So I just finished painting my first base set. Man! What a great time. But I have a problem. The hero bases (looks like a rock formation with a in set spot for a figure) don't actually fit heroes... or any other figures. They're oval with the bases being round. Anyone else seeing this? What did you do?

I've noticed the form on the Customer Service area doesn't work (at least in Mac browsers) hence I'm trying to see if I'm a one off or if they're universally bad and people are modding them themselves.

I can take a picture if people want to see... the overlap is pretty bad.

I had a few bases that needed to have some material removed. I filed them down a bit so they would fit. I didn't file down the hero bases but they do fit in the hero base for me, it's just really tight.

I had one tough fit, I cut into the base to make it about 1 mm bigger works great now.

Ywing, how did you do that? Did you just file the sides of the figure slot?

I used the edge of my side cutters just shaving it a bit until my hero could snap into place.

Since it's already painted, this method may not work so well, but in the future when you find an issue like this (during dry fitting) or any other warping on this style of soft plastic (it also works in IA), do this:

1) get a bowl of VERY hot (not quite boiling) water.

2) put base (or any other warped piece) in water

3) wait a few minutes

4) take base (or other warped piece) out of water

5) the plastic will be malleable at this point, so either bend/mold it by hand to make the space more circular or just put the hero figure in the hole, leveraging the mini against the off proportion side to slide it in

6) put base (with inserted mini) into ice water or a freezer for twice as long as it was sitting in the hot water.

presto! Warped plastic fixed. This method works on bent spears, warped bases, Obi-Wan's viagra commercial of a lightsaber, even the much thicker plastic on the rune golems (I had to change the angle of a sword and make another hand into a fist to allow them to rank up properly).

As to your question about this being a universal problem, in the 4 hero bases I have encountered, 2 were fine, one needed just a slight bit of forcing to get the mini in, and 1 needed the hot water trick.

17 minutes ago, FatherTurin said:

Obi-Wan's viagra commercial of a lightsaber

LOLZ. Nice tip man. Love it. I have a few spearmen that needed that trick too. I'll do it for the xpacks. The Waquar will just get an advantage vs floppy weapons

If you warp the hero base, will it fit the normal unit trays after?

BTW - I'm working on modding the figures and trays to magnetize (looking for good tips there) because the hole-peg combo isn't as snappy and nice as I'd like. I'll troll through the forums for any good posts.

10 minutes ago, docForsaken said:

LOLZ. Nice tip man. Love it. I have a few spearmen that needed that trick too. I'll do it for the xpacks. The Waquar will just get an advantage vs floppy weapons

If you warp the hero base, will it fit the normal unit trays after?

BTW - I'm working on modding the figures and trays to magnetize (looking for good tips there) because the hole-peg combo isn't as snappy and nice as I'd like. I'll troll through the forums for any good posts.

1) it should fit, but if the base is REALLY messed up, you may still have to do some trimming.

2) re: magnetizing. Once I get the command box (which apparently comes with a spare base), I have a solution I want to try. The bottom of the tray is recessed ever so slightly. I want to find very thin sheet metal and glue a square to the bottom of the tray inside the recess. Then find very thin magnets to glue inside the base of the minis (location won't matter if the sheet metal covers all 4 holes). If I ever actually try this I will let you know how it goes.

I was thinking of doing a small magnet and then finding an 1/8" washer or something and using a drill bit (by hand) to sink them just a bit into the tray. I think the magnets will stick okay to the bottom of the unit if you clean up the peg hole... (same on sharing)

This happened to me too, and I also only really noticed after i'd finished painting. (duh) I carefully used my Xacto blade, and shaved down the hero minis base, and shaved open the scenic base. It was a pain, but the figures fit now.

In my first impression post (thanks to an Adepticon copy) I expressed my only complaint about the quality of the product was issues with the bases not fitting the trays and I'm surprised there's not been more postings about it. There's 3 main issues:

- To me, none of the miniatures fit neatly into the trays as the plastic post in the tray needs to fit into a hole in the miniature base that's not much larger. Add in the fact that the miniature is a softer plastic that tends to "grab" the post and it becomes harder. Many of the people active on these boards are the hobby enthusiast variety who have no doubt cut things down or magnetize or whatever so it's not an issue (I magnetized mine) but for the average Joe nothing will sit cleanly in the tray without having to push down a fair amount.

- There's one pose of the Daqan Spearman that has a notably larger base that simply doesn't fit in the tray slot at all. I have 3 Core Sets and it's the same in all of them. Not much of a sample size I know but seems to point to a problem with that sculpt. I used a sanding bit on my dremel to sand away much of the back part of the base on these guys.

- As the OP mentions, the decorative hero base is too small to fit either Ardus or Kari (also the post in the middle has the same issues, but worse as it's the softer "grabby" plastic trying to fit into the same material). Again, I used a dremel to sand down the inner edge of that base until the heroes can fit in easily.

All my unit bases fit wonderfully. The more I use them they better they work. I'll wager mine work as good as the ones that magnetized theirs. Now at first it was tight fit, but they wear perfectly.

FFG if you're reading this, I'd be fine buying a bag of resized bases if you had them for sale (if they worked better). It seems like the figures themselves are mostly normalized and the bases and trays are the issue. My Daquan calvary have a similar issue, but it's far less exaggerated. Shaving them a bit would likely be fine. The hero bases are legit the wrong shape... I'd need to take away about 20% of the base or open it up by 24% or so to make it fit. I doubt that's happening well no matter what tools + greenstuff that I use.

If it's off that much, I would e-mail them direct with pictures

12 minutes ago, Ywingscum said:

If it's off that much, I would e-mail them direct with pictures

it is... ones egg shaped and the other is a circle

Email them with pics, they'll send you a replacement. My core set was missing a piece, they sent me a replacement. It did take about 6 weeks but it was as easy as one online form. I'm the UK as well, I'm guessing its faster in the US directly.

My bases on all three sets fit the trays snugly. The base pegs were a different matter.

I ended up drilling out the pegs holes to loosen things up and that seemed to solve the problem nicely.

On 5/16/2017 at 0:02 PM, Daverman said:

In my first impression post (thanks to an Adepticon copy) I expressed my only complaint about the quality of the product was issues with the bases not fitting the trays and I'm surprised there's not been more postings about it. There's 3 main issues:

- To me, none of the miniatures fit neatly into the trays as the plastic post in the tray needs to fit into a hole in the miniature base that's not much larger. Add in the fact that the miniature is a softer plastic that tends to "grab" the post and it becomes harder. Many of the people active on these boards are the hobby enthusiast variety who have no doubt cut things down or magnetize or whatever so it's not an issue (I magnetized mine) but for the average Joe nothing will sit cleanly in the tray without having to push down a fair amount.

- There's one pose of the Daqan Spearman that has a notably larger base that simply doesn't fit in the tray slot at all. I have 3 Core Sets and it's the same in all of them. Not much of a sample size I know but seems to point to a problem with that sculpt. I used a sanding bit on my dremel to sand away much of the back part of the base on these guys.

- As the OP mentions, the decorative hero base is too small to fit either Ardus or Kari (also the post in the middle has the same issues, but worse as it's the softer "grabby" plastic trying to fit into the same material). Again, I used a dremel to sand down the inner edge of that base until the heroes can fit in easily.

This was almost my experience exactly.

Additionally, if you use the recommended army painter method for painting, the additional paint, dip and varnish on the base edge will make even more of the figures not fit in their slots without rubbing which will eventually chip the paint on the base edges. Alot of folks seem to be fine with this or are just not painting the base edges.

That's not acceptable for me as all of my wargaming miniatures do duty in a variety of rulesets so the base edges need to be painted and I'm not going to put up with chipping paint. My solution was to clip all the pegs away and use my dremel to enlarge the figure cavities on all the trays except for the monsters which fit fine. It was pretty easy, but took a bit of time.

They end up looking like this...

...and if you see my finished army gallery there is a bit more room around the figures...

https://www.chicagoskirmishwargames.com/blog/2017/05/04/runewars-daqan-army-finished/

...but it's worth it to me to not be forcing my figures into the trays every time.

I'm glad you posted this.

I bought 2 core sets.

In each, 1 base isn't right - the heroes fit in one base but not the other and all heroes fit in rank and file bases.

so I just did a little razor blade work and they fit.

Thanks for the OP!

On 5/20/2017 at 6:42 PM, Adun42 said:

I'm glad you posted this.

I bought 2 core sets.

In each, 1 base isn't right - the heroes fit in one base but not the other and all heroes fit in rank and file bases.

so I just did a little razor blade work and they fit.

Thanks for the OP!

So I tried something -- and it worked out alright. I took the entire hero base and stuck the top part in hot water. Then took the base of a hero character and shoved it in, it reshaped the hero base and it now accepts a figure just fine.

Try it out.

I'm debating doing the same for the other figures that don't fit well, but I need to do some gluing first (just got a core set)

I had one not fit that well so i just took my circular sand bit for my drummel to it and widened it. PVC doesnt like being sanded so it gets really coarse, but its also not being seen anyway so i didnt care.

I was going to cut the hero's base down, but then i noticed she fit the normal trays just fine.

She still fits a little snuggly but that saved me a magnet anyway and i can remove it no problem lol

Thank you FF. They sent me 2 new bases and they're good to go.

I'm finding that all the parts reshape wonderfully with the hot water method described above.

I shaved the flash and mold lines off of Kari last weekend (finally!), and found that the way she is facing on the base affects how well she fits. It seems neither her figure base nor the scenic base are perfectly round. But rotating her to face a different way helped her fit in the base better.