The pull of paper soldiers is many units, fast. There is thus no point in going for reduced-scale attempts to mount big battles in a small space or with very many troops. The ideal of my early wargaming could be realised...many troops in 25mm scale.
A scale to carry this out is needed. I plucked a scale of 1mm to a yard out of the air and found it works quite well. With this scale a card unit can be 50mm or 50 yards wide. This allows an British battalion in line to be 4 units wide, a French battalion at 3 bases is an Ok representation. Cavalry squadrons at 50mm wide work well.
The important thing her is that I could divorce any idea of figure-to-men ratios. The only factor to decide is a linear scale for frontages and ranges. After that one just decides on a format for making a base or unit look good. The number of men per base is decided by frontage. It works out at roughly 150. A British battalion coming to 600 and a French one with 3 bases to 450.
I have decided on infantrymen standing shoulder-to-shoulder for close formation or two men looking active for skirmishers. Cavalry are mounted individually at two per base which stands for 100-150 riders. Commanders stand alone as do messengers.
Artillery are a little more difficult but a solution is to use a 25mm frontage for one model. This gives the frontage for 3 real guns. Two model guns are therefore a real battery of 6. Howitzers I decided not to represent- indirect shooting would be allowed at a suitable rate to avoid fielding individual pieces. Of course entire batteries of howitzers could be fielded. With a limber for each gun which must be fielded to add clutter and a crew of 4 figures this gives a nice representation of a real gun battery.
The Waterloo battlefield is doable with a 2m deep table on this scale. A 12pdr is shooting 2 metres at extreme range.
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