Sabot bases

When I first came into contact with the surprisingly large number of wargamers based in Ilkley one thing that I couldn't understand was the propensity of some of them to constantly rebase their figures for different rulesets. I swore to myself that I wouldn't ever go down that route. No matter how idiosyncratically I'd structured my unit and element sizes new rules would just have to be twisted and tortured until they could somehow be made to work.

I was therefore delighted when I discovered C&C Napoleonics as they have allowed me to utilise my collection of very many, very small units of Russian, Prussian, French, Bavarian and other assorted nationalities without doing anything to the way that I had organised them many years ago: for example nine man infantry units on three 20mm x 40mm stands. It works very well and gives a good game. The main remaining problem (apart from calculating the line of sight on a board of offset squares) is the fiddly nature of the small bases, the time it takes to move them about and the incidental damage as they were being handled. I had been wondering whether perhaps they needed rebasing after all.

My Wars of the Roses figures however left me with a different problem. I had based the nobles, knights etc individually, mostly on pennies, but others on any old odd size that must have seemed a good idea at the time. The various rules that I have actually tried, or indeed would like to try at some point, all require leaders to be essentially just another stand. I therefore broke my rule and knocked up some temporary bases of the same size as a stand (40mm x 40mm), which held the leader and displayed his name, specifically for the battle commanders at Tewkesbury. I rather liked these and have therefore double broken the rule and made some permanent such stands for all sixty or so such captains that i have. The consequent dilemma was how to differentiate between battle commanders and unit captains now that I had, well, based them all the same again. Thus my last order from Warbases included some 60mm x 40mm sabot bases to allow higher level commanders to be identified by an attached stand of heralds. Unfortunately the heralds - of which I have an inexplicable dozen or so stands - were based on arbitrary sized scraps of card, because presumably I never really thought that I'd use them. I therefore triply broke my rule and rebased all of them on 20mm x 40mm bases.

It was only while admiring all this work that it occurred to me that the same sabot bases could serendipitously also be used for the Napoleonic infantry. So, a further order was placed and the C&C faffing about problem has been solved without rebasing dozens of units and hopefully they will be easier to handle without bending guns etc. Now, if only the line of sight issue were so amenable.