My dabble with big bases.

[Norm]

I have been doing the dreaded rebasing thing!

My 12mm Kallistra ACW come with 40mm x 20mm bases. Two side by side are ideal for my 100mm Kallistra hexes, but I have recently been bitten by the bug to go to large bases. So I picked up some 80 x 30mm bases from Minibits and broke up 12 of my smaller bases.

At the same time, I also ordered some 30mm x 20m from Leon, with a view to basing 3 bases to a unit, giving a total frontage of 90mm. This would still fit in with my 100mm hex, but had the advantage for my Pendraken napoleonics that as well as line, march column would look good and for attack column, I could throw in an extra bases for a 2 x 2 arrangement. So I broke down another 4 bases to make them up.

Now, after including these new bases in a few of my games, I felt that;

Big bases -
Advantages - Fast to move and looked nice.

Disadvantages - road movement looked daft and was not intuitive to manage.. I like to pull two bases appart toshow skirmish formation or put them in a slight 'V' to show disorder, that can no longer be done and on hills or in building complexes, the units invariably had to sit with one end of the base up in the air, while smaller bases can wrap over contours and fit around buildings better.

Smaller bases -
Advantages, looked very good in march column and was just generally better able to reflect various formations or conditions such as disordered or shaken, without revering to markers.

Disavdantages - To reflect Attack Column, which is a major Napoleonic formation, I needed to create a 4th base and even for line. For line, adding a 3rd base increases handling of units by 50% and for those in Attack Column by 100%. Not much there and then, but over the course of a full game it is significant, especially for bad back sufferers.

So on balance, I feel that the 40mm, while not 100% ideal, does at least avoid the pitfalls of the other basing attempts and so, I have returned all bases back to their former 40mm compromise, which works well. I hadmade the new bases permanent to get a true idea of how they would look and manage, so they were all flocked, sanded and filled etc, to the rebasing twice just to get back to my original position has been indeed tedious and hard  on the finger-tips.

[Steve J]

Some interesting observations there Norm. Big bases have never appealed to me, probably as I tend to smaller size games (and tables) and so the 40mm x 20mm works best for me.

[Leman]

My experiment with rebasing FPW had similar results. They looked great as dramas but as playing pieces they were too inflexible. I am now in the (slow) process of going to 5 infantry and 3 cavalry on 1" squares, with a deeper base for artillery.

[petercooman]

I never could bring myself to use big one-base units. I always thought that they restricted you in the number of rulesets they would be compatible with. I use 40x20 myself and find it easily adaptable.

The only case I am considering is kings of war, wich handles big bases very well. But that is probably because I cringe at the thought of playing with 400 single based minis!

[Chad]

Small bases on sabots will give the best of both worlds

[Fenton]

For Warband I got some of the 100x50 bases for some goblins. I as now rebased these on 40x20 and will use sabot bases . Again like others so I can use them for multiple systems