In this first non-review article for the site, I'm going to go over how you can easily add more variety and visual interest to your army though its basing by iterating on your theme. A theme doesn't have to be high-concept; it can be as simple as "they're fighting in a ruined city", and you'll have an idea of the vibe you're trying to go with and how you want it to look. I'm going to stick to a simple theme and a few materials, and try to talk you through how my thought process went, so that you can imagine how to do it yourself next time you're doing a project.
Some Disclaimers
At points in this review you might find yourself exclaiming things like -
"But a space marine motorbike could totally smash through rough ground and undergrowth without tipping over! He wouldn't have to stick to flat ground!"
or
"British Riflemen were skirmishers, but they advanced in front of the blocks of infantry, so they would be standing on flat ground just like them instead of flanking!"
To which I can only say "yeah, probably." You'll understand whatever theme you decide to go with and whichever minis you're doing it with better than I do; I just want to give you an idea of how to think about it, rather than setting any rules.
So What's the Project?
The models we're going to feature here today are the start of a 15mm Ancient Greek army I'm putting together for display. I've given them all the same base size, 60x40mm, to reduce the number of variables between demonstration bases & make them easier to store, rather than having a specific game ruleset in mind. If you're more of an expert in Historicals than I am and can tell this has rendered them unusable in any major ruleset, feel free to have a sensible chuckle at my expense.
What's the Theme?
To keep this as simple as possible, I'm going with a nice default grassy plains theme. If you're of a certain age you'll remember this was the default for most miniatures, especially the ubiquitous "Goblin Green paint on sand = grass" basing scheme you'd see on every Citadel miniature from the plains of the Empire to the warzones of the 40k universe to the hive cities of Necromunda.
I'm building an Ancient Greek army, so they'll be largely fighting in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, but I decided to go for a more verdant environment than the usual "dry brown grass and sand" since the minis are already going to be quite brown and golden in colour. A quick bit of research brought up some pictures of the regions I was thinking of, and we're off to the races.
"Research" in this case is my euphemism for fretting at the last minute that I'd somehow misremembered what the Mediterranean looks like, and am about to make an ass of myself in my own article. if you don't have an anxiety disorder, feel free to skip this part.
What Materials Are We Using?
An easy way to add variety and theming to your bases is of course "use a lot of different materials", but that doesn't help any if you don't know what to use or don't have the money to try a lot of stuff out. So to keep this simple and try to focus on the principles & not the products, I'm going to stick to 5 materials, two of which you can drop or sub out if you need to.
- Sand: this is a fine grain, lightly coloured sand, as I'm working at a smaller scale and won't be painting over this later. You could use a larger grit sand at bigger scales, and/or a different coloured one for non-Mediterranean ground or if you're going to be painting it.
- Static Grass: I'm using 2mm grass in a summer colour, as we're going for a vibrant look and longer grass would look out of place (for reasons we'll get into). Again, you can sub this out for whichever grass looks better for your project or scale, or use both short and long grass if you've got more of a budget to work with.
- Tufts: these are a single kind at a regular length, as I'm trying to show the principles at work here, but you could use 2-3 kinds in complimentary colours to make your project more realistic if you wanted.
- Texture Paste: this is something I use a lot, primarily as a "neutral" ground texture when I want to cover up something like milliput or No More Nails that looks visibly artificial and I don't want to be able to see it through subsequent layers of paint and basing material. If you were doing this as a project yourself and were working on a limited budget, you could just use the sand on its own and skip this material.
- Clump Foliage: this is the most skippable of these materials, as I'll be using it in a way you could simulate at this scale with a "bush" kind of tuft if you wanted. I just wanted to try using this at this scale, and to simulate larger bushes like you'd see in this environment.
Roll Call - Each Unit and its Iteration
Infantry Regiments - Open Ground
Infantry will usually be the core of your army, and you'll often have a lot of them, so this is a good way to establish the "normal" point from which we'll be iterating.
These Hoplites fight in large blocks like this, which generally means they need flat, clear ground as they can't watch where they're stepping. Grass above the ankle level gets quite thick, particularly for grasses that grow in clumps, which makes the ground under your feet uneven and we don't want our Hoplites twisting their ankles mid march.
This doesn't mean the ground is completely bare, however - as you can see a light dusting of our static grass on top of the texture paste gives the impression of very short grass underfoot, that would be easy to walk on even in bare feet.
Skirmishers - Dense Ground
Skirmishing troops like these Peltasts operated by flanking and harassing the main bodies of troops from the sidelines, and in harder ground that the main troops will struggle with. Sharpe fans in the audience will remember the times the 95th Rifles are firing from rocky slopes and woodlands, where they can fall back if a larger body of troops decides to come and get them.
As you can see here, I've gone much harder on the grass/sand mixture here than I did for the Hoplites, and it's here where we make the most use of our tufts and clumps as foliage & undergrowth that the lighter troops can move around. At larger scales and individually based minis you could use several tufts per base to achieve this same effect with less base space to work with, or use basing bits such as twigs as visual interest, but even if we'd just used the grass/sand mixture these models look like they are on a different part of the same battlefield as our Hoplites.
Light Cavalry - Semi-Dense Ground
Light cavalry performs a similar function to the Skirmishers, reeling around in flanking motions and finding weak points to harass, but being on horseback means the ground has to be at least somewhat even and with room to manoeuvrer. Horses are flighty, and can break their legs if you so much as suggest it aggressively enough, so riders can't easily go into denser terrain like the skirmishers.
As you can see here, the grass/sand mixture on top of the texture paste is the same as the skirmishers, but used much more sparingly, and with only one or two tufts/clumps to simulate things for the riders to weave around. In the grassy plain our main army is fighting in, this might be the point at which the flat ground starts to give way to the base of slopes and foothills, as our light cavalry wheel round our opponent's phalanxes.
Heavy Cavalry - Flat Ground
Heavy Cavalry are made up of armoured riders - and sometimes steeds, in the case of units like Cataphracts - doing high-impact charges, so that means flat, open ground where the horses can build up speed and not trip. As such, we're going to be using the same principles as our Infantry Regiments and Light Cavalry.
Here we've gone with the most sand and the least grass - probably a little too sparingly on the grass, looking at this picture in retrospect - and without any of the foliage from the lighter units. These horsemen would have enough rough ground to deal with once they've punched through their target and are trampling foes underfoot.
...Well, OK, you can maybe have a tuft on every third base. As a treat.
Artillery - Very Flat Ground
You'll have to excuse me breaking the space-time continuum here - the Ancient Greeks weren't known for their heavy artillery, so I had to grab a Roman onager to use as a demonstration model.
The ground around an artillery piece like this is going to be even flatter than the rest. This is both by choice of where to set up, to ensue a solid point to fire from, and due to the crew milling about as they operate and tinker with the machine, or in some cases even build the whole thing on site. Grass will be trampled and bushes and rocks if present at all will be uprooted and moved where possible. To represent this, I've stuck almost exclusively to our texture paste, with only a light smattering of grass that hasn't been completely worn down.
This has the potential to make your base kind of boring, however, so this is a good opportunity to do some storytelling. You've got a group of men standing around for an extended period with a machine to operate. Have they got their tools nearby? Have they left trash like discarded tools or even lunch? Or are they following the Universal Rule of Men at Work - for every two men working on a job, there must be a third standing to one side and pontificating. Sadly for this kit the third man was very clearly Roman, so he's gone in the bits box, and I've instead rolled some additional ammunition boulders out of leftover Milliput. If I'd had more room on the base I would have used some of the piles of baggage we'll see in the next step, but never mind. Told you it was a bad idea to put them all on 60x40s.
Command Bases - Mixed Ground
These are the centrepiece models of your army, so it's time to show off a little. In other projects I've made little dioramas, and if you're someone who dabbles in Hero Rocks™ this is a good time to do so, but I'm sticking to the materials we've used so far. I bought most of this army secondhand, and in splitting up what I had into bases I found I had a lot of leftovers. These are great for adding to command bases like these, as various bodyguards, camp followers and general Hype-Men* for your leader.
With the base on the left, I pictured this general on horseback being closer to the battlefield, and as such there's thicker sand/grass mix with patches that have been worn down from runners coming and going. There's a few tufts here and there but nothing suggesting deep undergrowth. The one on the right is... supervising?... guarding? the camp fire, or perhaps has had his cook get started on the victory feast. The grass/sand mix here fades out to the more bare ground the cook has chosen to start the cooking fire on (very responsible), as this is perhaps towards the back of the battlefield.
*The Ancient Greeks were famous for their generals' use of Hypemenos, or Hype-Men as we now call them. Most famous of these was Crocodillus, who served the Spartan general Bophades during the Peloponnesian war by standing behind his master during speeches and shouting "Guerilla Warfare!", for which he was handsomely paid.
Baggage Train & Other Hangers-On - Mixed Ground
Much like the heavy cavalry and artillery, moving a lot of baggage requires nice clear ground for the most part, but let's diversify a little.
In Summary
So now that we've put together a base or two of each of the kinds of unit in our army, you might have notice that we've only actually made a couple of "kinds" of base here - flat ground, rough ground and bare ground - just in different styles. "Thicker", "Flatter and less grassy", "Thicker but also Flatter", and so on. And yet by sticking to the same handful of materials and putting some thought into how each unit would operate on the same battlefield, each of our kinds of bases looks different to one another without any of them looking mismatched next to one another, putting across both the main theme of the army and their own individual flavour.
I hope that showing you my process here has given you some starting points you might use when planning what basing you're going to use on your next army. How does each unit operate, and how can you use your materials to get that across? And again, there's always going to be exceptions - perhaps your tank is crashing through a thicket, or your skirmishers can fly over even rougher ground than usual.
The sky's, or in this case the ground's, the limit!
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