If any of you guys use miniatures and grids for battle what size do you generally make each square? Some abilities work in 1 meter increments but if I made each square only 1 meter then I would need a ridiculously big game mat to make weapon ranges matter. I'm leaning towards doing 2.5 or 5 meters per square any input?

An inch is a metre for my group, since we use 40k minis to represent characters. If there's a fight that involves longer ranges than is on my board, I'll say '1 square is x metres'. It's not ideal, but mostly those fights are for if they're being sniped from a few hundred metres awaysomething.

For personal combat my group uses each one inch square representing 2 meters (rounded up on any fractions). For space combat, a one inch square is one VU. We also allow things to move along the diagonal (corners) of the squares, especially in space combat where ships have 45 degree turn increments. We also make ships do the full turn whether it's 45180 just to avoid having to keep track of odd angles on a rectangular grid.

So far this has worked out well enough as we tend to group NPC combatants into mass unitsallow for blasts of 2 meters to affect targets in adjacent squares during personal combat. The 2 meter to an inch has proven to be a handy way of keeping firefights closer togethertaking up less table space.

I've been using a standard 1"=1 meter scale (gridless, ranges measured with tape measure as per the tabletop game), but I'm finding that that scale makes it very easy for the action to spill off of the table, so I'm considering switching to .5"=1 meter.

We normally use 1" = 1 meter but we scale as needed. We have used 1=1, 1=2, 1=3, 1=6 and for really long range 1=10. You can even have multiple scales going at one time. Just be sure to mark where the new scale begins.

You could say everything within 10 spaces of the edge of the mat is 1=1, 11-20 is 1=3 and anything further is 1=6. Long range really opens up and you have area to work melee and short range in.

thanks for the idea's. I think i'll try the multiple scale on a map rule and just use different colored dry erase pens to denote the change. One of the players wanted to play a sniper type arch militant so I'll need to make gun range matter or it'll be useless