Still thinking about armies for Maurice

Culloden 1746

Despite the success of my MDF counters, I'm still hankering for some Maurice armies made of lead, but what scale, war and ranges?

I've posted about scale preference before. To recap, I prefer 28mm for skirmish, 15mm for middle-level games (e.g. Crossfire and Irregular Wars) and 10mm for mass armies (e.g. Square Bashing). For mass armies I would also consider 6mm, or 3mm (really 4mm) if they were available.

I recently played a game of Impetus with Baccus 6mm early mediaeval figures and the effect was magnificent. I have 6mm DBA armies of my own on 40mm-wide bases but they don't compare for mass effect with the sight of 80mm-wide Impetus units covering four times the same area as a DBA base. Anyway, I digress.

The bases I'd like to use for Maurice would be 25mm square so that measurement would be in inches (1BW = 1"). The problem with using Baccus for Maurice is that infantry figures come in 20mm wide strips. Cutting and combining them would not be convenient. So to use them for Maurice would require either 20mm bases (too small and fiddly) or 40mm bases (unnecessarily large for this particular game). If and when 3mm figures are produced they are also likely to be in 20mm strips. 3mm are a very attractive idea because of minimal painting requirements so I might allow that to override other considerations, but they aren't a current option so I can ignore them for now.

One option would be to mount smaller figures on double bases, Might & Reason style, i.e. two 40mm x 20mm bases per battalion. BW would be 20mm. This would be OK for Line and Mass, but Column would look ugly and require head/direction markers. Conversely, Column isn't much used so perhaps it isn't worth worrying about the look. 40mm x 20mm would also be more compatible with other systems. Many 6mm owners actually seem to favour 60mm x 30mm bases with 6 strips per base (1BW = 30mm). 60 x 30 is a very elegant solution because it allows cavalry to be put in two ranks and infantry to have officers and drummers outside the ranks.

If 10mm, Pendraken would be my first port of call. However, if doing SYW I would have to consider Old Glory as they are conveniently produced in 1" strips of 5 figures, and strips could make a very significant reduction in painting effort. If using Pendraken I would put 8 infantry or 3 cavalry on a 1" base, though 6 infantry or 2 cavalry might be adequate, especially for AWI.

As to theatre of war, I already have circa 1690 and Marlburian armies so would want to do something different. In comparison to some other centuries, there isn't really that much to choose from. My current preferences would be the '45, the SYW or the AWI.