Operation: Rebase

Having enjoyed the game the other day I am frantically rebasing to get a force of Numidians assembled and ready for a rematch vs Kent and his carthaginians. Hunting through my lead piles I discovered 4x packs of Foundry Numidian infantry that will make a great start to my Numidian warband. That is about half of what I need so scanning the internet I have spied the new plastic Victrix Numidian light infantry and will add some of those to the Foundry figures to each base to bulk out the force. I've not bought Victrix before so am interested to see how they will turn out- they look good on the website.

I've revised my army list from the other day, doubling the infantry component and will need a total of 6 light infantry/warbands for the bulk of the Numidian light infantry warbands.

My figures are being rebased to the "Impetus standard" which has the look I prefer. That means my bases will be 12cm wide and depth varying according to troop type. So that figures don't get damaged I tend to go for slightly deeper bases for skirmishers and heavy infantry:

• skirmishers: 4cm 
• Heavy foot 5 cm
• Light foot 6cm

Just to complicate matters further the local gamers use 2x 8cm bases= 1 unit in Hail Caesar so their unit frontages are 16cm wide. I'm not keen on 8cm, or 16 cm for that matter, bases anymore so will need to come up with a cunning plan for gaming vs the other local armies. I think I will add a 4cm wide spacer/sabot to increase their unit footprint. Luckily my light horse are already at the right (12cm) widths being "small units". At this stage I'll just use empty terrain covered "spacers" but may end up putting 1 or two figures on them. We will see.

The other issue I have is how to depict my warband units such as my Numidian light infantry.
In Hail Caesar light foot, warband are 3-4 ranks deep which means that bases need to be twice as deep, or two standard bases- which means a lot of figures, hmmm... Large Warband are double width (as well as double depth) in HC so that means a large foot warband unit is 4 times larger than my "Impetus" warband. Given that each base has 8-10 figures that is a lot of painting! Okay, so how does Impetus treat "large" warband? You add a second rank to the warband and once it has taken enough casualties your remove it, so a large warband in Impetus will be half the size of the large warband in Hail Caesar and deeper rather than wider on the table top.

Having given it a bit of thought this morning I've come up with a compromise (of sorts) that should work and will require slightly less work for large (HC) warband bases.  My solution? I think I'll make my warband bases the same size as my Cavalry bases, thus they will be 12cm x 8cm and will each have 8-10 figures in a loose formation on them. If I want to make large units then I'll add a second such base for Hail Caesar. For both games I think I will simply add a skirmisher sized base with 3-4 figures to represent the extra back ranks- that way the footprint will remain about right. An ideal solution? Maybe not but, and this is the important part, it should work.

Anyone got any idea which manufacturer these are? I thought they might be Crusader and quite like them so wanted more but aren't 100% sure which brand they are.

Rebased light horse and some Numidian command stands.

And the bases painted and ready for vegetation. However, I am unsure what I will add to add to them at this stage.

Below is this mornings efforts: Since I need 6 bases of warband I started rebasing some Celts (mainly Warlord plastics) which I'll use as Galatians as well as allies for the Carthaginians and Republican Romans and till I've enough Numidians done support for the Numidians too.

As you can see my idea of "spacer" bases. Adding a couple of infantry to these spacers would be visually appealing and would kind of represent skirmisher types on the flanks of the main warband.

So a bit of work finishing off these bases tonight.

It is nice to be back into doing some gaming related after a long, long break.

Craig