"Black Powder 28mm basing and frontages" Topic

I know that Black Powder is very flexible with its basing and allows for virtually anything as long as it's consistent. However, the issue I'm running into right now is distributing 28mm figures so that the base falls within the right ranges for Small/Standard/Large. For example, Perry Napoleonic British has 36 infantry and "suggests" you base them 6 figures per base on 45mm wide bases, using all 36 figures. By Black Powder standards though this gives a frontage of 270mm which is into the "Large" category despite the unit wanting to be "Standard". The logical thing seems to be base them the Black Powder way instead, 4 figures per stand on 40mm bases for a total of 24 models in a unit, with 12 extras remaining. Not exactly realistic given that the British had 10 companies in a battalion but suffices given the circumstances (10x2 would be a bit silly I think not to mention give a huge frontage).

Victrix's boxes make this slightly worse because they often give even more figures. Their Austrians, for example, contain 56 (54 if you don't count the two mounted Colonels) figures. Mounting this 6 per stand on 45mm bases would give 9 stands for a frontage of 405mm, well beyond even the upper limit of a "Large" unit in Black Powder. Again the logical thing seems to be to base smaller (given the unit would be Large I'm thinking 32 models in 8 stands of 4 so it's noticeably larger than 24) and have extra to use or combine with another box to make an additional unit.

What have others done in this case if you're starting out fresh and don't already have models based on some other basing standard that you just adjust the BP rules to match?

Wayne

Five double companies for British?

My Napoleonic units have a frontage of 240mm. My ACW units are 250mm wide.

Companies in British units (and in many other countries) were administrative components. The officer in charge would organise the battalion into fighting groups, often a left and a right wing each of several companies and many men from the same company could be in a different wing.

I base all my 28mm Black Powder infantry in groups of 4 on 40 X 40 stands – when I have extra figs I usually try to buy in a way that enables me to form complete units, e.g. 2 boxes of Napoleonic Brits gives me 3 24 fig regiments at 6 stands per regiment

That's why I bought a bunch of the 36 fig Wargame Factory WSS infantry when I could – I took 2 boxes and made 2 units of infantry in tricornes and one in either bearskins or stocking caps as Jaegers

Our group settled on 24 figure units for normal units, and 32 figure for large. Sixteen and less are small units.

We mount our figures at four per stand. We use a 30mm frontage and 40mm depth for each stand. We tried the recommend 40x40 but we felt that, for Napoleonics, the figures look too far apart.

My ACW mount 4 figures per stand in a 2x2 arrangement. Stands 40mm x 40mm. Two stands Small unit, 4 stands average sized, 6 large.

We use 18 figs based in sixes, 3 bases, for a "standard" unit, 24 on 4 for "large", 12 on 2 for "small" and 6 on 1 for "tiny". We also have separate skirmisher stands.
We find the smaller unit sizes allow more room on the table for manoeuvre plus as each unit takes up less space you can fit more on.
To be fair this system ties in with the Shako II rules which we also use.

I did a couple of blogs posts on this.
Basing my British
Basing French