I first got into gaming with 28mm figures and they will always have a special place in my heart, but over the last few years I have been finding a number of frustrations with them. Firstly, they aren't cheap, even accounting for the way that historicals are significantly cheaper than GW figures. To get a sizeable army is still going to cost hundreds of pounds. Secondly, they're pretty big and so take a lot of storage room. Thirdly, they just take so long to paint, certainly if you care at all about how they'll look.
So when I got into the Civil War period I was persuaded to try a smaller scale, specifically 6mm. This is roughly the same scale as GW's old Epic range.
The first thing to say is that the figures are as cheap as chips. For the same price as a single Freebooter's Fate pirate, I can get a whole 6mm brigade. Although Baccus explains on their website why it's something of a fallacy to think in terms of 6mm “figures” per se, on a per-figure basis they work out at about 7.5p each. You can't really argue with that for price.
Secondly, considering how cheap they are, they are well cast. I don't know if this is just Baccus but I gather that it's common across the whole range of 6mm figures. There is almost no flash to clean up and very little in the way of mould lines. Given the hours I have spent cleaning up 28mm figures, snipping them off sprues and shaving off flash and mould lines over the years it was a delight to be able to use most of these figures pretty much “out of the box”. Pretty much all I had to do was run a knife over one or two parts of the horses, and straighten the pikes, lances, and bannerpoles.
Perhaps most importantly, while one might have thought that being so small would make them harder to paint, the reverse is actually true. Because of their size and the distance at which they're viewed, you can get away with much less subtle painting than on 28mm – the point becomes to give the idea of the unit rather than actually picking out all the details – of which there are fewer to pick out in any case. It is probably very hard to get 6mm figures to look great. But it's very easy to get them to look good.
As a result, once I got stuck in, I found them a breeze to paint, and because they're so easy to paint there's minimal frustration and agonising over details, which makes it easier to keep morale up. I have a unit of 28mm Roman cavalry I'm pretty happy with, but it's taken me about as long to paint a single cavalry figure as it has to paint a whole 6mm unit. I reckon I've painted more 6mm figures in the last two week than I have 28mm figures in the last two years.
As an added bonus, the units look substantial. It is much easier to look at a 6mm unit and convince yourself you're looking at a whole battalion comprising a couple of hundred men than it is with even a fairly large 28mm unit.
The only sad thing about them is that the small scale offers relatively little opportunity for conversion, modelling and individualising figures except through paint job. With my Romans I have enjoyed modelling certain officers as particular figures from history and giving visual clues on the bases. It's hard to see how to pull that off at 6mm scale. I might though see if I can find some 6mm dogs for the bases of Prince Rupert and “Black Tom” Fairfax.
So I'm a definite convert. I will stick with 28mm for my Romans and associated ancients, and (obviously) for skirmish games and the like, but I'm also going to push on with 6mm Civil War and will have to seriously consider the scale for any future periods I get into too.
Pictures of my tiny little menz will be forthcoming soon!
And if you thought 6mm was tiny, I'm also building a collection of 1:2400 scale ships (equivalent about 0.5mm scale) so that my 17th-century warriors can fight on sea as well as on land. Here is the current fleet (sans flags as yet):
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