Plastic Soldier Company 15mm question

[General Lee]

So today I received the plastic 15mm WW1 figures from PSC (both German and British) and I need some advice. Having never played WW1 before I'm not sure what rules to use for them. What works best for 15mm figures? And how should I base them? Each sprue comes with a mortar team, a machine gun team and 17 privates. I'm thinking of basing them per six on a base and using the Black Powder rules. Oh and the guns come in sperate sprues

any advice would be much appreciated!

more info on the figures: http://theplasticsoldiercompany.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=159

Some bases I did:

[fred]

Do you have a feel for what kind of representation you want to go for? Is each figure representing 1 soldier so a base is a section or so, or at a higher level so a base is a platoon or company?

If you are thinking of Black Powder then I suspect that you are thinking a base is a platoon or company.

I'm not sure I'd use BP for WWI, it's movement is very generous. Not really representative of the mud of the trenches.

At the smaller scale there is Through the Mud and Blood by the Too Fat Lardies - and there may be a modification of Chain of Command too.

I'm using Great War Spearhead which steps up the representation a lot, with each stand being a company, and you typically field a couple of divisions per player - this puts you at a much more strategic level.

[General Lee]

Do you have a feel for what kind of representation you want to go for? Is each figure representing 1 soldier so a base is a section or so, or at a higher level so a base is a platoon or company?

If you are thinking of Black Powder then I suspect that you are thinking a base is a platoon or company.

I'm not sure I'd use BP for WWI, it's movement is very generous. Not really representative of the mud of the trenches.

At the smaller scale there is Through the Mud and Blood by the Too Fat Lardies - and there may be a modification of Chain of Command too.

I'm using Great War Spearhead which steps up the representation a lot, with each stand being a company, and you typically field a couple of divisions per player - this puts you at a much more strategic level.

Thanks for the answer Fred! I'm not yet really familiar with army organization during WW1. A clubmate of mine has also just mentioned Spearhead. It sounds good. I'm thinking about mounting five infantry figures per base. I take it that would work like you said: one base represents 1 company. So how many companies make up a regiment? and how many a division? etc

[fastolfrus]

We use Peter Pig's rules - Square Bashing - but that uses lots of figures, generally mounted 3 to a base, 4 bases to a unit. Lots of units per player (divisional level?).

You can use Peter Pig WWII rules (PBI) instead, a company level game, still uses 3 figures per base, generally 6-8 bases per unit (each unit is a platoon), only a few units per player, usually just 3 or 4.
There used to be a starter extract of PBI available free to download, only gave the basic infantry rules, basic weaponry, no vehicles etc, but that's not an issue if you use them for 1918 instead of 1939.

[fred]

This is an early war British division - with each stand as a company.

1 - Division HQ Stand
3 - Infantry Brigades each with:
Brigade Headquarters Company: 1 – Brigade HQ Stand
4 – Infantry Battalions each with:
     1 – MG Stand
     4 – Infantry Stands 

Later in the war there would be more MGs and mortars. And slightly less infantry.