Mr. Dodson,
Your considerations and limitation-problems are the core and backbone theoretics for every gamer and dioramabuilder to solve and overcome. It is a pitty so little attention is played to this among other collectors and builders. So it is great you come up with this topic.
My ground scale is 1 centimetre represents 10 metres of real ground .
I am very sorry but I am afreight to say here it goes wrong already.
The scale of the models we use is 1/72.
Lets make it more simple and say: it is 1:100.
Now you come up with A SECOND SCALE which is 1:1000.
That is ten times as small.
For a traditional wargame this is no problem. Even 1:10.000 should be possible.
Because it is all a simplification and an abstraction of a historical situation.
But your impressive work and extremely dramatic and realistic pictures do not look like a traditional wargame. It looks like a diorama and that is what many people will judge it for. As a diorama it is still impressive, convincing and realistic. Though as I told you before there are some lesser points. But thats only for some spectators, since everybody sees something different in the same piece of work.
A terrain scale 1:1000 just differs too much (factor 10 or more) from the human figure scale. And in the architecture this will become most clear.
Trees have little proportional reference.
But doors, floor hights and ground sizes of buildings have.
For example: here is a picture I took from a beautifull diorama in the Schattenburg Museum, Feldkirch, Austria, depicting the French Revolution attack on Feldkirch and surrounding mountain villages.
As you can see, the builders wanted to show different valleys, mountains and villages in one diorama but since rocks and trees have little reference to scale it goes wrong with the architecture. It is too small and so it looks like out-of-proportion toys. In this special case, I am sorry to say this for the people putting so much effort in it, this just looks silly where 2 or 3 floors of a house are as high as one soldier.
These houses are an all-over different scale.
So then there are diorama builders facing the same problem but making another decision: they highten the buildings to camouflage the small scale.
The huge diorama I found in the Essling Granary building is a good example:
The builders wanted to show all historical buildings but crammed them together for lack of space.
In proper proportions it would have looked like this:
But lack of space and mixing two different scales creates this:
As can be seen, the hight of Granary and Townhall is near realism but the groundplan is not.
It might be because I am not the easyest-to satisfy-spectator but for me this model of Essling creates a certain unpleasant tension
. I feel different scales distorting each other and 'fighting each other' for their right of existence!
I measure the distances between the centres of the built up zones, for instance and transpose these measurements to the table.
Dodson we have so much in common!
What you describe is exactly what I did, for example in 1986 when I was a schoolboy and we created our first massive Waterloo game. This was the simplified terrain plan:
It was based on two table-tennis-tables and two additional tables, occupying a large room in my parents house. Playing the wargam was difficult since too much space was occupied by buildings, road, forest. No space to deploy troops, no space for a proper charge.
Tracing paper can be effectively employed to super impose scale original maps over a scale plan of your re fight area.
You see what I mean? We used tracing paper too, to decide where the hills and valleys needed to be created. I found these in my store room. These tracing papers are 30 years old now!
Built up areas are represented as near to the original 'footprint' as possible in order to minimise the tactical influence exerted by being too big.
I am sorry but I am not sure what 'footprint' means in this context.
Is it the scaled-down size of a village, the number of houses or the distance from one village-center to another?
For Ligny This meant constructing the key buildings in a scale smaller than 1/72, that looked like the originals and gave the 'feel' of a village, whilst looking balanced to the eye.
I think a human scale that is ten times as large as the terrain scale is just to big a difference. Of course your houses are not factor 10 smaller. Probably only factor 2 but that is still a lot for architecture.
In this case we must conclude: You (or we
) just want too much in one game, one diorama or one picture. We can not build the whole world in scale in one room.
The closer you can have terrain and figure scales matching, the better it becomes for the architecture.
But then there might appear another problem: lack of table space and lack of figures available to occupy all this space.
Sometimes an area needs to be represented but the actual scale would make the table enormous to accommodate it. Such a problem was Plancenoit. My solution was to build it to scale and include on the battlefield in it's correct position but at a larger scale of 1centimetre representing 20 metres of ground between it and the other main points La Belle Alliance and Papelotte.
To avoid the problem of villages and buildings occupying most of the battlefield, in later times we started to build only parts of a battlefield. Like Plancenoit. The houses are just a messy collection of what was available for the battle game and we had no trees left to chear up the village since all were needed for the woods east of the village. But since we only had to build one village on a huge table, there was enough space for proper scale houses, space between houses and some suggestion, created by hedges, for gardens around the village.
On the picture you see the French trying to keep away the Prussians before they enter the village.
I wanted to include the part of Thielman's Corps that could influence events, but modelling all the 'extra' villages would have taken up a large amount of space, that would then be largely redundant.
Here you have been drawing your limits. That is always very interesting: where we draw a line. At what moment or stage in the development of such a huge project are we able to say: here it stops?
All movement and firing, ie by artillery to this area from these points is at a half rate to compensate for the change in scale. Operations within it are at the normal rate. I found that this technique worked well in practise.
And here you have another result of mixing different scales. It creates confusion, especially when playing with a lot of different gamers together. But it seems like you came up with an effective solution that works well!
Now I am very curious about what ruleset you use and who you are playing against?
It is hard to imagine you are practically able to play a traditional wargame with all those thousands of separate standing figures.