Multibasing – What and how

An important part of the Kings of War hobby is Multibasing. In this blog post I’ll write down what multibasing is and how best effects are achieved.

First a bit of history

Wargaming (especially historicals) the base unit in a wargame is not a single model representing a single soldier, but the unit. (usually represented by a stand) Sthis stand represents anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of men depending on scale and the size of the battle.

This allows a given system to represent both the battle of vimero with 14,000 men on the french side and the battle of austerlitz with over 200,000 men on the french side; just change the scale from regimental level to brigade or divisional level.

Warhammer changed this. In Warhammer, all single models were mounted on 20mm square bases, so a regiment consists of 4 men wide (later changed to 5 men wide) in one or more ranks. A regiment of 22 zombies which includes a single wraith will be 4 ranks of 5 men and one of 3. When a unit takes damage, the number of models is reduced sumarily, so the game gives the impression of one-on-one scale. After warhammer was discontinued, 9th age kept these basingrules.

Kings of War, however, returns to its orginal wargaming roots and takes the unit as a whole instead of its collective of individual models. A unit is (on paper at least) 10 men, 20 men or 40 men strong and therefore has fixed base sizes. (Usually 100×40 mm or multiples of this)

Damage is represented by wound counters and morale, so the unit is either complete (maybe with the wavered condition) or routed. (=destroyed)

What does this mean for the game and hobby?

For the game? not so much. New KoW players have to get used to the “either living and functional or routed and gone” rule. Other than that, there’s little different from using multibasing.

For the hobby, the difference is enormous. For instance: this is my regiment of (nominally) 40 shock troops. More on them here: The actual amount of miniatures is about 28 and the large screaming bell which is just there for decoration purposes.

the same regiment (without the bell) would look roughly like this in Warhammer / (9th age:

The Warhammer 20x20mm for a model base is very cramped. Though these models are actually better painted than mine it takes a close look to actually see that. This regiment must be a nightmare to set up….

So only for the same of the hobby I’d advocate multibasing over 20×20 mm basing.

More examples of multibasing in the last part of this blog post.

why do I love multibasing?

While multibasing, you can tell a story in a diorama. For instance, take my spearmen horde. The story is that the horde is deploying from line formation (the back part of the regiment) to fighting formation (the front part.)

more on this multibase here: It’s even a tutorial…..

What’s that MMC and PMC business?

When multibasing I don’t normally use the advocated amount of models. for instance, a troop nominally has 10 models, a regiment 20 and a horde 40. If taking 20 models on individual bases is a bit cramped, just glueing 20 on a multibase would be the same.

That’s why I usually use less than 20 for a regiment. The question of course remains how many is enough, is dificult to answer. For me it’s enough when it looks great. Still, there’s some examples on the internet where the amount of models looks a bit scarce.

One example here (source🙂 in which the amount of models is -I think- too few to represent a regiment. The painting, however, is lovely….

Fortunately, Mantic has produced a few guidelines. These guidelines are called MMC (Minimum Model Count) and PMC (Preferred model count). most tournament request to -at least- have MMC, but some ask for PMC. You can find them in the FAQ.

A for the regiment above, MMC would be 11, PMC 14. The regiment, as beautiful as it is, would not be tournament legal.

for myself, I try to adhere to PMC which means at least 7 men in a troop and for regiments/hordes/legions multiples of this number.

How to get some efficiency in the collection

Most models can be fielded in troops, regiments or hordes. In order to get some measure of efficiency out of my collection, I usually model my models in troops.

2 troops make a regiment and 4 a horde. In the case of legions, 6 troops make a legions.

In some cases, this makes for challenging dioramas. For instance, my swamp things horde (depicting a ruined temple) can be fielded as 4 troops :

Multibasing – how my collection changed over the years

My first multibase back when Kings of War first edition came around. Glueing 10 spearmen to a single base was the best idea back then. It works, sorta…. Also see the quality of my phone’s camera back in 2015….

in 2017 the idea surfaced that multibasing can also include some measure of terrain. (even thoug it’s only a bit of static grass) These are my shield wall that see combat regulary even now.

in that same year, height elevation and more base decorations were used.

From 2018 onwards, the ugly “goblin green” base layers is not longer used.

The knight’s blackbrown base with goblin green highlights + static grass is the standard nowadays for my human army. It looks decent enough without being too distracting. This just an ordinary foot troop, which my army has quite a few of. There’s also a few special projects, both within this army and of other armies.

Special projects such as this goblin horde multibase created during last year’s winter. It’s one part of my goblin detachment.

And this is a fairly recent knight multibase. It’s one half of a horde which is not yet finished. (and one third of a brotherhood project)

Do you want to see more examples of Multibasing? Use the multibase tag on the right to navigate through all my projects of the last few years.