Basing

How to base your figures?

The question most people wrestle with particularly for the horse and musket era as large numbers of figures are involved and rebasing is something best avoided. Therefore, some considerations; Basing – If going with Seven Years War Old Glory bag purchases, you get 50 figures (usually with a couple of 'extra' character type figures). These come with command figures for making up 16 figure units.

In this pics above you can see a 12 figure unit spread over a 2 x 2" wide base ala Might and Reason basing.

The OG figures are quite animated and large - a true 18mm figure entirely compatible with Eureka miniatures SYW range. The issue is they don’t squeeze into a standard 6/8” (3/4”) frontage for traditional 3/4" per figure frontages ( the standard Koenig Krieg or Empre style basing) – 1” is better. This means 4 figs on a 1” base looks chunky but not cluttered – it seems right.

Figures are Old Glory SYF1 - French infantry no turnbacks

If you base ala Might and Reason you would put all figures on a 2” x 1” base, which is 8 figs – this looks good and means a M&R unit (ie two bases) is made up of 16 figs. The downside of this is the rigid 2” frontage of basing which is much less flexible in other game systems.

However a 1” x 1” system has the advantage of keeping the basing flexible enough to play a single rank game. This would mean that the single rank in this case is represented by two lines of figures on a 1”x1” base. You could still play Koenig Krieg with two bases, you’d just need to mark casualties (which is just like recording SPs in M&R).

The upside;

Unit numbers - You now get 3 M&R units out of one Old Glory Bag. Two cavalry units of 8 figures.

Magnetic basing – if you do this on a magnetic strip of a 1” x 1” metal base the two stands needed lock on to the 2”x1” underbase to give a solid M&R stand. These do not shift around, make for ease of game play and storage as well on a metal sheet. It does mean pre organizing bases is not as easy as the metal bases would slide around in a box – however, grip material can obviate that.

Other consideration – army size. Poorly led armies need many, many units – up to 20+. Therefore multi basing is important to physically moving the figures. It also means you cannot label the underside of a stand easily, which you can do with my metal underbases.

Bases – Perfectly cut 1” x 1” metal bases from a machine metal shop are quite do-able – they are bullet proof and a perfect cut, every time.

Big Armies – M&R is meant to be played with lots of figures in a few hours. Reducing bases to M&R 2”x1” stands is I think very important to getting the game to finish on time – lots of time is wasted moving figures. A typical 7 turn game has an average of 15 pulses in it until game end might happen. Therefore, moving lots of small figures is going to slow the game down. If you save 5 mins on each turn not moving you just saved 45 mins minimum. That’s nearly 1/5 to 1/4 of the expected M&R playtime. So this is an issue in the basing equation. 'Empire style' basing is fine with small armies but not when you need to push around a very large number of separate stands.

Other rules - With a 1" base you are within an 1/8" of being based the same way for the Age of Reason rule set. For Koenig Krieg if you use 3 bases per unit (ie 12 figs) the difference would be an increase from 2 1/4" frontage vs 3" frontage - whilst this is an increase simply adjusting the ground scale by increasing all ranges by a 1/3 should enable the game to be played without too much problem.

For me, all these issues add up to a universal 1"x1" basing for infantry.

Figures are Old Glory SYW Prussian Grenadiers and Musketeers

Cavalry - much less of an issue. Figures from Old Glory fit nicely onto a standard 1" wide by 1-1/2" depth base. Eureka figures are bigger but the additional depth should allow for staggered placement of figures without a problem.

Figures are Old Glory SYW Hussars

Artillery - this is a bit more interesting. The 2" frontage recommend for Might and Reason is quite wide and unwieldy in a smaller scale battalion level game. Probably not too bad for position batteries however, but not always that easy to fit in with limbers, etc because of the wide frontage.

1" wide has a nice commonality with the other base sizes but is a bit squeezy with 3 crew - though not too bad. 1 1/2" is quite alright but is an 'odd size' so equally not as desirable. After much consideration I've opted for a 2" frontage with a depth of 1.5". By placing 3-4 figures on the base this provides a not overly cluttered stand and gives me some spare figures from the Old Glory bag. In concert with the 2"x1.5" base I'll be doing 1" x 1.5" bases as well, using the surplus figures from the 24 figures you get in an old glory bag ie no wastage. This will give me complete flexibility for all game systems.

Figures are Old Glory SYW Artillery

The 2" frontage can infact represent two 1" frontage bases merged together if needed by some game systems. This makes the stands compatible with Might and Reason and any other future games I'm likely to play. As there are often not too many guns for this period (at least at the army level game scale) surplus 1" by 1.5" bases for battalion guns for a battalion based game system (such as Koenig Krieg) will therefore provide maximum flexibility - keeping the guns loose and place them on either base as needed.