"Couple more Black Powder basing questions from a newbie" Topic

I've been speaking to my group about coming to a standard for basing for our Napoleonic project. It's a bit of an uphill struggle since there aren't standards, even among the group south that we talked to we got like 2 or 3 "Well in my group we…" sort of responses that left us more confused about what to do.

What we think we're going to do after talking to someone from the other group who gave really good advice is use Field of Glory type basing so we can use Black Powder, Blucher, and Field of Glory rules with minimal or no adjustment. From the other rules I've skimmed over it seems like this basing can also work with most rules, as General d'Armee has been pitched around as well (and looks good, I'd like to try that).

I know BP is flexible with basing but does the *depth* of the base matter, or only the width? We've had a long talk about this and can't seem to figure it out or come to an agreement. I want to use FoG standard as-is (e.g. 40x30 for Infantry and Cav) so there's some consistency, but one guy wants to use 40x40 since he insists on using 1/72 scale figures so he doesn't have to buy more models. Other than the scale issue will the different depth matter?

I'm waiting on my BP2 rulebook (next week, I think) but it seems like there's disagreement on what basing to use and agree upon, as everyone is reading different things and talking to others isn't helping. Am I being silly by wanting us to pick one standard, preferably what the other group (at least most of them) use, and stick to it? I keep getting the feeling that I'm reading way too much into a "standard" basing because it's what I'm used to.

You are wrapped around the axle about something that doesn't matter. Even if someone shows up with oddball or non-standard basing, if you can't come to a gentlemen's agreement about how his figures fit into the game, you probably shouldn't be gaming together anyway. I've already made known my thoughts on the 1/72 guy.

In general, width of your formations will matter a lot more than depth.

For example, I might end up basing my infantry on 45mm wide, 50 mm deep bases while a clubmate is doing 45mm wide, 40mm deep. Even if my six bases big battalion is in column two bases wide, it'll just add 30mm to the totald depth of the formation. That's quite marginal, compared to if I was using bases 10mm wider. In that case, the common line formation would be 60mm wider, so I'd be better of fielding an entire base less!

Depth has a far smaller game effect in general as well due to how units support each other. It's less common to have battalions stacked immediately behind each other, compared to how often you'll keep your flanks supported by units pretty close by. If your battalions are a good chunk wider than your opponent's you'll end up outflanking him, while having deeper formations really doesn't give you a gameplay advantage.

Thanks, so we should be good with the idea. And yes @79thPA I am likely giving too much thought to it, I just want to avoid a situation where we do everything very fast and loose, and then are the outlier/odd man out as far as how our things are based. I don't expect we will game with the other group often, but I don't want to deviate too much from them.

-Wayne

Look – for 28mm figures you cannot go wrong with 4 figures on a 40x40mm or 40x50mm base. I have figures based on both and they work OK together for a variety of rule sets (used them for BP, General de Brigade, Piquet and others.

20mm width per infantryman at 28mm looks far too spread out for me though. 15mm width per man is not perfect, but it's the most practical solution. 6 men on a 45mm wide base for me. :)

Other than the 1/72 guy the rest of us plan to use 15mm. He just immediately was like well I have a lot of 1/72 plastic so I'm going to use those, and then it sort of went to "Well… it doesn't *really* matter…"

I almost considered 1/72 plastics but I didn't like that there is such a variation in figures, plastic types and what you get in the box (e.g. so many have X many in poses, but no standard/drummer/leader, some have extra thrown in because they are for diorama not gaming, etc.) that you might need to get boxes from different manufacturers and they might be varying scale. I spent a long time on Plastic Soldier Review reading about the kits.

I am trying to be persuaded to push 1:72 now.. the other guy was talking to someone who might be interested and was immediately saying how he'll do a 1:72 army (despite 15mm being the preferred one based on a poll) for him if he plays. So now I'm torn as I see both, but I absolutely want to avoid having multiple people using multiple standards because "it doesn't matter".

Sigh.

I base my 15mm by doing 8 figures on 40x30. Or 3 cav on the same size. I really like the look of it. I've started rebasing my ACW the same way.

Haha so in a very drastic change of plans, the core group met yesterday and we talked about a lot of things. After about an hour, we decided to instead use 28mm, since we found they aren't that much more expensive than 15mm when you factor things in, the 1:72 scale doesn't look so out of place with them, and the spectacle is better. It's less popular than 15mm but not non-existent here, and we can just as much modify other rules for 28mm as modify BP for 15.

So turns out all this was for nought. We will be using the basing as recommend by Black Powder.

Thank you everyone for your help, even if we did a 180 after seriously discussing it.