Crusades reloaded

Hi all,

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and Santa has brought you all the shiny toys you'd hoped for. For me it was great - the festivities, but also the addition to the lead- (and book-) mountain.

Chief among the presents was a new supply of Perry Crusaders, and this gives me the reason to talk about one of the projects I have worked at during the "quiet" phase of this blog between May and October. I was considering rebasing and enhancing my Crusader army for quite some time now, but with the mass of new rules and the lack of a real favorite set it was hard to decide on a basing system.

My Perry Crusader knights attacking

 
The most flexible variant of course is the DBx-basing scheme that is compatible with all but skirmish systems and has a 6cm front for 28mm figures. Yet the 4cm depth for mounted always requires some squeezing and 4 figures to a base is not as visually impressive as I'd like. The 12cm front of Impetus on the other hand can look very impressive if furnished with enough figures, but you need a large playing field and indeed tons of figures if you want to play anything else but impetus.

I've tried several options and came up with this one finally: 8cm front. Essentially I double the standard DBx/FOG-base-sizes for 15mm, so I can play DBx with them as well as any other system like FOG, Hail Ceasar, Dux Bellorum, Impetus and others. The basing system gives me 6cm depth for horses and 3cm for heavy infantry - and thus it very conveniantly solves the depth-problem for mounted bases:

My Perry Crusader general with his loyal Syrian bannerman

For specially trained horsemen (knights superior or cavalry superior in DBx-terms) that fought in dense formations, I'll put four figures on a base:

Military Order Knights - again all from the Perry Crusader range

 For infantry the increased width and depth gives room for some limited diorama-building and story-telling. I double the figures required for DBx - give or take one or two figures.

Two bases of Crusader Spearmen - some Perry, some Foundry, some Magister Militum

This system is visually attractive, especially "en masse": The five bases of spearmen you have in your Crusader DBA army really does look like - well, not an army yet, but more than a few figures at least.

5 bases of spearmen - mostly from the Perry Crusader range

And this is the complete DBA-army: 12 bases (5 spear, 4 knights, 1 bow, 2 crossbows). Now I'm going to treat the Syrians the same way and test the new basing scheme wth a game of DBA. I certainly won't rebase my extensive ancients collection, but if it all works out well I may define the scheme as my standard for the medieval era.

I wish you all the very best for the new year and thank you for your continuing support and interest. Take care and see you in 2014,

Tobi.