Are We Still Standing on 1985? Why Do We Still Use 4mm-Thick Bases?

There are some things in our hobby that become so familiar we stop seeing them.

One of those is the humble plastic base.

As the Warhost miniature range has grown, I’ve had to make a decision I never expected to spend much time thinking about. Do we move to the traditional 4mm thick plastic base, or continue with the thinner bases we’ve used so far?

At first glance, it seems like an odd thing to spend time considering. After all, it’s only a base. The more I looked into it, though, the more I realised it opens up a much bigger question about miniature gaming and how much of what we accept today is simply inherited from the past.

I’m old enough to remember when Citadel introduced Slotta bases. Before then, most metal miniatures stood on thin puddle bases. The Slotta base solved a genuine problem. It securely held metal figures with cast tabs and made assembling an army quicker, easier and more consistent. It was an elegant solution, and one that helped shape the modern hobby.

Games Workshop then grew to become the biggest name in miniature gaming.

As its influence spread, so did the Slotta base. Other manufacturers followed, new gamers entered the hobby expecting deep plastic bases, and before long they had become the accepted standard.

Very few of us ever stopped to ask why.

That only changed for me when I started buying miniatures from other manufacturers. Some arrived on much thinner bases. The difference wasn’t dramatic when you picked them up, but it changed how they looked once they were on the table.

The figures felt connected to the battlefield instead of standing above it.

Roads met their feet naturally. Buildings looked the right height. Rivers and bridges felt like part of the same landscape rather than scenery sitting below a row of black cylinders and squares. The miniatures no longer looked as though they were walking around on little plinths.

Once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it. What surprised me most was that I’d spent nearly forty years in the hobby before I’d ever stopped to ask why.

That experience forced me to look again at the decisions we’re making for Warhost. Choosing a base because it’s familiar didn’t seem like a good enough reason. So before deciding how future releases should be presented, I wanted to understand why the industry had settled on this design in the first place.

The obvious answer is manufacturing, but I’m no longer convinced that’s the whole story. Modern plastic kits routinely include large flat parts, shields, weapons, vehicle panels and even thin puddle bases without issue. Manufacturing has moved on enormously since the 1980s.

The historical explanation feels far more convincing.

The original Slotta base needed enough depth to accommodate a metal tab. That dictated its proportions and solved a real engineering problem. As one-piece plastic miniatures became the norm, that particular problem disappeared.

The base, however, stayed exactly the same.

Perhaps familiarity became more powerful than innovation. Perhaps compatibility across manufacturers became the priority. Or perhaps nobody saw a reason to revisit something that had worked perfectly well for decades.

Whatever the reason, the design outlived the problem it was created to solve.

None of this is intended as a criticism of Games Workshop. Quite the opposite. The Slotta base was an elegant answer to the challenge they faced, and its influence on the hobby is impossible to overstate. I’m not questioning whether it was the right decision in 1985. I’m questioning whether we’re still making the same decision today simply because it’s become the convention.

For me, that’s a question worth asking.

One of the guiding principles behind Warhost has been to challenge assumptions. We aren’t making fantasy miniatures because that’s what fantasy is expected to look like. We’ve built a world that feels grounded, believable and rooted in the same visual language as historical gaming. The figures, armour, weapons and poses have all been approached from that perspective. It seems only right that the bases deserve the same consideration.

This isn’t an announcement, and it isn’t a campaign to change the hobby. It’s simply a question that the development of Warhost has led me to ask. Forty years ago, Games Workshop solved a genuine problem, and the hobby quite rightly followed. Today, I’m wondering whether it’s time to ask the question again.

I'm not saying that 4mm-thick bases are wrong. They’ve served the hobby well for decades, and many gamers genuinely prefer them. Compatibility matters too, particularly for those of us with large existing collections.

But I do think it’s healthy to question the assumptions we’ve inherited.

If you were designing the modern 28mm miniature hobby from scratch today, with no knowledge of Games Workshop or Slotta bases, would you really choose a 4mm thick base?

Or would you design something different?

I’d genuinely like to know what you think.