What I'm not going to do here is try to convince you that siege wargames are something you ought to try; neither am I going to grind any axes on how anything should be done, nor pontificate about rules. Well, there may be a little pontification, now I think about it.
I hope to produce a series of posts on this topic. I'll set out some thoughts on what I have done with sieges (and it evolved a lot along the way), where I've got to, and what the game is like. I hope also to share with you some things I found particularly interesting - bear in mind that I started out knowing nothing at all; I learned a lot from reading and trying ideas out, but sometimes I found that there was a surprising lack of factual data about how things were done, and I had to rely on reasoning from basic principles to fill in a lot of gaps.
I've been interested in, and done a fair amount of reading about, sieges for maybe 20 years now. It first occurred to me that I might actually try to add them to my wargame repertoire when I had made some decent progress with my ECW project (circa 2013). It was obvious that sieges were common in that war, and formed an important part of the campaigns. The technology was relatively straightforward, and - apart from a few horrors such as Bristol, York and Chester - there were plenty of instances of historic sieges which were small enough and simple enough to be feasible on my tabletop, using the same sort of miniatures which appear on my battlefields.
This eventually grew into a plan to have a set of siege rules which worked (with as little tweaking as possible) for each of my chosen periods of warfare: ECW (usually medieval fortifications, some fortified houses); WSS (usually serious Vauban, the walls hidden out of sight, only capable of being breached when you can see the base of the wall - these sieges can be a lot of work); Napoleonic Peninsular War (with very few exceptions, fortresses were basically medieval, often with some kind of earth fausse braie in front to protect the walls).
Toy Soldiers
My tabletop is normally 8ft x 5ft (which can be extended a little if need be), and marked out in hexagons. My soldier collections for the ECW and the WSS are 20mm scale, and small 25mm (let us say 1/72) for the Napoleonics; the house tradition has grown up with a default figure scale of 33:1, buildings are "one-size-down" (15mm scale, or 1/100), and the groundscale is normally 1mm = 1metre, or 1/1000. My hexes are 7" across the flats - a size that I chose simply because it allows a hex to hold a unit plus some appropriate scenery without stress. 7" is near enough 180mm, which of course is 180m on the field, which is (again, near enough) 200 paces, a handy distance to use in a game.
Naturally, it was important to be able to man my sieges with the existing soldier collections, but scope has crept a little. There are some items such as siege guns which would not normally form part of an army, so I had to add these. For the ECW I set up siege artillery models which would work for both sides, fully crewed, similarly to existing field artillery. For the French and British Peninsular War Napoleonics I set up siege train equipment for each army. This was all fine, but models in the correct scale are getting harder to find, and I was worried about this getting out of hand; I did not have (still don't have, in truth) a Spanish Napoleonic siege train, and the arrival of my WSS project (which certainly required sieges to be taken seriously) encouraged a change of approach; I have now painted up siege pieces in nondescript brown and black colours which will work for all the WSS armies and also the Spanish Napoleonics. All I need to do is crew them with singly-based figures of appropriate period and near-enough uniform, and we arrive at a nicely pragmatic place - the Land of First-Up-Best-Dressed. So my siege boxes include a growing collection of siege guns, gunners and sappers who will turn out for whoever needs them. It is even possible to have ECW gunners filling in as Spanish militia in 1808 (don't tell the button-counters). The handy assumption is that a single gun represents a half-battery of 3 actual pieces (which can conveniently be forgotten about when a game starts - a gun is a gun is a gun...)
For my existing infantry, switching them to siege duty is very straightforward. Each battalion is reduced to two bases, by dropping command stands (with flags and mounted officers), and also dropping pikemen. Anyone wishing to move around trenches or battlements on a horse, or waving a flag, is in for a disappointment. War is hell.
These battalions (battalia, whatever) of 2 stands, each of 6 figures, still represent 600 men - the figure scale jumps to 50:1. It is also very useful if one or two of the battalions can consist of 4 "companies" - stands of 3 figures each, which are very useful for standing on narrow battlements, for forming guard details to protect sapping teams and, for the garrison, for carrying out Trench Raids, of which I'll say more in a later post. If the 3-figure stands are grenadiers or other elites, so much the better...
Cavalry normally will not serve in the siege lines or the garrisons, but may be present in the extra troops that the besieging force bring with them - they form the advance guard who close the roads and cut off the fortress from the outside world, and will provide support, stripping the woods of vines and flexible branches to make fascines and gabions, not to mention securing any useful food and drink in the area. My Siege of Liverpool game two years ago was small enough to start from the very beginning, and Richard Molyneux's Regt of Horse had the honour to be the first troops to return to their home town, to close the roads and prepare the way - they didn't do much once the siege started, though - cavalrymen do not dig trenches, thank you. If cavalry do appear, they will also reflect the revised 50:1 ratio, 6 figures representing 300 troopers, but they will not normally contribute to the siege operations.
Sappers and engineering figures will have to be recruited for the siege army; my armies certainly wouldn't have them otherwise. A team of sappers normally consists of two individually based figures.
Formations are only implied - an infantry unit with its stands side by side is assumed to be in close order, in line, and if they are on the walls or in trenches they count as in hard cover - I'll outline the gunnery rules in another post. Sappers and gun crews are described as a "sparse" target, and sappers working in an actual sap are particularly difficult to hit, since they are concealed under hard cover - the garrison may choose to try dropping shells on them, if they have a mortar handy and can afford the powder, but they are still hard to hit.
In common with Vauban's Wars and some of Neil Thomas' rules, infantry and cavalry units are eliminated by 4 accumulated hits, artillery by 3, sappers by 2.
Two Kinds of Time
The foundation of much of my learning and inspiration for this has been Christopher Duffy's Fire & Stone - The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860, in the Appendix to which there is an example game, which introduces (as far as I am concerned) the idea that the siege game uses two timescales and two sets of rules. For all the plodding, procedural stuff - digging and bombardment, keeping the troops fed, bringing up equipment and moving troops around - we use Siege Turns (I normally have 2 Siege Turns to a week); if anything more brisk happens, or if anyone wishes to move troops to a place the Siege Turns will not allow, the game switches to Tactical Turns, which are pretty much recognisable as normal miniatures rules, with a turn representing 10 minutes (or something). I'll discuss Tactical Turns on another occasion; for the moment, I'll just say that I use a slightly cut-down version of my own CJ-Lite rules for the Tactical bits of the WSS and the ECW, and intend to produce a derivative for the Peninsular War.
The game, then, is mostly played using Siege Rules. Remember: Close Combat takes place only in Tactical Turns; heavy Siege and Fortress Guns only fire during Siege Turns. If you wish to charge the wall with scaling ladders, or stick a bayonet in someone, then I wish you good fortune - you'll have to call for Tactical Turns to do it.
I hope to cover the detail in the coming weeks (if I'm spared...). In my next Siege Note, I hope to discuss the big issue of scenery, the preliminaries needed to start a game, how the ground and the defences are laid out, how troops may move about and how the siege might progress.
After that, I'll have a look at some fun stuff like actual artillery fire and Espionage!
To give an idea of potential topics for discussion, and to get us started, this is the current turn schedule for my Leaguer Siege Rules:
Siege Turn Sequence:
Each player goes through the full Turn Sequence, then his opponent. Normal arrangement is that Besieger goes first.
Besieger
(1) Housekeeping
a. Odd Jobs: set or review the Digging Standard; if roll 5 or 6 on D6, draw an Event Card
b. Espionage activities
c. Move Officers and Named Individuals anywhere within permitted limits (for rallying purposes)
d.
Carry out Rallying for any unit which has suffered
loss; recruit extra (or replacement) Sappers, Spies, Named Individuals
(2) Movement and Digging
a. Move units and Sappers – allocate markers to units which are to carry out Digging Work
b.
Carry out Digging work (also use list of Sapper actions)
– Mining (if relevant)
(3) Artillery
a. Firing – manage hits and misfires; set fires from mortar shells
b. Check powder usage and supply
c.
Tidy up artillery smoke
(4) Combat
a. Opportunity for either side to switch to Tactical Turns (Storms for Besiegers, Sorties for Garrison)
Garrison
(1) Housekeeping
a. Odd Jobs: check progress of any fires, food supply and Local Support; if roll 5 or 6 on D6, draw an Event Card
b. Espionage activities
c. Move Officers and Named Individuals anywhere within permitted limits (for rallying purposes)
d.
Carry out Rallying for any unit which has suffered
loss; recruit extra (or replacement) Sappers, Spies, Named Individuals; attempt
to improve Local Support; set policing details
(2) Movement and Digging
a. Move units and sappers – allocate markers to units which are to carry out Digging Work
b.
Carry out Digging work – list of Sapper actions –
Mining (if relevant)
(3) Artillery
a. Firing – manage hits and misfires
b. Check powder usage and supply
c.
Tidy up artillery smoke
(4) Combat
a. Trench Raids
b. Opportunity for either side to switch to Tactical Turns (Storms for Besiegers, Sorties for Garrison)
