Bases & Game-Play
I also had to consider how I wanted my games to play. I had decided that I would rather have artillery mounted on round bases. It’s not conventional wargames wisdom but there’s a good number of reasons why it makes sense to me. For guns at the corners of infantry squares, it’s a no-brainer! It allows pivots to fire without disturbing ranked-up bases. Placing in earthworks and fortifications is easier – especially when pivoting to fire! And I anticipated a nice solution for limbered guns. For some reason also, a round base can help make a gun not look as under-crewed as sometimes they do. My preference was to have light infantry and light cavalry on round bases as well. My reasoning being that like guns when they are fielded singly or spaced out in extended order, to my mind, they look and play better mounted on round bases. I think round bases are more wargames friendly for skirmishing in open order and for defending obstacles, which light troops did a lot of during the Danube campaign. And perfect for light cavalry scouting in extended order, something I wanted to be able to do more of in this smaller scale than was usual in the larger scales. That light troops and guns wouldn’t have defined fronts, flanks and rears, didn’t worry me at all.1mm:3⅓m
The ground scale of 1mm:3 ⅓ m is an excellent compromise, if you don’t mind measuring in threes. However, mapping in kilometres would not only be workable but would convert, if you really wanted, to thinking of 1 foot on the tabletop as 1km on the battlefield and measuring with an inch rule – in 12ths of a kilometre! It would make 20mm the basic base size. A rank of three 10mm foot figures can fit okay on a 20mm frontage. Likewise, two 10mm cavalry figures fit fine on a 20mm frontage. However, three cavalry figures would have to jump up to a 25mm frontage giving a nominal frontage per cavalryman of 1m. None of which seemed bad. Also, 1:33 ⅓ metric scale rulers were available if needed.1mm:2.5m
1mm:2.5m started off as my preferred ground scale. It would make 25mm the basic base size. On first glance, three infantry figures on a 25mm frontage looks a little bit roomy. The cavalry would be fine. A neat advantage of this ground scale would be that my terrain tiles would be ½km wide, making mapping very simple indeed. Also if needed, 1:25 metric scale rulers were available.
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