When I find painted SYW miniatures for sale, they are generally based one of two ways:
- 1" wide x 1/2" deep
- 3/4" wide x 1" deep (or often 20mm wide x 25mm deep functional metric equivalent)
A decade ago I went with scheme 1 for my AWI collection, for a wide variety of reasons. Now I find myself opposed to it because it turns out to be really unstable and tippy, hard for human fingers to manage, and the weapons and arms and sometimes even feet of the figures are always sticking out into the space of other stands front-to-back, damaging the figures and making columns hard to manage.
I never liked scheme 2, because it seems weird to have stands deeper than they are wide. However, it's really common, probably because it's the Koenig Krieg standard. Also, it turns out I like the way it looks on the table with 18th C. miniatures that basically operate only in march column and single-stand line, as long as the units have 6+ stands. (3-4 stands looks bit too lean to my eye.)
When I started branching into the WAS/SYW era 2 years ago, my thought was to use 1" square bases (3 figures wide, 2 ranks deep). It's stable, easy to handle, looks amazing with units of 4-6 stands, and 1" frontage works for all arms (infantry, artillery, cavalry).
Now I'm reconsidering. I have quite a few miniatures painted and nicely based to the KK standard (option 2), and I'm sick of rebasing projects. I've also played a few games run by other people that used KK-based units with other systems, and it was no problem.
Tell me about your experience with KK basing. I don't play KK (and I'm not going to), so I have almost no experience using the basing in practice. What are the pros and cons that aren't obvious when you first start playing with it? What works? What doesn't?
- Ix
