More Scale Comparison Dithering

Left to right:
Battlefront 1:100 (15mm) PzIII Flammpanzer
3d printed M.Bergman 1:200 PzIII L
Ancient GHQ 1:285 PzIII J

I've been fiddling around the edges of building some WWII desert forces, and now my procrastination and prevarication has come to a head: which scale should I commit to?

They each have their pros and cons.

I already have a few 1:100 (15mm) bits and pieces, mainly British and Italian. I don't have any Afrika Korps infantry, but that's fairly easily remediable, and I have access to digital models of pretty much all the vehicles I'd really need. The down-side is that they take a while to print and they do need quite a bit of painting to look good, and also they're large enough that my 900 x 1800 mm tabletop really doesn't look like wide open desert when I'm using 15mm stuff on it. It's fine for a game like Chain of Command, a bit cramped for something like WRG 1925-50, Fist Full of TOWs or Battlegroup.

1:150 (10mm) isn't really all that much smaller than 1:100, and needs pretty much as much attention to painting as 15mm models. The benefits of that scale, such as they are, don't outweigh the fact that I already have a decent head-start on the models I need in 15mm.

I'm completely new to 1:200, so I would be starting from scratch, needing not only the vehicle models, but also buildings and similar terrain — fortunately, buildings aren't a very prominent feature of a lot of WWII desert battlefields. I can print most of what I'd need, and a tank like the Panzer III shown here only takes about an hour and a half. Painting to an acceptable standard is pretty easy. I'd probably have to use 10mm infantry from somebody like Pendraken, and they'd look a bit big next to the 1:200 vehicles and guns; that is a concern. Also, since nobody I know locally has a 1:200 scale force of their own, I would have to provide the troops for the Commonwealth, Italy, and Germany to be sure of having sufficient forces for a battle. This scale is small enough that my gaming table starts looking acceptably large, and the models are small enough for big battles while still being large enough to distinguish easily.

1:300 - 1:285 is a scale that I already have quite a lot of, and it's a scale that works well on a fairly small table, or makes a moderate-sized table like mine look positively huge. The only issue with it, from my point of view, is that with age my eyesight has deteriorated somewhat, and the models and figures on the tabletop have become difficult to see properly unless I'm sitting right over them. I'm not so blind that they're unusable, but the fact remains that my eyes are not as good as they once were, and it's tiresome having to squint and peer to make out what I'm looking at.

LATER:     I've decided to stick with 15mm for the present moment. It's logistically more convenient in every way than starting on a whole new scale that nobody else in Christchurch has ever heard of, plus, I can build on the few bits and pieces I've already got in that scale.