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.
That is a lot of trenches. A really good looking fortress you have. I can see the advantages of the hex glacis. I think there will have to be a compromise somewhere - but wargamers are used to this.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I tried setting it up - gives a much clearer idea what's involved. It's a shame not to use the lovely original glacis, but the slope is crazy! I've got more stuff to think about now, which is fine.
DeleteNice way to spend the day - fiddling around with toys. The glacis looks really good even before painting but I get where you’re coming from on the units behind it being protected. As a reminder does it need to be any more than a lolly stick thickness on the edge of the hex? Is this a return to creeping elegance?
ReplyDeleteLolly sticks! Hmmm. Somewhere I've got a pack of wooden spatulas - it occurs to me that, as you say, they might be all that's needed, and it would be cheap and easy enough to cut a set which all the possible combinations of angles for turning different ways to the next hex, and combinations thereof. Hmmm.
DeleteNot complicated, but need also to remember that concealment behind the glacis only works at the edge near the fort. Anybody sauntering up to the opposite edge can be blown to kingdom come - the cover only works up the slope!
DeleteI like spending time like that. The drone shot shows up your fortress model beautifully. Reminiscent of those models at les Invalides.
ReplyDeleteThe dimensions of the walls and bastions AND the glacis look perfect for your hexes. Was that a fluke, or did you commission the fort with specific dimensions and angles?
The beauty of the drone shot is that it removes the vertical dimension, which (as mentioned above, and in numerous ranting posts of mine in the past) in my case is 10 times the horizontal scale, a paradox forced upon wargames by the inconvenient need to play games which they can see in a space which they can provide, within the reach of their human arms from the table edge. The removal of the vertical scale reduces the challenge to making the distances consistent with givens like the range of a musket (since it must be possible to shoot an enemy in front of the middle of a curtain wall from one of the flanking bastions) - the mathematics and the design (and thus the ground plan) of fortifications did not evolve by accident.
DeleteAfter many years of "doing it wrong" (a noble tradition which I still follow, given the chance), I eventually found that 1mm to 1 metre (yes, that's right Matron, 1/1000) was a commonly used ground-scale in wargames which allowed me/us/them to stick a fair-sized battle on a table whose middle could be reached (in my case, 8ft x 5 ft, a common size). In the case of the Terrain Workshop designers, they obviously sat down with a copy of Vauban's geometry, and made the ground scale for their 15mm-scale fortress 1/1000, which fits my house standards perfectly. They swallowed the abhorrence of the discrepancy between vertical and horizontal scales exactly because (a) the compromise works reasonably well; (b) a great many other people have adopted the same compromise; (c) it doesn't look as stupid as one might expect.
So the central thread here is that it really was just a fluke that someone made fortress pieces in a scale which was perfect for my normal tabletop assumptions, but the fluke was more likely because these assumptions are in common use. One additional stroke of good fortune in my case was that I have trained myself to accept the appearance of 15mm (1/100) buildings on the same table as my 20mm (1/76) soldiers and equipment, so it all works out. Somehow (years of looking at the photos in Charles Grant's "Napoleonic Wargaming"?) the reaction to a photo of my fortress at some other angle than vertically above is "that's a very nice fort", rather than "that is a ridiculously distorted little fort"; we must remember that, if the vertical scale were the same as the groundscale, we should use 2mm figures, with 1 figure representing 1 man.
This is why mention of "visual realism" in wargames always threatens to burst my corsets. Model railways are realistic, normally, because they have universal scales. Wargames, other than specially engineered skirmish games, are based on some compromises which are fine (and traditional, though frequently forgotten about) and necessary to keep the game playable yet also worth looking at!
Could the fort sit surrounded by quite a large 'hill' of thick hexagons, but with the area inside the glacis mounted on a set of thinner hexagons, so there is enough of a drop to represent a trench without an overly steep glacis?
ReplyDeleteYes, it could. In addition to the scale paradox I banged on about (yet again) in response to the previous comment (which is a very good and perceptive comment), there are a couple of other inherent clangers in the physical set-up:
Delete(1) The inconvenient paradox in wargaming scales, for a combination of reasons, reach its peak in siege gaming - it's not so easy in a siege to gloss over the fact that men and their buildings are 10 times as tall as they should be. This is worsened by the use of a rigid baseboard; in reality, we know that the men in the trenches would not be standing above ground, with a dirty great trench sticking up to hide them, and the fort's ditch would not be at baseboard level, it would be down a bit. The only way to do this properly is on a sand-table, preferably with 2mm figures.
(2) The compromise solutions for the game must also allow the terrain to be set up within acceptable limits of cost and inconvenience. The stacked hexagons approach might well work, though the layers might need to be impossibly thin, but it feels that (assuming a sand-table is not practicable or desirable) it would be easier simply to use my nicely-sculpted model glacis, which puts us back at the beginning. The only real solution for the covered way is to dig down below the table top - sand-table!
I believe I am heading towards a really cheap and nasty representation of the covered way, which might be slivers of painted wood on the top edge of the glacis plates, just to remind me what it is we are looking at here!
Another solution is to do it all on a map, with no vertical scale implied at all, marked out in hexes, with cardboard counters to represent the troops. No - that would never work. This is a lot of fun, but it isn't easy! Thanks for joining in - your ideas are much appreciated.
From the game point if view, how about for the slivers of wood, a stack of pieces of thin card, differentiated to show increasing deterioration of the glacis under bombardment, when removed successively on achievement of the requisite score on a D6?
DeleteThe idea is interesting - stacked cards could be used to show the effect of attrition, as you say, but it is unlikely that the glacis itself would be bombarded in this way. It is a strategic obstacle to the besiegers, since it obscures line of sight to, and protects, the main walls; once the defending batteries on top of the wall have been reduced as far as possible, someone will probably sap across the glacis and dig holes in the top edge to position the final breaching batteries, but the glacis itself is just a field - bombarding it wouldn't achieve anything. Attrition cards are a potentially useful idea, and more elegant than my usual coloured dice lying around the field!
DeleteI don't know whether this is at all an original idea, but how do siege games take account of 'underground terrain', things like undiggable/variable diggabke rock rock, underground springs, sink holes? It occurs to me that you could have hexagonal cards with surface on one side and problematic conditions on the underside, to be turned over when reached by the attackers.
DeleteAgain, an interesting idea. My game uses event cards, some of which relate to weather. In general, digging is one of the most satisfactory aspects of the rules - I use a classic (i.e. rather crude!) system, which uses the concept of what has become known as the "Digging Number" - this is a number between 1 and 6, which is set at the outset and then maintained up or down by dice rolls each turn thereafter. Any piece of digging work has to roll a die - and has to beat the current DN. As an example - an infantry unit (which consists of two bases) rolls 1D6 for each base, and both dice have to beat the DN to complete a trench along their front; if they have a sapper figure present, they may roll a 3rd die. If 2 dice pass the test, the trench section is complete; if only 1 passes, the trench section will be marked out with gabions (incomplete), which gives only soft cover during the opponent's next turn; if no dice pass, the trench exists only on the engineer's plan, and the guys have no cover at all when the sun comes up, which is a bad situation. This Digging Number is a crude abstraction of soil conditions, bad breaks, poor surveying and - most of all - weather. If the DN gets to 6 then nobody can do any engineering work at all until the DN comes down a bit (most likely this is because of torrential rain or something) the loss of time for the besiegers can be a major problem...
DeleteJust had another thought (JBM told me not to think but it sort of crept up on me). Could you not cut chunks out of the 'glacis' hexagons on the ditch side? To keep the cutting simple, the pieces cut out could be, alternately, pentagons (with very long 'bases') and Isosceles Trapezoids. The pieces cut out could be 'flipped over' to create a double thickness/additional 'contour'.
ReplyDeleteI'm quite ready to be told this won't work and to be reminded not to think.
I think you may be on to something here. This is certainly the first time I've seen the beginnings of a Nobel Prize submission taking shape on my blog. Thank you.
DeleteThat's fabulous set of fortifications you have there, seems a shame not to use them. Are you intending the glacis hex tiles to be complete hexes or part tiles where appropriate?
ReplyDeleteHandiest if I can use complete hexes; mostly it seems pretty versatile. I tried some odd variations - a longer straight wall, and a standalone star fort, could both have used an extra slice of a tile to give a better fit - I'm quite happy to have some spare half-tiles if it helps.
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