After playing a ECW game earlier in the year, I kind of decided to move in a new direction for rules for the period. I had recently rebased my armies onto large 60mm wide bases. I liked the larger base from an aesthetic perspective, but found they looked funny when I had to form the units into column. As such, I know that had to change…. I thought about the one inch square basing the a lot of rules used, but did not like how that looked with pike units and how that made bending pikes more likely (I should replace my pikes with steel ones someday…). So, the next choice would be 40mm wide. Many rules use this as a standard. However, these also tend to be too thin. In the end, I decided to go with 40mm square. This would give enough size to represent pike with some ranks and all clumping of figures for a more visual appeal.
With that decided, I placed a large order Shogun Miniatures for 40mm square magnetic bases. I have grown to favor these for medium to large bases. They have a little, but no too much thickness to facilitate moving them and removing them, whiteout having to grab the figures. Being magnetic, they also can be set up in movement trays when needed and are easy to securely store in transport boxes.
I had a number of loose ECW that I bought from Gajo some time back, so I decided I would use these as my test case. The models included some heavy cavalry, dragoons and musketeers. I sprayed the bases dark brown and then started to glue down the figures. I went with more density on the heavy units and less for the lights.
The bases had a lot of open visible area (as they are not all ranked up troops). I will normally pumice this type of basing and work it up. However, I did not have that in me. If this worked, I would go back and do all the other troops and wanted something a little simpler!
I started by just flocking the bases, using green paint and flock. I thought this was not enough, so I then added a few dark green 2mm tufts to the bases. I thought about some tan, but worried this would stand out too much. Then I decided to just add spots of static grass flock mix in clips around the base using white glue. That gave a decent lush grass look that would fit any battlefield in Britain or Northern Europe! I let that dry and was satisfied with the result. I am happy with the look and will be moving to the rest of the army when I get the chance to get it all on the new basing!
- Manteuffel
I think it’s a good choice scale wide but perspective deep is rightly popular these days.