It’s pretty common to see ECW bases with a large footprint to accommodate the pikes to the front. Most rulesets that I’m aware of use the pike as a single block, so I don’t think there’s any reason not to?

The extended bases for pike blocks has been around for years now. Not only do they protect the figures, but when it comes to pushing two blocks of pikes into each other for close combat the “normal” tight basing makes it near impossible.

My old buddy Ken (from Yarkshire Gamer), even does this with his 28mm Italian Wars collection (linky for some pics Yarkshire Gamer: 28mm TAG Borgia Shot )

For the Epic Warlord stuff, the front pikes are “at porte” (so you don’t really need to base for the extremes of pike blocks with levelled pikes at the front), so you could probably get away with just an extra 10mm (or 20mm if you want the depth of the bases to be consistent).

As for basing the whole lot onto one big base, it depends. If you are just going to be playing the Warlord rules then it’s  probably going to make sense. But if you might be trying to use other rules where yo might need to represent infantry formations that AREN’T 50/50 pike and shotte (which is really only seen at the very start of the period the figures are supposed to represent, or the French 😀 ), then you may as well keep things to using the two bases (then you can have a lower ratio of pike).

Alternatively, considering that you just need to adjust the ratio of pike to shotte, you could just add more shotte bases… (yes, that was unhelpful, I know!)

I thought this was about Extreme Championship Wrestling….