoot the entire length of the board, you could throw a grenade easily at range 4. It’s a game, not actual physics of weaponry.

Just to clarify, I meant that fitting a UH-60 Blackhawk or Huey onto an American football field would definitely be a terrain type situation, not a combat operation unit in that small of a space.

3 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

So in real life, a bunch of archers with longbows can shoot about 12 times a minute with an effective range of 200 yards. Divided by the time it takes a good horse to cross 200 yards at 25mph (16 seconds), you figure out that the archers would only get maybe 3 shots at an incoming body of cavalry. This assumes relatively flat, empty, solid ground. Therefore, if designing a game with that data, you might make the range of a longbow 20" and the run rate of a horse 10". Regardless of the size of the models, which is chosen based on aesthetics, cost, and other considerations. Then you scale the tabletop to fit the number of miniatures and minutes per game you want.

Pretty much every mini-game does this so us old gamers tend to forget not everybody know this stuff!

On 1/17/2019 at 8:43 PM, TauntaunScout said:

I suspect this why the layered terrain such as ewok villages and landing platforms are so popular, they add a lot of square inch-age to play on.

also there are rules for units to clamber up to height 2 so vertical battlefields are a thing that should happen.

mandalore, nar shaddaa,coruscant, more than enough vertical cities

open-uri20150608-27674-dalo0n_30b33652.j

1337012834NarShadaa2.jpg

Edited by Geressen
9 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

If you correctly scaled a model Wal-Mart, it wouldn't fit on a Legion table. So paintball wearing Star Wars costumes inside a Wal Mart is live action Legion.

I'm game.... !!!

I was weathering my Scarrif Rebel trooper at a paintball game the other day!

10 hours ago, patox said:

Thought for the day.

Whether we're talking about the sport with the round ball or the other sport where the ball makes contact with a foot less than 20 times per game (on average), a typical Legion 3' x 6' battlefield when scaled up is smaller than a football field.

It's an interesting perspective.

(If you don't scale it up, you can fit over 2500 Legion battlefields in there)

NFLvsLegion.jpg

Dammit, now I want a "TrooperBowl" game...

Darth Ball will be my goto thrower!

10 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

This is what I meant when I said that the average Legion battlefield is smaller than a Wal-Mart store.

If you correctly scaled a model Wal-Mart, it wouldn't fit on a Legion table. So paintball wearing Star Wars costumes inside a Wal Mart is live action Legion.

I suspect this why the layered terrain such as ewok villages and landing platforms are so popular, they add a lot of square inch-age to play on.

Now i want to dress up as a stormtrooper and play paintball inside a wal-mart store

6 hours ago, Attackmack said:

Dammit, now I want a "TrooperBowl" game...

Darth Ball will be my goto thrower!

use a bloodbowl type game and substitute some of the units or homebrew some rules?

what exactly is stopping you?

Edited by Geressen
2 hours ago, Geressen said:

what exactly is stopping you?

Lack of free time and opponents, is almost always the real answer.

16 minutes ago, TauntaunScout said:

Lack of free time and opponents, is almost always the real answer.

if you want enemies you have to make them.

if you disagree,fight me *****.

As always, the answer is demand and economics. It's a fact that the mini's have to look cool and fun to paint for a tabletop game like this to succeed today. And it also needs a lot of big, fun toys.

To do both of those together you have to cram the board and fudge the scales. As has been discussed at length, a snow speeder would fly over the board in a turn at scale and not turn around and come back for a while. But you can't sell air support strikes. You can sell models. And the scale range of an AT-ST main gun would be like fifty feet. No way the range is four times its height.

To do these battles at scale, you'd need to do them in like 10mm or smaller. And people don't get psyched to paint 10mm heroes. Hence "heroic scale" where the models are much bigger than they would be for the environment and all the ranges are compressed.

why not make a campaign where you can move tokens through a cityscape to try and capture areas untill a rebel and imperial token come into the same grid which is when you battle. as a bonus. allow units to escape to neighbouring grid points and allow infinite range units to set up on high areas next to active fights and provide off table fire in battle. like snipers and mortars fire into the battle from their directional edge every second round untill a unit moves out of the battle and into their grid.

Edited by Geressen

cityscape is always cooler looking but way more expensive and harder to set up as well as it really makes the 6 turn game a lot harder due to the climbing rules. Everytime I clamber, i lose 4-5 figures out of the unit.

1 minute ago, buckero0 said:

Everytime I clamber, i lose 4-5 figures out of the unit.

If you are rolling that many Blocks on white defense dice you should definitely play Rebels if you don't already.

28 minutes ago, NeonWolf said:

If you are rolling that many Blocks on white defense dice you should definitely play Rebels if you don't already.

That's the only time I roll that many blocks. I've killed many a squad trying to hop over a 6ft fence .

This is going to sound like a terrible nitpick... but you've activated the math nerd in me.

Assuming 28mm is 6ft (i.e. a 28mm guy on the table is representative by a 6 foot guy) and 28mm is about 1.1inches:

1.1"/72" is the ratio, then X/3600" (100 yard football field in inches), then a football field is 55" long in legion scale and 29.9" wide. So the legion play surface represents

The point remains valid, it's not a lot of space to be driving tanks around in.

Actually the climax of Saving Private Ryan does come to mind...

I messed up in my attempt to make regular grey sci-fi platforms.

it's going to be kashyyyk now

50405212_2009896019106140_85751569452692

top platform is height 3

needs a lot of work still, including bark on the cylinders. and a whole lot of paint. after I finished the top bombed out platform and the lower more intact ones.

Edited by Geressen