Basing: The Perennial (Weekly?) Dilemma

Is there anything worse than the self-doubt inspired by making a basing decision?

54s in particular seem a bit more troublesome than most - so few rules suggest a size for them, and doubling or tripling can often result in ridiculous base sizes.

If you take a look at my other blog, you'll see that my 54s were mostly multi-based, 2 figures to a 3" square:

Typically, I treated each base as a squad for Blitzkrieg Commander, or a platoon for One Hour Wargames (sometimes I used two bases for a 6" front per Neil Thomas's rules).

But after seeing Tim Gow's play test of a Little Cold Wars inspired WW2 game on Megablitz and More where the figures are four to a 4" square  for platoon, I decided to unbase everything and give that a try with some 4" MDF coasters I picked up for the purpose (4" also corresponds to what Neil Thomas suggests for a basing width minimum in OHW):

This looks good to my eyes, but, despite almost never playing 1:1 skirmish anymore,  I really want the flexibility to use my figures as individuals and on bases and potentially, bases of different sizes (I have commitment issues, what can i say?), but not have them fall over when I move those bases.

I'm also demanding as you can see.

So, stealing borrowing from Mr. Gow, I have decided to mount each figure to a base, attach a magnet, and make the movement tray/sabot from steel.

But, as I just bought the 4" coasters (well, around 4". They aren't perfect), and more than I could use at that, I thought it better to see if I could make them work. After some research, I found "steel paper" available relatively inexpensively and easily cut with scissors - so that's that.

Deciding on which base for the figures themselves took several hours of wasted energy researching round vs square and which size for 54s. The Miniatures Page is almost as bad as getting lost in Wikipedia! I saw everything from 1" squares to 1.5" circles to 2" squares/circles, and why squares are better and circles are better. *bangs head on desk*

I opened up OpenOffice Draw and made scale renderings of different sabots with bases and how figures with different sized integrated basing might look. (Obsess much?)

Finally, I went back to the inspiration for this, and, after reading dozens of entries on Megablitz and More, I found the dimensions of the rectangles Mr. Gow uses (30mm x 40mm), and promptly placed my order with Litko for the same, with rounded corners.

No sure how long until they arrive (I rarely order anything not Amazon Prime with 2 day shipping, so I'm somewhat spoiled that way), but in the meantime, I've got five Conte US paratroopers primed and ready for paint this weekend. Ironically, they will probably be left as single figs for 1:1 skirmish games.