Basing and rebasing for Chain of Command

[Tactical Painter]

I don’t know if it’s just me, but once I settled on a basing convention for my WWII miniatures for Chain of Command I allowed myself to get so rigidly tied to it that I started doing things that just didn’t look right. I settled on 20mm rounds for individual figures, therefore ALL individual figures had to go on those size bases.

All well and good but that means you end up with something like this:

Faintly ridiculous and in all the name of a convention of my own making. My current project is a platoon of Volksgrenadiers and there was simply no way the prone figures would make it onto a 20mm round and so, gulp, dare I say it, I broke with convention and put them on larger bases.

This took me down a rabbit hole, but a good one I think and so I’ve revisited a lot of my basing and come up with some solutions that solve both practical and aesthetic issues. The prone figures certainly look better as you can see but I’ve also changed the basing for weapons teams and senior leaders. I’ve written a blog post about the journey and how I got there is you’re interested http://thetacticalpainter.blogspot.com/2020/08/thinking-about-basing-and-rebasing.html

The Tactical Painter - painting miniature armies for battles on the table top.
http://www.thetacticalpainter.blogspot.com/

[ian pillay]

Excellent blog post. I really like the wavy edges to the bases. It brakes up the unnatural straight edges and blends them well with the table. Not played CoC but the basing you have chosen looks good for Crossfire so you might have unintentionally doubled your use for the figures.
lovely brush work, I enjoyed looking at those photos.

Tally-Ho! Check out my blog at…..
http://steelcitywargaming.wordpress.com/

[Tactical Painter]

ian pillay wrote:

Excellent blog post. I really like the wavy edges to the bases. It brakes up the unnatural straight edges and blends them well with the table. Not played CoC but the basing you have chosen looks good for Crossfire so you might have unintentionally doubled your use for the figures. lovely brush work, I enjoyed looking at those photos.

Thanks. Interestingly enough it was Crossfire that got me back into playing WWII miniatures after decades of playing board games. That was one reason my senior leaders were on those larger bases, as I had my Crossfire squads with three figures on a 40×40 base and the PC on a 20×40. I still have a Russian, German and British force for Crossfire, but I don’t play it much these days.

There’s much to like about Crossfire but I’ve always thought it is under developed, it feels like a beta version. I admire the lack of traditional turn structure and no measurements. The game is very playable and easy to teach, but it could really benefit from further refinement. It doesn’t help that the game receives no support from Arty Cunliffe or the publisher (one and the same, I suspect) and has to rely on a very small, but enthusiastic community.

The Tactical Painter - painting miniature armies for battles on the table top.
http://www.thetacticalpainter.blogspot.com/

[MartinR]

Arty Conliffe has pretty much retired from wargaming although I gather he is still tinkering with one of his Ancients rule sets (or he was a couple of years ago).

 

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Tactical Painter]

MartinR wrote:

Arty Conliffe has pretty much retired from wargaming although I gather he is still tinkering with one of his Ancients rule sets (or he was a couple of years ago).

Maybe, but he was never particularly supportive even years ago. The rules have no official online presence and any online rules enquiries needed to go via a third party (assuming you knew who this third party was). This is not an attack on anyone, just my experience, but a major reason why I stopped playing Crossfire. It seemed like it had a lot of potential but that was never explored fully, as it stands now it feels more like a work in progress than a finished piece.

The Tactical Painter - painting miniature armies for battles on the table top.
http://www.thetacticalpainter.blogspot.com/

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