It had to happen sooner or later. Until now I have based my 1808 Swedes (and Russians) on 20mm round bases mounted in slotted movement trays. Every single figure even has a magnet connecting it to the movement tray.
The problem is that even the smallest movement trays are too big. There is no way around it. I thought it was OK for a long time, but I now realize that it really doesnt look very good, particularly for figures in a marching pose. Close order infantry marched much closer together. Also, the magnetizing system doesnt work very well. The figures dont stick to the bases quite well enough. This can be pretty irritating when gaming. At first, I thought Id protect the figures by storing the one by one in foam trays, just like I do with ww2 figures. That didnt work either – imagine having to mount 500 figures into their movement trays before each game (and were often hard enough pressed for time as it is). So that only happened twice before I gave up the whole thing. And to be honest, it has turned out that I hardly ever remove the figures from the movement trays for any other purposes either.
So, I decided to rebase the whole lot. Im doing them on 45x40mm bases, mdf by Warbases. Rebasing all my 1808 figures is almost 500 figures, and these are just the first 24 (23 actually!) of them. The good thing is that I can now add the correct company distinctions to the Swedish and Finnish infantry.
The downside is that I have to paint a few additional figures just to fill up the ranks, expanding what are now mostly 16- or 20-man units into 24 man units. In total, I dont need to paint much more than perhaps 100 figures or so. But itll take a while to go through the whole lot… It is also quite tempting to do larger units – but thatll have to wait! 4 bases of 6 (24 man units) is quite practical and pretty much the standard for Napoleonic wargames. But if I ever manage to paint enough figures, I can always expand from 4 bases to 6 per unit (36 man units), at least for some units.
Another thing I will add when I enlarge my units is a second flag for all battalions. I already have 2 flags per unit for the Russians, so this also had to be done at some point. The Swedish army used the exact same system of two flags per battalion as the Russians (i. e. first battalion one white (king’s) flag and one colored flag, second battalion two colored flags). The flags I paint by hand turn out really nice, but they do require some work. With this first unit (Åbo regiment, second battalion), the flag I had was the very first one I did a few years ago. I was a little worried that I wouldnt be able to match the old one, in terms of the exact color shades and the highlighting. But it worked quite well, I think.
Pancratist 