Rebasing ancients

Procrastination on multiple fronts

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while. In fact I should be working on a college paper right now, but alas. Ended up pivoting majors from history to geology. Still taking Hist next semester for personal interest reasons though.

    If the history 1101 course I’m (not) studying for right now didn’t one thing it’s rekindle my interest in historical gaming. So after a brief consideration of starting a Norman army, I’m rebasing my ancients. Initially I had the idea of changing to 25mm rounds for skirmish games but realized that planning an army for games I don’t play and don’t want to play is a bad idea.

    I had originally used 20mm squares for infantry and 25x50mm for cavalry. There is a decent saga presence in my area and I’ve attended a couple tournaments with my romans and Macedonians. It had a very “heroic” feel to it though and my historical interest lies more in mass battles. Thus the rebasing. I plan to use them mainly for Impetus and To the strongest, which seemed like they had a good balance of speed and tactical depth. I’m also attracted to multi-basing for the small dioramas that can be constructed and it seemed like a fun modelling opportunity. Plus I’ve lost track of how many models have broken from having to move so many or falling off shelves.

    With that settled the only issue was what sized bases I wanted to go for. My first idea was 40x40mm. I thought it looked good with more opportunities for mimicking formation while still being flexible for multiple systems

    Unfortunately adapting this to cavalry bases was challenging. Having a fluid formation with the base split into 3 pieces (120mm frontage) is very difficult, especially with light cavalry. Two solutions came to mind. 

1. Bite the bullet and do 120mm frontage

2. Try 60mm instead

    60mm has advantages for downsizing games and for ease of painting. Some rulesets prefer this as well. I could combine two 60mm bases to make the 120mm frontage needed for Impetus or line them up in column for display effects. In terms of figures per base this was my plan (following impetus measurements):

Heavy infantry (120x40): 12 figures

Light infantry (120x60): 6-8 figures

Skirmishers (120x30): 3-4

Cavalry (120x80): 3 for lights, 4 for heavy

    The only way to truly decide is to put them on cardstock bases and test them out. I'm planning to base my Persians this way before rebasing my Romans.