Friday, August 23, 2013

Dark Ages movement trays project

My Saga figures in my collection have slowly grown in size. They are not taller, just more of them. I have been playing Kings of War games with Dwarfs and they have been very enjoyable. KoW though is monsters and spells and regiment blocks of infantry etc while Saga is a Skirmish formation game. I like KoW rules though for big table top battles at 28mm. So my idea was to get a base solution to use my already based figures for Saga in Kings of War historical style games. Extending the use of the figures into a different style of game.
Part of my inspiration for doing this is these fantastic Historical Army options at the excellent Hour of Wolves and Shattered Shields site. The Viking age pdf has been my guide as to just what a potential army could be. I also tend to immerse myself in periods I like. Historical novels, history sites, Vikings TV series and so on. So my initial plans have me thinking of Vikings invading England. Anglo-Saxons vs Vikings. Perhaps do a campaign. Then do it again but with later Vikings (the ones who occupied York etc). Then perhaps even later with the Norman invasion re-worked. A lot of game possibility's.

Base size
The PDF also has a base guide but, the KoW rules also has a base guide that can be figured out. Humans = 20mm square base. Troop = 10 figures, Regiment = 20, Horde = 40. With Troop and regiment being 5 figures across and Hordes 10 across. However due to 25mm round bases for Saga I will not be able to reach those total number of figures on the same base sizes. I am cool with that and feel no reason that my units need to reach those totals. But I did run with standard tray sizes and figured out a spread of 25mm bases that I liked and I sent it off to Warbases. UK to laser cut me some MDF trays. Some wargamers may feel that I am just stretching my collection out too much and they could be right but mehh. What evs. On the tray for 40 figures I configured it for just 14 holes. Sure I could have squeezed more on like another rank of seven but that means my collection would have to grow by a lot more. I will be increasing the collection but not drastically. I already have a fair few unpainted plastics. How much more work do I really want? Sure It would be cool to get a great shield wall look going on but perhaps that's a later on project.
Here is the results.
Base for a Regiment (footprint of a 20 strong unit). Only 9 figures though. 
3 sizes. Troop, Regiment and Horde. Before flock is applied.
I glued on sand and small rocks then painted and flocked in the same way I have based the figures. I got enough bases for 2 Armies so I can be the ultimate game host. Mwah ha ha ha.
I have no projected time line for this project so it might be a while before another update but I am looking forward to when it is ready to rumble.

Cheers for now from Brendon (The Kiwi)

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