ECW Campaign - The Map

After publishing yesterday's photo of the Battlefinder cards laid out for the campaign map, I spent a few hours playing around with Gimp, and produced a proper graphic-edited version, which I shall have printed at size A3 (or possibly A2, if the resolution will take it) and laminated by my friendly local print shop, for putting up on the magnetic board in my office.

Here it is, in a reduced size. If you wish to have a look at it, remember this is just a home-tweaked version of The Perfect Captain's Battlefinder system, which is available as a free download from their (his?) website. The only non-standard bit of these cards is that I have changed the place names to suit the North of England - so the influences are Nordic and Saxon rather than Norman. You will observe that some of the cards are inverted - this is deliberate, to get the river to run the correct way. Remember also that this is complete fantasy - no association with real places, past or present, is intended.

The card images do not represent immediately adjacent pieces of terrain - each of these sites may be anything from 5 to 20 miles from its neighbours on the board.

* * * 

Supplementary “Late Edit”

I received a number of emails asking for more detail on how the map is used. I am sort of feeling my way into this campaign, so to some extent the answers are going to be “not quite sure yet”; the idea is that it will be a simplification of The Perfect Captain’s Tinker Fox ECW campaign scenario, which is intended for use with Battlefinder and is, again, available as a download from TPC’s website.

It will be a simplification because I am conducting this campaign solo – thus, for example, the procedure of issuing “Letters” each turn to give orders to subordinate commanders can be a lot less formal and detailed. I had also thought that I was going to do something pretty rudimentary about provisioning the troops, based on the “Provender Points” (P ratings) in the margin on each “district” card, ignoring the more daunting prospect of running a detailed revenue budget for each army – my past experience of campaigns has been that the road to insanity lies in the housekeeping.

On further thought, I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the Tinker Fox game is substantially about keeping one’s own troops in line, by paying them (if absolutely necessary!) just in time to prevent open mutiny. I didn’t fancy that overhead – not in a huge amount of detail anyway – but I am also aware that the motivation of the troops in the ECW on a day-to-day basis has more to do with the likelihood of their getting paid than with any minor issues such as the falling-out of King and Parliament. Some element of revenue management may be necessary, though I am a bit apprehensive about it. Also, the existence of a treasure chest with each marching force gives some kind of additional objective!

Current thoughts, in no particular order, and with no implication of permanence:

(1) A turn will be a week. In that time, in decent weather, a mounted, unencumbered force may travel up to 5 districts (i.e. most of the way across the map, if the way is clear), and other forces (on foot, with wagons or guns) may travel up to 3.

(2) Thus the areas between cards represent substantial distances, as described. The map as shown is not a mosaic of terrain tiles; Dr Allen De Vries, who introduced me to the Battlefinder system, describes the map as “an array of football pitches in a large swamp”, which is a little bizarre. Further, travel between the districts is only possible along the 6 paths shown on the template. You cannot fight, manoeuvre or do anything else in the gaps.

(3) The only element of continuity between adjacent districts is the river. The river cannot be crossed between cards – all crossing points are shown in the districts. In some cases, the road appears to track nicely from one card to the next, but not reliably so. Between adjacent cards, the paths and so on behave in some unknown manner which just happens to get you to the correct edge of the next card.

(4) The cards themselves are probably only a guide(!) – for a start, my table is not quite that shape, in any of its configurations. Maps were notoriously poor, though I would expect that the “home” (defending?) side would get less surprises on the battlefield terrain than the other side!

(5) Initial idea is that the Royalists have a major “capitol” (Battlefinder terminology) at Lowther, with useful surrounding towns and villages capable of supporting garrisons. The Parliament side will start at the bottom (southern) edge of the map, and may be deployed on both sides of the river if required. Objective for each side is to get the opposition out of the area, and capture of the enemy capitol is an outright win. At some point, yet to be thought through, the Parliament side will be reinforced by a Covenanter force arriving in the lower right quarter of the map – from roughly the direction of York (or Newcastle, or some such place we may never have heard of).

(6) Back to the housekeeping - Tinker Fox seems to me rather to gloss over the matter of ammunition. On the fells of Lancashire/Westmorland, you might come across a sack of beans or a stray cow or two, but a train of powder and ball seems unlikely. Again, I am keen to avoid insanity in the detail, but this does need some thought. Attacking and capturing powder trains was a well-regarded activity in these parts. 

One message from the emails was “why publish a map if you don’t know how you are going to use it?” – which is valid enough, I guess. Partly I put it up there because a map is a map, and it must be possible to use it somehow – especially since the Battlefinder system and the Tinker Fox scenario contain more than enough clues for how I will choose to make it work. I also put it up there to let it ripen for a while – like the “know your enemy” pictures detectives put on their whiteboards in TV movies!

ECW Campaign – More on the Context

I spent an interesting afternoon building a campaign map using my home-modified cards for the Perfect Captain’s Battlefinder system. The picture above captures the actual master map laid out on the template – I include this photo only because I have it available and it might be of passing interest – I do not expect that anyone will actually be able to read it. No matter – I have everything documented, and a more or less longwinded narrative will appear in time, giving the background (i.e. the fake history) to my ECW campaign. The area depicted is the countryside surrounding the River Arith, which almost certainly lies somewhere between Lancaster and Carlisle.

It’s important to understand that the photo does not show an approximation to an aerial view of the area – it is simply a network of sites which are separated by some undisclosed distance of the order of 5 to 20 miles – each card does not weld seamlessly to its neighbours; I have a vague feeling that it would if the system were really any good, but it doesn’t. These are simply memorable locations (out of the scenario book?) laid out on a template. It is (whisper it) a game board.

One early adjustment to my context work is that the date for the campaign has now slipped back to Spring 1644, which thus allows my Covenanter units to turn out for Parliament. Ah, I hear you say – ah, but – would the Covenanters not have been busy at the siege of Newcastle, and at the build-up to Marston Moor? Are said Covenanters not, as it were, spoken for?

What Marston Moor, I ask? What siege of Newcastle? The real joy of working at the shadowy overlap of fact and fiction is that I can please myself which bits of the genuine stuff I admit to. The scope is limitless – if it suits me to allow real history to place Covenanters on my OOB then I shall take full advantage, while simultaneously ignoring any of that same history which does not fit my script. I am lying on the floor, roaring with delight at the possibilities.

Oh - that Lowther Castle. I think not - built too late, and, anyway, look at the
state of it

The unusually sharp-sighted may spot the walled town of Lowther on my map – an important garrison town for the Royalists in this area. Someone has already asked me, is this connected with Lowther Castle, the home of the Earls of Lonsdale, in old Westmorland? Surely this is a real place? Not necessarily, comes the reply; if it suits my campaign history, the answer may be a tentative yes, but if it does not fit comfortably then it is a complete coincidence, and the town was named for a fellow from Grange-over-Sands I once did Physics practicals with on Saturday mornings in first year at university, sometime in another century.

Anyway – what Lowther Castle?

ECW Campaign – Preliminary Work & More Testing

Thornthwaite - with St David's in the background

Some time – probably within the next couple of months – I hope at last to get my solo ECW campaign under way. I am collecting together a short shopping list of ideas, and of things that I learned from my Peninsular War campaign which I wish to do differently this time.

The campaign will not use a formal map; the idea is to improvise a map based on my “North Country” edition of the Perfect Captain’s “Battlefinder” card system, and the rules for supply and movement will be correspondingly simpler.

The area to be fought over will thus be fictitious, and the forces and leaders will also be of my own invention. There was nothing wrong with using real places and (more or less) real armies in the Peninsular War, but doing so definitely pushes towards a specific organisation, and the strategies are bound to reflect what really happened, at least in part. This time it will be different – the area to be used will be some previously unknown location vaguely similar to the Lonsdale Hundred of Lancashire (which in reality includes Lancaster and part of the Lake District), and the participants will be my own invention, though some of them may look rather like known historical units – pure coincidence. You will not find the towns or roads on John Speed’s contemporary maps, but that is entirely because Speed opted not to show them. You will not find any historical record of the troops or the generals, but that is simply because Peter Young overlooked them.

The timing will be (vaguely) 1643, to keep everything up in the air and steer clear of the New Model Army. The political context will be smudged to suit the occasion whenever necessary. The tabletop battles will use my ECW variant of Commands & Colors:Napoleonics, which is undergoing some further minor changes – these are to be tested thoroughly before use. Formal sieges, and also any battles which are too small or otherwise unsuitable for a miniatures game, will be handled by the algorithmic approach which worked well in the Peninsula.

* * * *

Yesterday I had a preliminary solo game to test some recent rule tweaks – it represented the little-known Battle of Thornthwaite, which is separate from the campaign but is around the same area, and employs some of the same forces. It is a decent-sized toe in the water.

Thornthwaite is a prosperous little market town of approximately 800 inhabitants. The prominent family in the area are the Hesketh’s, cousins of the Marquess of Newcastle; they are Catholics and strong supporters of the King, and their sympathies are reflected in the stance of the inhabitants. The town’s important position, commanding the highway from Lancaster to some other place, is well recognised, though it has no walls and is not a particularly easy place to defend, the nearby River Dribble being a negligible stream at this time of year. The Royalist army in the area, under the command of Lord Benedict Porteous, alerted to the approach of a sizeable Parliamentarian army, has placed infantry in the town itself, and also in the parish church of St David of Briardale, which now lies about half a mile from the town, as a result of rebuilding after the plagues of the previous century.

The particular rule tweaks to be tested in this action were:

Accelerated troop movement – 1 hex bonus when further than 2 hexes from the enemy.

C&C “section” command cards (other than any which refer to the number of cards in the player’s hand – Assault and Refuse, being examples) may be applied to a Leader who is attached to one of his own units, and the order extends to any contiguous string of units from the same brigade.

Some changes to the influence and immortality of attached Leaders.

An experimental rule to cover the fire of Mortars, and a system for recording damage to built-up areas (and, though we had none yesterday, fortress walls).

A couple of refinements of movement rules, including a fledging road bonus and a change whereby units may move through friendly artillery, but may not end their move in the same hex.

A few other things.

Orders of Battle (numbers in square brackets are simply the identifying unit number on the bases; the list also shows the colours of small beads blu-tacked onto the bases to make it easier to keep brigades together and identify the army structure)

Battle of Thornthwaite – 1643

Army of the Parliament (Sir Nathaniel Aspinall [87])

Horse

Right                         – brigade of Lord Alwyn [96] (purple)

      Col Thomas South’s RoH [125]

      Sir Rowland Barkhill’s RoH [126]

   – brigade of Col Thomas Chetwynd [97] (red)

      Chetwynd’s RoH [123]

      Sir William Dundonald’s RoH [124]

Left                            – Col Matthew Allington [98] (silver)

      Sir Beardsley Heron’s RoH [121]

      Col James Winstanley’s RoH [122]

      Col Richard Sudley’s RoH [127]

      Lord Eastham’s RoH [128]

Foot

Right                         - Col Robert Bryanston [86] (green)

                                                      Bryanston’s RoF [106]

                                                      Col Obediah Hawkstone’s RoF [107]

Left                            - Col Edward Buckland [84] (yellow)

                                                      Buckland’s RoF [101]

                                                      Col Joseph Grafton’s RoF [105]

                                                      Col John Burdett’s RoF [108]

Reserve                   - Lord Lambton [99] (sky blue)

                                                      Lord Lambton’s RoF [102]

                                                      Sir Thos Nielson’s RoF [103]

                                                      Sir Julius Mossley’s RoF [104]

Unattached

                                                      Capt Wm Ancaster’s Dragoons [120]

                                                      Med Gun [140]

                                                      Light Gun [139]

                                                      Heavy Gun [147]

                                                      Heavy Mortar [157]

Army of the King (Benedict, Lord Porteous [3])

Horse

Right                         - Lord Sefton [4] (green)

                                                      Lord Sefton’s RoH [44]

                                                      Sir Henry Moorhouse’s RoH [47]

                                                      Col John Noden’s RoH [48]

Left                            - Sir Roderick Broadhurst [10] (yellow)

                                                      Broadhurst’s RoH [43]

                                                      Lord Cressington’s RoH [46]

Foot

Garrison                  - Col Archibald Rice [17] (turquoise)

                                                      Rice’s RoF [23]

                                                      Col Wm Ringrose’s RoF [25]

                                                      Sir Marmaduke Davies’ RoF [27]

Reserve                   - Sir James Parkfield [19] (silver)

                                                      Parkfield’s RoF [19]

                                                      Lord Ullet’s RoF [24]

St David’s               - Col John Fulwood [18] (dk blue)

                                                      Fulwood’s RoF [28]

                                                      Capt Charles Grove’s Firelocks [38]

Unattached

                                                      Maj Oliver Dingle’s Dragoons [40]

                                                      Light Gun [59]

                                                      Med Gun [61]

Royalists had a hand of 5 Command Cards, Parliamentarians 6. The Victory Point requirement for a win was 10, 2 of these being available for possession of more of the town than the enemy and 1 for possession of St David’s church.

I shall not give a detailed account of the action – the captions of the photos should provide much of that. Both armies had an amount of horse which was not of immediate use in fighting for a town and, predictably, the Royalists started their defence by employing theirs in launching a wild cavalry charge against the (numerically superior) force of horse on the Parliamentary left.

Ignoring this distraction, the infantry brigades of Edward Buckland and Lord Lambton [P] set about attacking the town itself. Their attack was preceded by a short bombardment from a large siege mortar known as The Clapperdudgeon (commanded by Capt R Rousell), which started a couple of small fires, but failed to hurt anyone. The infantry approached the open ground to the East of the town under heavy fire of musketry, showing great courage, but were repulsed quickly and completely once they reached the edge of the town.

Buckland’s force was destroyed, and together with the heavy losses already sustained by Allington’s horsemen on the Parliamentarian left, this was sufficient to clock up the required 10 VPs before Lambton’s men could get involved in the assault, and the Parliament army withdrew, most of its troops having done little beyond some manoeuvring. They will return, they will fight again soon. The battle lasted about two hours elapsed, allowing for some head scratching over new rules.

Broadhurst's horse [R] on Mill Hill

View from behind Parliament right flank - they had more troops eventually

Col Bryanston with the Parliamentary reserve foot

General Aspinall watches his attack develop

Allington's horse on the Parliamentary left - they had a very bad day

General view of the Royalist position

Defenders in Thornthwaite

Broadhurst's men looked businesslike but didn't actually do anything

Lord Sefton's bold charge wrecks the Parliament horse

In goes the main assault - Buckland's brigade

Lord Porteous - he won, but he still doesn't know which way up the map is

I am left to ponder the advantage which “galloper” type horse gain in a melee. It may well be appropriate for the tactics, but the cavalry on both sides at this stage of the war in this theatre would mostly be provincial gentlemen and their retainers – I am not sure that there would have been a great deal of experience of the German wars, and Prince Rupert is nowhere to be seen in these parts. If there was a fault in the game here, I feel it may be more to do with my simplistic decision to make all Royalist horse “Gallopers” and all their opponents “Trotters” – certainly the Royalists cut through their opposite numbers very effectively, but that might not be entirely correct for this backwater of the wars.

Casualties among brigade commanders (which do not give rise to VPs) were lighter than I feared they might be, and the “daisychain” brigade order rule worked nicely for shifting men quickly, and encouraged a structural discipline on the armies which is pleasing and usually entirely absent in C&C. The coloured beads are a big help, but the tiny specimens I used are a complete swine to handle and attach – I spent a fair amount of time crawling around with a torch, looking for dropped beads (which, of course, roll for a surprising distance).

Interesting game – I’ve left it set up, so that I can re-run some bits of it with further tweaklets. On the King’s side, Lord Sefton distinguished himself with a remarkable cavalry attack, though he was captured in the process. Once again, artillery was mostly a waste of time once friendly infantry moved in front of it, since only the light guns may move once they have started firing – I understand this is pretty much how it was.

Hooptedoodle #150 – The Mud of Cumbria

Since it was the Contesse’s birthday last Saturday, and also since we never did get a Summer holiday this year (with one thing and another), we took a weekend break at Wetheral, near Carlisle. I haven’t visited Wetheral for about 15 years, but remember it fondly – it is a quiet village (one gets the impression that this is where the money in Carlisle lives), with interesting walks along the valley of the River Eden and blessed with an excellent, independently owned hotel (The Crown) which has great food and even a nice indoor swimming pool (which we used – my son is a very keen swimmer).

Fancy a little holiday home in a quiet village in the North West, for the weekends?

The original plan, to be honest, had been to visit Durham, but Durham was booked solid – certainly everything within our price range – which may be connected with Freshers’ Week at the university. So it was Wetheral, with possibilities for Hadrian’s Wall visits and even the north end of the Lake District (less likely, given the time available) for a little walking. We got the Autumn Special Deal by phoning the hotel direct, which – interestingly – was about 60% of the best price we obtained for the same accommodation through the better known web-based booking sites. Hmmm.

Saturday we walked down the 99 steps from the railway station to the bank of the River Eden, and walked a few miles upstream. Very pleasant scenery – the river runs almost through a gorge at points, and past a man-made island which the monks put there centuries ago to channel salmon into a trap. There is a spectacular railway viaduct (which also carries a footpath to allow you to get to Great Corby, on the opposite bank), and below Corby Castle (which is mostly Victorian in its present state) there is a very impressive man-made cascade down to the river. It must be a remarkable sight in wet weather.

This walk also renewed my acquaintance with the Mud of Cumbria, which made a big impression on me (or possibly it was the other way round) during my 2012 walk along Hadrian’s Wall. I had not forgotten about it, of course, but time softens the memory.

In September 2012 I developed some private theories that the Romans may have had some idea of exploiting the commercial potential of this very special mud – it is composed of very fine silt; in a field it can be bottomless, even if the surface looks quite firm; an innocent looking puddle will suck your boots off and laugh at you as you fall about in the mire; on a stile or on stone steps it has the exact properties of WD40, even in your best Brasher boots (assuming you still have them, after the puddle). Our exposure to it this weekend was minimal, but even so I managed to get some on the boots as I was walking on some rock shelving at the edge of the river, and I was sliding around like a drunk goat on a frozen pond. Somehow, the mud is different in neighbouring Northumberland – I must check if it changes abruptly at the county line. More study is required, with proper samples and slump tests and all that – and much discussion in pubs. I must give this some thought – anyone fancy a mud sampling weekend based around Cumbrian pubs? We could omit the mud-sampling if it seemed appropriate.

Our trip home on Sunday got off to an early start, to allow us time to have a short walk from the Roman Army Museum near Greenhead, up onto the end of the very best section of the Hadrian’s Wall walk – we did a couple of miles along the top of Walltown Crags, just to give my wife a brief taste of the best of what the Wall offers in scenery and walking/scrambling. We’ve been together to Housesteads a few times, but that is very formalised and park-like compared with the Crags.

Foy the Younger on top of Walltown Crags

Sunday lunch at the Twice Brewed Inn was as good as usual (slow-roast pork belly and mustard mash with scallions, ginger ice cream to follow…), then the drive home along the switchback of the A68 was only slightly spoilt by the bikers. It was a nice, dry day, so the Big Boys had all been polishing their nice big bikes and were out in force. I don’t have a problem with bikers, most of them are sensible, thoughtful road users with a better than average understanding of the law and safety, but a proportion of them do seem to feel that somehow they are in some strange kind of war, flying heroic, doomed missions against enemy motorists. The thing that scares me is the possibility of coming round a bend and finding some numpty on a Kawasaki coming at me on my side of the road, well over the speed limit and too excited to think straight. Racing leathers and incontinence knickers. Jesus.

The A68 - hang on to your lunch

In my boyhood I travelled thousands of miles on the pillion of my dad’s bikes (which is why I walk like John Wayne), and I don’t wish to end my account of a super little trip on a grumpy note, but I do not find the sight of a line of bikers in my rear view mirror a comforting one – at least one of them will be forced (by peer pressure?) to squeeze past at the wrong moment, in a silly place. On Sunday there was a moment when one chap decided to overtake me without noticing that I was signalling to overtake some cyclists – a strange oversight for a brotherhood who spend their lives complaining about the lack of vision and thoughtlessness of others.

When I was learning to drive, back in the age of steam, when avoiding running down the man in front with the red flag was part of the knack, I was taught by an ex-Army instructor named Derek. One thing he said to me has always stuck:

The things which cause more accidents than anything else are surprises. If you do something unexpected – travel at the wrong speed for the conditions, turn without signalling, whatever – you are putting complete reliance on other road users’ ability to cope with the situation; if they don’t manage to cope, whether or not you think they should have, the fault is your own for causing the situation in the first place.

Driving lessons

Not exactly earth-shaking logic, but it occurs to me that a minority of the biker fraternity specialise in – take a pride in – doing things which are surprising. Bomb-burst manoeuvres where they overtake someone on both sides at once, overtaking on a blind corner despite double white lines, travelling as fast as physically possible all the time (and in my home area, which has some fine, fast, twisty roads, we also have inconveniences such as people who live here, horses, children on bicycles, deer, etc etc) – none of these help a great deal.

Here’s a chance for someone to score an equaliser by complaining (quite rightly) about the dreadful standard of car-driving on the British roads, which should serve to fuel the war and help greatly. I’m not sure, but I think that if large groups of young men gathered together on a nice Sunday in September, equipped with the most powerful cars they could afford, and travelled in convoy, as fast as possible, up and down the A68, they would stand a very fair chance of being arrested, incontinence knickers and all.

I hope that in the next few days I should get out my wargames table after a long lay-off – if nothing else, I am keen to take some photos to catalogue my ECW collection. With luck, I should have something more relevant to blog about.

Hooptedoodle #149 – Another Brief Skirmish with Technology

Since I choose to tell you about this one, dear reader, you may safely assume that this is a (rare) tale of braggart and personal triumph from among the many episodes of frustration and bewilderment which form my normal daily experience of the Age of Technology. There will be, in short, a happy ending.

My son’s printer is a Canon MP470 – not a brilliant piece of kit, so be sure; it is, for a start, a combination printer/scanner unit, a type of device I have never liked very much. It was my mother’s, but she never used it, so we sort of borrowed it and it came to live here, and it has worked pretty well, though the lad’s taste for artwork with black backgrounds and so on gives rise to a mighty appetite for ink cartridges.

Well it stopped working today. The paper was feeding in crooked (crookedly?), and the printer was making ominous clattering noises – any attempt to print anything produced a paper jam and a mess of ink on the rollers. I strongly suspected that the new owner’s habit of overfilling the paper hopper (by a factor of maybe 200%) had finally jammed it and bent something. However, there is no point forming judgements and striking knowledgeable poses – the printer is needed for homework and stuff, so it was necessary to do something about it. I used to be pretty good at jobs like this, and in a former life the Contesse worked in a technical support role in a commercial PC environment, so she is very good indeed, though our knowledge is probably a little off-the-boil, and the old eyesight has not improved over the years.

I had a search online, and was lucky enough to find a description of exactly this same problem in a Canon user forum – some fellow claimed that almost certainly there was a foreign object in the workings (nonsense, we cried) and he had solved this on his printer by reverse feeding (manually – I hope you are taking notes here) a sheet of paper through the track, by dint of getting his finger deep into the works and slowly turning a knurled wheel with his fingernail – eventually, the reverse-fed sheet pushed out the foreign object. Now, because it is a combi printer/scanner, the machine is a bit like the inside of a clock when you open it up, nothing quite opens wide enough for a clear view, and reverse feeding a sheet of paper through all those fiddly rollers and past a tiny plastic latch which must be lifted with a penknife blade is not unlike the challenge of inserting a blade of grass into a butterfly’s anus (not that I have personal experience of this, but it seems about right).

Since this was our only possible lifeline I donned my trusty LED headlight, we found a sheet of thicker (less grass-like) paper and began the agonisingly slow reverse-feed job – nadgering the wheel click by click, swearing, dropping things, etc. After a short time, it became humblingly obvious that the proposed solution was correct – the Contesse spotted the promised foreign object in the paper track, and fished it out. It was not a hairpin or paperclip, it was in fact quite a large novelty bookmark of my son’s which Sir Isaac Newton (the rascal) had obviously dropped from the bookshelves above the printer.

I append a picture, with a USB memory stick to give an idea of the size of the offending item. We have all heard of the Ghost in the Machine – this was the Dodgy Character in the Printer.

I need beer.

Hooptedoodle #148 - Let's All Scream & Run Round in Circles

So here we are, on the threshhold of a potential watershed in history, and – you know what? – I’m bored rigid.

On Thursday, as you may be aware, we will all be trotting along to polling stations here to vote YES or NO in the Referendum to decide whether Scotland is to leave the United Kingdom. At the very least, you would expect this to be a time which is tense with excitement, when we are all giddy with the possibilities and the sense of being in on a moment of real history. Certainly a lot of people are making a great deal of noise about it, but mostly I find myself wondering if there are any grown-ups at home.

I refuse to contribute to the mighty pile of nonsense which is already out there on the subject. My private feelings on the matter are not unknown, but that is not the issue. The machinery of democracy has, yet again, collapsed into the ritual of reciprocal abuse, face pulling and hysteria which makes a sick joke of the whole concept. Broadly speaking, those who intend to vote YES are driven by received cultural and (supposedly) patriotic motives, and by an understandable dislike of the Westminster government and all it has come to stand for (does Mr Cameron actually understand that every time he opens his mouth there is another swing to YES?); those who are in the NO camp are mostly driven by fear of the overwhelming number of unknowns – whatever their feelings about the ultimate logic or desirability of independence.

I am depressed by the difficulty of trying to find some facts – everyone has an axe to grind. Everyone is campaigning, especially the bastard press, and everything is a lie. Anyone who produces an opposing view – to either side – is being negative, or is using bullying tactics. If I walk around my house with a notepad, and scribble down a list of all the services we rely on, all the things we need, and try to attach some helpful notes for myself about how it would work in an independent Scotland, the notes would almost all say “don’t know”, and it isn’t because I haven’t tried to find out. In the long term, who will deliver the mail? who will pay the pensions? what currency will we use? who says so? what authority do they have to say this? how will education, health all be financed? The Telegraph is not a paper I have any time for at all, but recently they sketched out, in some detail, how the budgetary control of an independent Scotland might stack up, and it does not make for entertaining reading – they mention the likelihood of the highest personal taxes in Europe, plus crippling rates of Corporation Tax and VAT which would drive away businesses and employers; of course, this is all the sort of thing we would expect the Telegraph to say, and the correct response is to sit down with the aforementioned notepad and sketch out a counter-argument for each point – I have to say I am struggling to do this. I don’t have the wisdom or the knowledge to do much of it anyway, but more importantly I have no reliable facts on which  to base a rival case. As it happens, we might dispute whether the Telegraph does, either – we all just don’t know.

We do not know. I repeat. Swerving the eye-watering issue of currency (how can you swerve that?), what happens to the Scottish finance industry, which is a key element in the case for economic viability? There are strong rumours about their all moving their head offices out of Scotland (and, as I understand it, RBS’s customer base is about 90% English, so this is not a simple matter – and let’s not mention who currently owns that bank), so there is much shrieking about that, too. There is also a visible trend of customers already taking their savings elsewhere, just in case. In a sensible world, all these banks – and all other businesses with a significant presence in Scotland - would have issued a definitive statement of intent to their customers months ago, saying what the possible future might look like. Of course, they have not, so all we have is the shrieking. We do not know.

People are saying to us, “Go on – jump out of the window – it will be great – we will think of something fantastic to catch you before you hit the ground, though of course we don’t know exactly how it will work or what it will be.”

Hmmm. Obviously, since democracy is what we love and embrace (apparently), we will all have to live with the consequences of Thursday’s vote, and the two sides will have to get over their current name-calling and get on with making things work. At the moment, that doesn’t look like a great prospect.

I realise there may be a whiff of undesirable negativity in what I have written here, for which I can offer nothing but my humble apologies. We are in a situation where it is estimated that, with 3 days left until polling day, something like 17% of the registered electorate still don’t know which way they will vote – and this is not them being coy or secretive about it, this is an estimate of the number who state that they intend to vote but that they still have not finally made up their mind. How could they? In all truth, none of us knows enough to make a rational decision.

Choice is a NO result, with a return to the same old bloody Westminster hypocrisy and with some increases in the amount of devolution (which, if he is even slightly sane, must be the result Salmond is praying for), or a YES, with a local explosion of euphoria and precious little direction or hard fact to build a working future on – not in the time available, certainly. To me, it’s a bit of  a NO-brainer.

Siege Thoughts (1) – The Folks Who Live on the Hill

The Civilians

My first period of enthusiasm for tabletop sieges was about five years ago now; this was before I started this blog, but the first serious playtesting was recorded splendidly by Clive in his Vintage Wargames blog. My early rules had a lot of holes in them, and the game was fun but definitely creaky in some areas – I’ve done a little work on it since then, but otherwise I have been distracted by other things (excuse 1), and for a while I have been waiting to see what Piquet would produce in their mooted Vauban’s Wars rules, for which we are all still waiting, sadly (excuse 2).

During my solo Peninsular War campaign (blogged here in 2012-13) I deliberately chose not to use tabletop sieges, since they do not fit well with the timescales and turn cycle of the map movement game. I did consider the possibility of having a siege set up on a tabletop if it was required, and working it alongside the map stuff (such things should be possible in a solo game, you would think), but then I realized that I would be in deep trouble if there were two sieges simultaneously. Thus I spent some time developing algorithm-based siege simulators, and I have to say that the two sieges that took place during the campaign worked very nicely as mathematical models, but I was still a little sad that the lovely fortress toys and my siege train did not get used on the table.

I am very keen to get back to sieges sometime soon, so I’ve been doing some further thinking and scribbling. I already had some rough notes about what I termed barometers, which were missing from the early rules, and which I have always known I should have to come back to. During a siege, my logic goes, the normal siege turn will represent 24 hours’ activity, but if anything more tactical occurs – such as a sally, or a storm, or the arrival of a relieving force – then the game temporarily switches to 15 or 30-minute turns, during which a more standard type of wargame is conducted until events calm down again to the more measured step of the siege operations. Over and above all this, I envisaged  a weekly check on the progress of a number of things, and this is where I would maintain the barometers to show the current state of the garrison and the civilians (if any) in the fortress, the level of enthusiasm of the besiegers, and the supply of provisions and ammunition (in a simplified form). It would also be necessary to monitor damage to the town as the result of bombardment and fires, and check for sickness and epidemics (on both sides). The movement of the barometers would be linked one to another in many cases, and there should be a little contributory dice-rolling to simulate good and bad breaks.

This, potentially, could get very complicated, but thus far the barometers don’t exist in any useable form, so in odd moments I am doing some head scratching and trying to write down a few basic ideas. Some of this is from first principles (or what passes for commonsense around here), and some is borrowed from my various sources, which include the works of Chris Duffy, Tony Bath, Charles S Grant, Henry Hyde and a number of other worthies, plus the Festung Krieg rules from the Koenig Krieg 18^th Century rules and other bits and pieces.

My first attempt at a barometer is that for the civilian population who have the misfortune to inhabit a besieged town. My starting point was to identify five broad “states” of the civilians, thus:

(1) Completely supportive of the garrison; will collaborate fully in matters of supply and will require no policing effort; if necessary, will be prepared to form irregular units and/or help man the defences. The population of Saragossa during the sieges there might be an example of a State 1 civilian group.

(2) Passively supportive of the garrison; will contribute food and labour, but will not fight; a small amount of policing required; will probably hand over spies.

(3) Pretty apathetic; may require active policing and control; will not fight, but may well be demoralized or sullen.

(4) Hostile to garrison; may obstruct military effort, or disrupt supply arrangements. Extensive policing required, and there will be inhabitants who provide information to the besiegers, and who may take up arms to assist an assault from outside.

(5) Violently hostile; the population is held in check only by extensive diversion of troops and effort; there will be a tendency to insurrection, and armed resistance against the garrison. They will certainly assist the besieging force if chance is offered.

Clearly, the citizens may move from one state to another – up or down the barometer – as the situation develops. A military governor who deprives the townspeople of food in order to feed his own men, for example, may find that he has to divert much of his strength to suppress a violent backlash if the citizens slide into State 5.

OK – there’s a lot to do here, and the way this all links with the progress of the siege and with the other barometers still needs thinking out, but this is my first skeleton. I was interested in the fact that States 1 and 5 imply that the population may generate irregular “units”, which become involved in conflict on either side. I started thinking about how many such soldiers might be produced from a civilian group.

Bearing in mind that my priority here is to get something working for Spain in about 1810-13, I reasoned that, if half the population were male, and there were large numbers of children, many of whom would not survive to adulthood, then about one-third of the males might be aged 16 to 50, and capable of carrying arms. I am aware that many of the men would already have been called up to join the army, or have otherwise disappeared to avoid being called up, and many might have been killed in the war. Let us assume this takes the one-third down a bit. A convenient figure might be that 1000 population can yield 4 fighting figures (at 33 men/figure). Thus it will also be necessary to track civilian losses in the siege.

I propose to work with a standard unit of rations (yet to be named), which will feed 1000 civilians or 1 infantry battalion (of about 700 men) or 1 cavalry unit (of about 350 men) for a week. There are some tables in Tony Bath’s book giving guidelines for the effect on sickness and morale (and thus desertion) of living on reduced rations for various periods, which look useful without being too onerous, so I propose to check that all out.

These siege thoughts will, I hope, constitute an occasional series as ideas come together; much of this is very rough at this stage, and it will take some time and much testing to get it into shape, but it’s the sort of thing I enjoy fiddling with!