Siege Notes: (2) Terrain and Scenery for Sieges

I'm going to move on now to the rather scary issue of siege scenery. A few people I've spoken to in the past are put off sieges by the need for lots of special terrain pieces; this is understandable, I think. 

Because I have always had a thing about sieges, I have been quietly collecting bits and pieces for years - in fact I have probably put more effort into this aspect than I could justify in terms of the amount of playing time I have had from them to date. It's a personal thing; sieges with miniatures are interesting, and just occasionally they can get quite exciting, but for me the visual spectacle is a very big part of the attraction, along with the developing narrative. Overall I am very keen on having these games look as good as possible.

In some ways - especially for the more formal Vauban-type games - my sieges are limited by the kit I have available - I'll come back to this. 

ECW Sieges

I've mentioned it before, but of the three periods for which I've attempted sieges, the ECW is least daunting (because the weapons, the fortifications and the tactics were simpler, and many of the sieges were fairly small) and often the most fun to play through. Here are some photos, to give an idea of how the terrain contributes.

 

This was my alternative-history version of the Siege of Newcastle (1644), which unfortunately I had to abandon because of Real World inconveniences. This may be just as well, because I couldn't settle on a sensible back-story for the scenario - I still hope to rescue this one! The pictures (this and the next) are here just to show what can be done on a hex table with a historical map and a load of daft buildings. I used to spend hours shopping on the Magister Militum site (sadly missed), and I bought in fortifications by JR, Battleground, numerous others; the houses and churches are a mixture of Hovels resin pieces and ceramic "ornaments" by Tey Potteries and Sulley, heavily matt varnished. The scale is (approx) 15mm throughout, though my soldiers are 20mm. The star-fort in the foreground, which is playing the part of the Shieldfield Sconce, conveniently divides into 2 parts, and will re-appear here and there as demi-lunes, hornworks and so on - can't remember who made this piece, but it has been very useful!

 

Newcastle from the west - the River Tyne is off the table to the right, but not far away. The slips of paper are to help the idiot solo player remember the names of towers and gates 

 

Here's a test game I played in 2017, Covenanters attacking the fictitious town of Middlehampton; observe that it looks broadly the same as Newcastle - must have been a general architectural style of the period. You will also note that the sconce is in play again...

 

I make extensive use of earthworks pieces by Fat Frank - here you see a gun emplacement and some trench sections

 

I record damage to the fortress with stone chips, but it is also useful to have the odd breached version of a wall section. The Scots are about to rush in - nowadays my rules would have had everyone leave their pikes at home, for ease of handling...

 

This is from my Siege of Liverpool, and shows the turf wall which I added to my collection, laid out next to Tithebarn Street. Turf walls are not to be sneered at, they stand up well to roundshot bombardment, but may be damaged by mortars firing shell, and a gang of lads with picks and shovels can spoil things too. Half of the ubiquitous star-fort is present as a hornwork, which in the real siege was also made of turf!

 

This is most of my collection of diggings - much evidence of the works of Fat Frank, and assorted resin pieces from other makers, including (I think) Anyscale. I might mention here that the finest resin fortifications I ever saw were made by Gallia - they were out of production before I started collecting, and I'm not sure they did 15mm - this may not be very helpful, but keep your eyes open!

 

For the true trench enthusiast, here is a tray of Fat Frank's finest - I have mine made without sandbags, just in case they might be anachronistic! This shows why armies dug trenches on site rather than transporting them ready-made...

WSS Sieges

Next in chronological order for me is the WSS. By this period the influence of Vauban was everywhere - he was one of the chief innovators in the design of fortresses, and also (starting with Maastricht in 1673) he had changed the way that sieges were managed. Clearly this is a time of excellence, and I have been keen to give due importance to the sieges of Louis XIV's day.

It would be great to have some flexible construction toy that would allow a satisfying variety of design, yet which was visually up to the demands of the period; this is not possible at present, but I managed to purchase a half Vauban fort (6-bastion layout) in about the right scale. This is still serving me well; I am short of extra Vauban pieces, though I did manage to get some extras 3D printed to size by a friend, and my Vauban forts all tend to be rather similar! The trick then is to avoid having the same siege again and again!

Vauban's fortresses had the walls hidden away behind earth and grassy slopes - let's see them shoot at that. The only way to breach such a wall is if you can see the base of it, so there are few shortcuts - if no-one gives up (though they usually did), the besiegers have to dig their final parallel on the covered way, to get a clear shot at the wall, so these tend to be long games, and can be hard work. There is a lot to be said for beginning a WSS siege with the 2nd Parallel complete, but no gun emplacements constructed yet.

 

An aerial view of my half-fort. This was made by Terrain Warehouse in polyurethane foam, 20 years ago - long out of production now. You can see the moulded glacis pieces sloping away into open country - in this photo the terrepleine and the covered way are brown, the ditch/moat is green. The vertical scale is 15mm (1/100), which visually is OK with the 20/25mm soldiers, but the horizontal scale is important. Especially with Vauban, you cannot muck around with the lengths of the walls - there was a strict design layout. In fact this model doesn't work out badly at all - the distance between the salients of adjacent bastions works out on the model at about 340 paces in my adopted scale, the bastion faces are 95 paces and the length of the curtain wall section between bastions is around 135 paces, which is all just slightly small, but works nicely. The middle of a curtain section is within effective musket range of the bastions at each end, which is as it should be 

 

Because of the difference between the vertical and horizontal scales, the original supplied glacis, lovely though it is, causes problems if anyone wants to stand on it or dig trenches across it, so reluctantly (tearfully) I decided to stop using it, and experimented with flat terrain tiles for the glacis. In fact this works well (some later photos should show the scale-mismatch problem clearly); the new covered way is represented by wooden lolly-sticks, and the stupid contrasting green shade for the glacis plates has now been toned down considerably. Only snag now is that the besieger has to remember that he can't see the walls, nor any enemy soldier in the ditch, until he reaches the covered way!

 

 

Fat Frank pieces can be used to build redoubts and all sorts. The brown felt pieces here are zig-zag forward saps, which usually have some gabions attached when in the open, to remind us all that they are in cover

 

Big guns and small - Imperial artillery getting close to the glacis

 

General view as the siege develops - I intend to spray the puffs of smoke with a touch of grey to make things a little less silly - if I hold off long enough, they may become a bit grubby anyway...

 

Extra picture taken inside the fort during a test siege; you can see a cottonwool puff, indicating that there is a building on fire, and you can also see a moment which passed into folklore, as the town mayor (orange coat) made a speech to cheer up the townspeople, but rolled a 1, which means that his speech was so awful that the citizens' Local Support number actually decreased by 1. Let us just say that he was not asked to repeat this performance, but the town surrendered soon anyway, so maybe no-one ever knew...

 

The two red dice in the lower left corner show that the citizens' Local Support is now down to -1, which is really not very good, and affects the defenders' Resolve score (of which more in future episodes...)

 

Here the heavy guns are massed on the top of the glacis, battering the wall, while lighter field artillery in the 2nd Parallel are using ricochet fire to enfilade the flank of the right-hand bastion (I don't think they hit anything). You can probably make out the pile of damage stones against the wall - not a viable breach yet, but the garrison chose to ask for terms at this stage. Quite right too 

 

Peninsular War

I also fight sieges in the Napoleonic Peninsular War. For the most part, in this theatre the fortresses were basically medieval, patched up with add-ons and earthen banks (fausses brayes) to protect the ancient structures from this newfangled artillery threat. Spain had seen centuries of warfare, but Vauban and his contemporaries had largely passed by unnoticed. Offhand, I can only think of Almeida which looked at all modern. I am sure that the places near the French border were state of the art (Bayonne, Toulouse), but otherwise both the forts and the sieges were surprisingly quick and dirty, and can make entertaining games.

Wellington, for all his success, was always in a desperate hurry, and he took a lot of risks. I am fascinated by Suchet's campaigns against the Spanish in the north east, and - once I have sorted out my Spanish siege train - I will be keen to have a shot at Cartagena, Tarragona and similar. These forts hadn't changed much since the Middle Ages.

 

This is back to the Very Beginning - when Clive Smithers visited in 2008 to have a go with my new fortress toys. The castle is a pleasing mish-mash of different periods, which is good fun. The issue of the unrealistically steep slope of the glacis is very obvious here; though it looks nice, not even Peter Young could stand toy soldiers up on this. Lining the troops up along the top of the walls during a siege also looks nice, but is dumb behaviour from a Health & Safety viewpoint

 

This is a terrain-related solution - I hurriedly painted up some Zvezda French gunners for Clive's visit, and armed them with Newline ships' guns, in an effort to create some garrison artillery units which could sit on the narrow terreplein. Nowadays my big guns are placed on the bastions or in special batteries, but these looked nice as well - maybe a little overdressed for garrison service

 

Clive brought along some Minifigs S-Range artillerymen - with the big hats, they do look a bit hefty on the 15mm-scale walls! We were very excited by the whole experience, but had very little idea what we were doing

 

 

Because we had nothing else, we used rules which were just those bits of Chris Duffy's Sandhurst game which I had managed to understand. We used a large supply of kids' Jenga blocks for trenches - crude, but quite ambitious with 2-sided communications trenches. We included some insane mining rules, and we had miners tunnelling under the walls so fast that it became pointless digging proper parallels - that gave us some entertaining moments, but it rather wrecked the game as a useful test!

 

 

Fast forward some years - this was a solo tester, to try out the new Vauban's Wars rules. These rules gave much food for thought, but I have a lot of hang-ups about some of the Piquet fetishism in the game systems. I decided to mod them quite a bit and have another go. In passing, I might comment here that this was the only siege game I remember in which the defenders won; in the first few turns, the attacking Anglo-Portuguese force maintained such a heavy fire from long ranges (in a fruitless effort to flatten the defending guns before the main attack started) that they ran out of powder, and had to abandon the siege. These are the useful lessons that testing can provide [Duh] 

 

This was the second solo bash using my now-modded version of VW. This Siege of Toro was much more like what I had in mind, and from that point I decided to hang on to some of the ideas, but press on with my own rules

 

As you see, Toro was another messy set up, an old fashioned fortress with some add-ons to protect the old walls. Spot the hornworks. I obviously cleared out the cupboards to stage this one - forts like this give a lot of fun, in the construction and the game. Much of the fortress and its ancient citadel (an ECO castle which was really just added for entertainment value) are sitting on extension boards, off the main table, which is a useful idea. This is the final storm, running under Tactical Rules, hence the blue counters, which are used for activation in the tactical game 

That's about all I wanted to say about terrain for the moment. I am pretty much out of touch with suppliers now - there is a fair amount of 3D printing going on, but be careful - some of the print quality is dreadful, especially from small operations selling on eBay. I am not in a position to tell anyone how to build a fortress, or where to buy the pieces - my intention here is just to show you what I have done about it, what it looks like, and you can form your own opinions on it.

I hope this material is interesting, maybe even useful! In the next post I'll say something about the things you have to assemble, calculate or make up to get a siege started (including my standard health warning that a siege of this type will not dovetail nicely with a map-based campaign, however attractive the idea), and some stuff about where you can place your troops and how you move them around under the Siege Rules. 

Sieges: Testing in progress

 I was pleased to have somewhere to hide from the news onslaught this week. I carried out a few spot checks on the details of some procedures - some got changed, some were fine, at least one was axed completely!

The photos are a mixed bag from various tests - they get more serious towards the end, since I am now working on taking bombardment through its course. This will continue over the weekend, if my sanity holds out. All the changes thus far have been in the direction of simplification.

Simplification; simplification.

One useful sub-project is that I have rehoused my trenches and earthworks in (smaller) Really Useful boxes, which makes it possible to keep the battlefield tidier, and also to find individual items of scenery in real time. 

 

Boxes and boxes - I bet you Vauban was one of those schoolkids who put brown paper backings on his books

 

 

And labelled them

 

Testing encourages me to make up a proper chart for the turn sequence, so that's progress for a start

 

This is the Local Support marker, to keep track of how happy the townspeople are - on a scale of -3 to +3, this seems a bit high to me

 

This started out as the Digging Standard marker, but may have evolved into a Weather Dice - we'll see

 

Early session, with the Allies' Sapper Team A sapping forward, with a guard (a company of Franconian Grenadiers) on hand to protect them from Trench Raids

 

Here Team D is under attack (at night...) by two companies of French infantry. Team D have infantry support, and the French boys have brought their own sappers with them, so that they can wreck the sap if they chase the Allied lads away. This scrap yielded 1 hit for each side, so the Trench Raid party sulked off home and both sides applied the sticking plasters

 

Another early effort, where I made a late-evening howler with the artillery rules, and some of the Allied infantry had to be rescued by VAR

 

We're now moving on to my latest session, where the Second Parallel has been completed, gun emplacements have been constructed, while the defenders attempted to blow them all away, and I have just reached the point where the Allied guns are about to open fire. Note the nifty redoubt on the end of the trench

 

Since the Allies have (predictably) placed their batteries where they can enfilade the terreplein, the French sappers have been busy placing these inelegant green lumps on the terreplein, to reduce the effect of ricochet fire. Are these things called traverses? - can't remember. To be honest, I can't remember whether I meant ricochet fire, either. The French have more soldiers than this, but lack of space means that they are in a safe part of the town, which is A4 sized and lined with ferro sheet...

 

Allied 24pdr batteries - at the Second Parallel stage they can't see enough of the wall to start trying to breach it, so the main effort for the moment will be to wreck all the defenders' guns before the big push. There's a mortar here as well; for simplicity, I'm working with a draft rule whereby mortars can be set up in a trench, sparing the need for a full emplacement. We'll see how it goes. The mortars are mostly intended to lob shells into the town, starting fires and upsetting the civilians

 

The Allied commander, with a couple of his engineers. Although officers can't be fired on, it is generally regarded as poor judgement to ride a horse. As I recall, taking a look at butterflies outside the trench is not recommended either

 

For these test sessions, the besieging infantry are mostly Hessians. The town is in Wallonia, the garrison is French and Bavarian with a French Governor. A sort of World War, really

 

The Allies have set up their heavy batteries in the centre and on the left, positioned so as to enfilade the walls, they have field artillery on the right and mortars on both flanks. They haven't started firing yet - that will be tomorrow, when the smoke puffs will be in evidence

Sieges: Digging and Fiddling About!

 I have the house to myself this afternoon, so I can spread out and make a bit of a mess. Good opportunity to play around with trenches and glacis slopes [flat glacis slopes...].

First off, I did an audit of my trenches and battery emplacements. There are some cast resin pieces in there, but most of the stock is hand-made by Fat Frank, of whose work I am very fond.

 

Here's the full stock - the straight trench pieces are 150mm (6 inches in old money). It becomes obvious why real besieging armies dug their earthworks on-site, rather than arriving with them ready-made...

 

Fat Frank must have made many thousands of these, but the general build quality is very nice - I ordered mine without modern sandbags

 

 

Then I played around with my Vauban fort, to see what could be done with glacis "plates"

 

This is the basic fort, as supplied by Terrain Warehouse (years ago) - all this is made in expanded resin foam - see how pleasingly the glacis slope fits with the walls and bastions. This is all fine, but attempting to vary the layout (add a gate, for example) is complicated by the implications for the glacis, and digging trenches across the glacis is always a bit of a balancing act. Bear in mind that the vertical scale (15mm, or 1/100, for my buildings) is about 10 times the horizontal scale (1mm represents a metre), so the slope of the glacis is very much exaggerated 

 

Here's a drone shot of this same basic fort - note that the brown areas are the terreplein, behind the parapet, and covered way, not the moat/ditch - the ditch is green

 

So I removed the moulded glacis pieces, nudged the ravelins out a little, and laid out some hex tiles for the glacis, just to see what happens. I've used unpainted mdf tiles for the moment, just for visibility; the idea is that a working version would have the glacis painted a grass green shade which would contrast a little with the baseboard colour. The glacis slope is about 200 paces deep, which is sensible

 

 

And here is the adjustment if we remove the ravelins - it's still looking all right. In fact it could be used like this, but there are some things to remember: (1) however it may look, the wall behind is sheltered by the glacis; (2) the edge of the glacis nearest the fort is the covered way, with a firing platform. Troops behind the edge of the glacis are hidden/protected. It would please me to add a simple trench element at the edge of the glacis, to remind me of these properties, but I would have to remember that any trench pieces in this position would not be a valid target, since they don't really stand above the glacis...

I'm having a think about the paint colour, and also about possible terrain pieces to represent the covered way. Some numbers: my hexes are 7 inches across the flats, which is near enough 180mm. A 7 inch hex has sides which are 4 inches long (close enough for jazz), so I'm considering getting some custom trench-type pieces 90mm long, with rounded ends and a pretty low, flat profile to represent the covered way. I've sounded out Adrian at Fat Frank, to see if he would consider doing some made-to-order trench pieces; that's as far as I've got today, but nothing is scary yet.

Sieges: Some more progress - after a few months off!

 Yesterday I picked up my brushes for the first time since May; very easy session, enjoyed it.

I completed some more of the siege-bits pile for WSS, right through to varnishing and basing. I also sorted out more of the "cast of hundreds" figures destined to play the part of assorted siege-gunners and engineering types. These figures are all previously painted, some came with the odds and ends from Eric Knowles' WSS hoard (very usefully, Eric specialised in odds and ends), some came as loose change in various eBay hits, and in historic purchases from Soldiers of Rye, some were kindly donated by friends - thanks to Jim Walkley, to Benjamin, to Albannach, to Serious Michael (in Derbyshire), to Old John, to Clive and to Goya (for hunting things down for me at bring'n'buy stalls in various countries). Thanks also to anyone I've forgotten to mention.

 

WSS Siege Bits box - what's been did: thus far we have 3 brass siege cannons (the one with dolphins is Minifigs, the others Hinchliffe), 3 iron 24pdrs (Hinchliffe), 4 heavy "fortress" guns on garrison carriages (also Hinchliffe), mortars in 2 sizes (Lancer Miniatures) and a crowd of crewmen and helpers (Les Higgins). For any keen types who identify that some of the iron ordnance pieces look a bit like Blomefields, and might be happier in a slightly later war, I can only plead that they are near enough for me, and that this little park also is to provide the siege equipment for my Napoleonic Spanish army!

 

These little fellows are from my pool of Eric Knowles conversions which have been called back to service after retirement. The source figure for each is the "fat officer" from the Les Higgins Malburian range - one has been altered to be doffing his hat, appropriate to the Age of Elegance, while the other is struggling with a tin-foil map. The paintwork is Eric's, preserved as far as possible. What the uniforms represent I neither know nor care - I like them, and these guys look senior enough to wear what they want!

The "cast of hundreds" approach is useful; thus far I have gone for the easy stuff - figures which only really needed some chip-repair - if they also looked a bit faded then a quick exposure to Army Painter's "Quickshade" is a big help - then fresh varnish and new bases. If they look a little pre-owned then that is just what they are - they are working antiques, so appropriate respect will be welcome. If there seems to be a lack of direction in the uniforms, that's OK - some of these chaps might well be British, or a bit French, but if they are not then they are probably Dutch, or a garrison battalion, or Walloons, or from assorted German states - they may even be in civilian dress - who knows?

I still have some more figures to add to this army of extras - the next lot will require more touch-up work. At the moment I have run out of 20mm bases, and to be honest I am not yet sure just how many more I will need. I'll come back to this.

On the weapons front, I have another 3 bronze-barrelled siege cannons to finish off, one extra-large mortar and a few little Coehorns. Getting there.

Beyond that, I need to paint up a lot more gabions, get started on some decent chevaux de frises, and sort out some separate (3-man) companies of troops to carry out trench raids, and to stand guard duty for sapper teams. This last exercise offers a chance to use up a small supply of pre-painted British grenadiers who will not get a gig otherwise.

One proposed terrain breakthrough has been a bit of a wrench; for Vauban-period warfare, I do have proper 3D (sloped) glacis pieces to go with the walls and bastions. The nicely-made glacis pieces can also be something of a nuisance, since they limit the fortress designs I can use unless I spend money and/or effort getting extra moulded pieces. I have decided to use flat glacis plates - just hex tiles painted in a special shade of green so they stand out, and use Fat Frank's standard "trench" pieces to represent the covered way at the top edge. I'll try some mock-ups with this idea in the next few weeks. What could possibly go wrong?

Sieges: Back to the Little Stuff

Suitably inspired by all the work being done in my garden, I took the opportunity this afternoon to return my attention to the toys - to clean up and sort out some of my siege bits and pieces, and make more sense of the way they are stored. 

As I'm learning (and I'm quite happy about it - the amount of kit is a large part of the spectacle and the enjoyment), tabletop sieges use a lot of scenic pieces. I already had a good collection of walls and defences and buildings - medieval and Vauban-period - and I now have a growing mass of earthworks, gun emplacements and so on, to support serious sieges. I really do need to get this lot stored in a logical and practical way. So work is under way!

 

Here's something strange spread across the attic floor - there are 4 trays of hand-made trench sections (which can also double as earth walls placed in front of pre-gunpowder stone defences) and gun emplacements, all supplied by the excellent Fat Frank, then, at the front, a tray of assorted cast-resin pieces, various makers (I note that a few of these still need painting, by the way).

In the left foreground, open, is a badly thought-out view of a brown wooden cigar box containing 4" x 1" brown felt strips - these are for use as forward saps in my Vauban's Wars games (and, of course, any other games which might wish to borrow them). My starting idea is that you get two of these strips as a single piece of Sapper Activity action, when cued by the appropriate Sequence Card. You may lay them as you wish. Obviously, the speed of forward sapping will be closely related to how obliquely you place the strips - in the house parlance, to the angle of zig-zag. If your sap is enfiladed from the defences, you have done it wrong. There are no excuses. The closer you get to the fortress, the more extreme will be the zig-zag profile of the sap, and thus the slower the rate of approach.

There is another box (closed) at about 3 o'clock in the picture - again, not a great visual - in there is my collection of assorted multiple and single gabions - some of which also need some paint, now I look at them.

I propose to put the Fat Frank pieces in a box of their own, since this will be the main supply for the building of parallels and batteries by the busy besiegers. The rest can be stored separately as a back-up supply.

Near the top of the picture are a couple of very old Bellona gun positions, which are really just present for old-times' sake.

[In the real world, my driveway is now ready for the gravel, and one of the two trees nominated for removal has been severely wrecked - about two-thirds of the bulk has gone, though the main "frame" of trunk and big branches is to be removed tomorrow, along with, I hope, most of the second tree. Good progress - we've been very lucky with the weather.]