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. 

Hex Cells - Round & Round We Go

There are occasions when I find that I am somewhere I've been before. Sometimes, the number of footprints makes it clear that an awful lot of people have been there, but it doesn't make it any more likely that the path leads anywhere.

Prompted by comments to the previous post, I reckon it is time for one of my periodic visits to the subject of hex cells on the wargames table - specifically, what size they should be. Since the mid 1970s, I have had 7" hexes on my table, and only occasionally have I wished they were a different size. They are seven inches (across the flats) because that looks OK and fits my unit sizes nicely. Six inches would be a possible alternative, anything smaller would not be viable, given that I have no wish to allow hex sizes to drive a complete re-engineering of my armies, rules and figures-to-men ratios, nor to initiate an extensive re-basing programme. Since no-one made commercial hexagonal bits in the 1970s (as far as I know), there was no option but to manufacture my own hills, so the odd size did not make things any worse than they would otherwise have been. If someone had made pre-formed hills and rivers for 6" hexes when I started, I would probably have gone for 6".

In recent years I looked at various mats and tile systems. The most basic was a printed tablecloth made by a Spanish concern that was promoted by NapoleoN Miniatures. I can't remember the name of the firm - Microgames? - something like that. I corresponded with them for a little while, and they sent me a couple of samples. They did a range of off-the-shelf cloths, including a decent-looking Peninsular War job with 100mm hexes, but they were more than happy to discuss bespoke products. They were prepared to print anything I wanted on the cloth (it didn't warrant the description "mat"), and make it any size I wanted, which sounds ideal. The cloth, sadly, was very flimsy - you could see light through the weave, it would certainly stretch and wrinkle and move about in action. A friend said that you couldn't even dry dishes with it, which is an interesting criterion. So I dropped that idea - not without difficulty, since the manufacturer seemed very excited by my interest, and looked forward to meeting me at a wargames convention in Dublin (which is obviously just down the road from here) to finalise my order. I have seen impressive examples of heavier, textured mats, which look good (though the hex grids come in a small number of unsuitable sizes), but I worry about storing them without damage, and I have a weird dread of covering my home with bits of shed flock and resin flakes.

Tile systems are invariably impressive - sometimes spectacularly so. The old Geo-Hex tile system (which I have never actually seen) appears to have used large hexes, but it's long OOP. I have heard mention of TSS making hex tiles, and their website shows some interesting pictures, but it makes no mention of sizes. I emailed them, and they came back very quickly and politely and said they no longer make the hex tiles, since they had trouble with manufacture and accuracy of the finished pieces. They did, however, recommend their excellent square terrain tiles, and they do look very good.

One of the familiar aspects of following a hopeless path is that frequently people will fix you with a slightly pitying gaze (especially in email) and imply that they are surprised that you are still doing whatever it is you are doing, and that the rest of the world has moved on from that - all the cool guys are now buying our latest product, and here's some pictures and a price list.

Hexon - state of the art?

At four inches it's a breeze. Kallistra make what appears to be the standard-setting product, Hexon II. Looks terrific. It probably looks awesome, though I am not an expert in awe. 4" tiles in a bewilderingly huge range - you can build the most convincing looking countryside in all sorts of regional shades. I am really very impressed, but it wouldn't do for me. The hexes are too small for my armies, and the whole approach of using a wall-to-wall set of tiles involves costs and storage issues which put me off. No - I am not decrying any of this, it really is wonderful - if I was starting from scratch now I would do Napoleonics in 15mm, with small unit sizes, and I would buy the Kallistra system. The snag, of course, is that I am not.

My wargames have never been scenically realistic. There is no whiff of diorama about my set up. Plain boards, unflocked bases, simple, representative villages and woods - that's how I've always done it. I've found it practical and pleasing, and I like the traditional look. I also like the look of more exotic approaches, I hasten to add, but they are not for me. A plain table with some blocks on it for hills is fine. If the hills look half-decent and troops can stand on them, and if I can store them easily without damaging them, so much the better.

As Mr Kinch has correctly pointed out, the real reason for choosing to move to smaller hexes is because that is how you want the game to be. It is possible that I could use 6" hexes, and it is possible that there would be advantages for the game size, but it does not (yet, at least) strike me as a must-do. Cutting out hills is a royal pain in the ass, to quote Mr Salinger, and no mistake. If someone makes suitable 6" hexagonal hill blocks which could be used, singly or in multiples, without leaving raw edges, and without requiring me to cover the whole world in the things, that would be a small push toward making a switch.

I have read interesting forum threads about casting tiles in plaster, papier maché or secret-formula gloop, and all kinds of mine-is-bigger-than-yours discussions of tile systems past, present and mythical. I am, I think, not much the wiser. It looks like a choice between staying where I am or some DIY-based change. The more I think about this, the less I fancy a change. I must Google "hex terrain" and look yet again at those TMP exchanges from 2006, and count the footprints.

By the way - what happened to Hexon I?

Product Mentions...

Very short post to express my appreciation of a couple of recent purchases, and to draw the attention of anyone (specifically UK residents) who does not know of them. No, neither of these has anything to do with dandelion removal - well, nothing obvious.

First off, a plug for a local Edinburgh business - Harburn Hobbies. Makers of fine model railway scenery, and definitely not cheap, but their cast-resin rivers are superb. I haven't actually used them on the battlefield yet, but I am impressed - they make my home-made rivers look wretched, not to mention insanitary. Only slight problem at present is that their bends are all about 75 degrees, and I'm trying to pluck up a plan and the necessary courage to alter them to a hex-friendly 60 degrees.

Secondly, I got some pre-cut bases from East Riding Miniatures (ERM), of Hull, who now do laser-cut 2mm MDF in any size you can think of. Excellent - they are quick, friendly, very helpful, and surprisingly cheap. My brand loyalty just shifted. Thanks, Tony.

Sabol Studios

I have recently been very impressed by the work of Sabol Studios (of Woodstock, Georgia, USA), and thought it might be of general interest. Sabol Design are well known as manufacturers of carrying cases and similar wargame-related hardware, and they also do custom builds and commissions for terrain boards and pieces.

The 15mm Spanish monastery was built for Gary, whose blog The Peninsular War in 15mm is always interesting. I was sufficiently gob-smacked to contact Sabol, who proved to be friendly and very helpful. They are happy to take on terrain commissions, though shipping costs mean that there are limits to the size of items they can send to Europe. I think they may be just the guys to build some extra bits (including a gatehouse and some wrecked walls) for my 15mm Vauban fort.