"Kings of War basing question" Topic

I picked up some movement trays for my 28mm fantasy guys, and they appear to be a little too wide for KOW. They're like 125mm and KOW calls for 100mm frontage.

I'm guessing my opponents will hew a little closer to the KOW standard. Will this create a big problem for me if I don't modify my movement trays to make them smaller? Will the game mechanics break down if I've got a little bit more frontage on all my units?

Did V3 clarify that units should have 100mm frontage? In the PDF versions, units were described in terms of being 5 (or 10) figures wide without actually stating the base width of the figures. I frequently used figures on 25mm bases, which put my 5 wide units at 125mm.

In any case, it should not be a big deal. KOW is a unit based game, its not important how many actual figures are in contact. If you like, you can always add a filler strip to each side of the figures to reduce the "in play" width to 100 mm.

KOW clarified the basing rules in a roundabout way, by mandating that figures be based individually on the bases included in the unit box (typically 20mm squares for fantasy). So a unit that is five figures wide has a logical frontage of 100mm.

If you go with 125mm frontage – it will be slightly to your disadvantage – but not to any great degree.

Ran's suggestion of filler strips, would be good, then you can declare that the figure bases are the unit, the movement tray is just decoration.

What Patrick says is correct – I don't know why they didn't just list the base areas of the units, there aren't that many variations. And the game is totally unit based – you can have as few are as many figures as you want on a base.

We're a casual group anyway, so it sounds like the units will match up OK even if my basing is a little bit bigger than everyone else's. Thanks for the responses.

Good to know that it probably won't be an issue. I'll probably be the one across the table from Patrick.

How much does the depth of a unit come into play?
I have a couple units on 25mm bases, but as mine are on squares (his are on circles) I don't have trays and I thought I'd just use 4 across to equal 100mm. However that still makes me 10mm deeper than a standard unit.

I'm basing most everything else on 20mm squares, 40mm squares (Monsters) and 25x50mm rectangles (Cav) so they will be KOW compliant, but I don't want to rebase the few units I've already got done. I could just multibase, but I'd rather keep them individually based so I am not limited to one particular system.

These are the movement trays I've got painted up…and I really don't want to saw a column off 'em if at all possible! :)

The size of units really only matters for movement – smaller can units get through gaps, and are less likely to be effected by terrain.

Deeper units are harder to manoeuvre, so the difference between a troop (40mm) and a regiment (80mm) matters (especially for cavalry (50/100) – but the difference between 40 and 50 isn't really here nor there.

For combat you can pretty much always get two units in. The chances to get 3 units in (unless against a horde) are very rare. And its only 3 vs 1 were the difference between 100mm and 125mm frontage matters (in combat).

I happen to have Ordinarybass' copy of the rules, so I took a few minutes to look it over. It seems like as long as the unit base sizes are within a reasonable range, the largest width being no more than 150% of the smallest width, then it will not matter much.

I doubt depth will matter either, since there does not seem to be any flank to flank contact allowed and a charge against a flank by two units does not seam reasonable for any of the unit depths. Since I will most likely be the other person across from Patrick and OB, I think we'll be able to work something out with a little variation in base sizes.

Just got my hard copy of the rules yesterday and spent some time looking over the relevant sections.

I think Fred is right. Looks like larger units are mostly a slight disadvantage to the player, but probably won't affect gameplay much.

Though I haven't had a chance to play, I'm really liking the rules so far. Looks very very simliar to Warpath 1.0 (which I think was basically "KoW in Space"), a ruleset I very much enjoyed.

Played and hosted and demo'd about a dozen games, using both fantasy and historical with a variety of basing schemes.

If things are equal on both sides, it definitely doesn't matter.

If you've based your orcs on 25mm/fig frontage and his are 20mm/fig frontage, it might matter a little. But you can easily take this into account by having the smaller frontage keep a bit more than an inch around it.

Basically, the basing system is the same as GW – most humanoids are 20mm per fig, 5 files in two ranks for a troop and 4 for a regiment, so 100mm x 80mm.

Larger humanoids like orcs are 25mm a fig, so they'd be 125 by 50 or 100mm.

In play, if you're trying to plug a gap then wider is better. If you're trying to maximize unit density than smaller is better.

The spirit of the game is to play by the general standards. So if you've large humans – GW Chaos figs – then leave tham at 25mm / 1" a figure. If you have 'normal' humans – GW Empire and most historicals – leave them at 20mm a figure.

Hope that helps. It's an easy-going system with very clean rules, you won't have any problems if you ask around. I'd try the Mantic forums, those guys are pretty helpful.