Miniatures, Bases, and Hassles

 

One of the challenges of being involved with miniature wargames is basing. It's been a question for a long time, sometimes tied to questions of scale. Do you build your Pictish army in 15mm or 25mm? Then once you decide that are you going to base it for DBA/DBM, WRG Ancients, or some other game. if you're lucky your favorite game, or one of the popular ones, will be on smaller bases and some other game of interest will be on bigger bases meaning you can use sabot bases which is a fancy term for putting a larger base underneath the smaller base to increase the footprint to the proper size. In many games you can actually mix scales if the basing is correct, which can look pretty weird when someone's 6mm Gauls go up against someone else's 15mm Early Imperial Romans but I get it. Do you want to play a game right now? Even if it is Romans vs. blue-painted hobbits? Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

With the Warhammer family of games - and a lot of modern miniature games really - this attitude is less present. I blame it on the competitive-first mindset that's become so prevalent over the last decade or so. A lot of us play these same games far more casually, more "narratively", but so much of the focus online is on tournament stuff and efficiency and point costs that people forget that's not the only way to play the game and one of the sticking points is basing.

So space marines and orks originally came on 25mm bases. Ten years or so ago the went to 32mm round bases. Now leader characters for marines are mostly on 40mm bases, even if they are not in terminator armor, and some leaders have gone to 50mm rounds. My beloved Captain Banderas of the Crimson Fists started on a 25mm and got moved to a 32mm and now ... will probably stay there as I have bigger Primaris versions with a similar look that would fit on those much larger bases without looking lost in that space. 

Old Azrael

In casual play it doesn't really matter - and realistically game-play-wise it doesn't really matter - but people can get snippy about it. It doesn't really matter because smaller bases let you pack more figures into a smaller space - this can be important in a big melee fight - while bigger bases block some figures out. In contrast if your unit has aura abilities, with a radius effect, a larger base will let them cover more area on the table. So yes a marine character on a larger base can do leader effects over a bigger area but gets blocked out of some combats if they are part of a squad. There is actually some balance there but there is still some community pressure to put your models on whatever the current official base size happens to be. My metal Chapter Master Azrael of the Dark Angels came on a 25mm. Later I put him on a 32mm to modernize, as I did with the 6th edition starter set Captain that looked an awful lot like Azrael but was plastic and slightly bigger. Then somewhere in 9th or 10th they put out a new Azrael and he's on a 50mm base. (insert furrowed brow here) As much as I would be fine continuing to use one of my older models it just looks silly putting Old Az on a base of that size. So at some point I will probably break down and buy the new one - I'll grumble about it, but I will probably do it.

New Azrael

The other challenge is when they just change up the whole damn thing. I built a lot of armies for original Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Those were on square bases, typically 20mm and 25mm for infantry. In 2015 they killed off WHFB and launched Age of Sigmar with round bases. Now it's been long enough this doesn't make me angry today on its own but the aftershocks still rumble through. 

Around 2023 we had been playing around with some AOS and I decided I might as well unify my Beastman army that had been in various stages of development since the old WHFB days. So I pulled a bunch of Gors - the main Beastman troop type - off of their square bases and put them on rounds. This was some 40+ of them so it took some time. I picked up some other units too, building them all on the current round or oval bases for Sigmar. 

Then in early 2024 the rumors started up and were eventually confirmed that spring: The "Beasts of Chaos" were being dropped from Age of Sigmar. They were being added to The Old World, which was sort of good news as I was interested in the new version of the old game, but it also meant I would need to look at rebasing a bunch of stuff less than a year after rebasing them the first time. 

No, I was not happy. 

No, I still haven't rebased them ... but I'm looking at it because a bunch of them are painted and playable and would be good to get on the table again.

One of the main expediters of this is the creation of movement tray expanders. I've talked about these before when discussing using my old armies as Old World bumped up base sizes too, of course: all the old 20mm based figs are now on 25's, and the 25's mostly went to 30mm bases. Well, they also make them to convert round bases to fit in the footprint that a square-based unit would take. I already had them so I printed one out for my 50mm based Bullgors (minotaurs) and yes! - they fit perfectly! Now I've printed out some that adapt 32mm bases so my Bestigors are viable. No rebasing needed!

The only real dilemna here is with the Gors - of course the most numerous unit in the force would be the problematic one. Gors, years ago, were on 25mm square. Sigmar moved them to 32mm round. With Old World, for various reasons, they left them on 25s instead of bumping them to 30s like every other larger infantry unit. You can fit 32s into the space for 30s, but you can't fit 32s into the space for 25s. Looking at how almost everything else in the army needs minimal work I am leaning heavily towards bending the official rules and just leaving them on their round 32s. It saves me a ton of work, potential damage to painted figures, and the only reason I can see that they left the 25s in was to allow one specialty army to combine Gors and Ungors (a lighter, weaker type of beatman) in a single unit. I don't really care about doing that so I'm not hurting my options. I also don't trust GW not to put them on 30mm bases anyway in a year or two so that decision is probably made. 

I have to admit this is giving me some ideas now ...

So yes, when not working on the 40K stuff I do dip into the fantasy side and try to make some progress. Movement trays and adapters and similar utility aids are a great reason to have a 3D printer around but even if you don't they are widely available online and it's a great feeling when you realize you can just put some new shoes on an old army and go.