Siege Testing - (4) Bombardment, The Storm, Tactical Fights

I had limited time available this evening, but was keen to bring the Test Siege to some kind of conclusion, however predictable!

First of all I must offer thanks to Pyotr and Martin, who emailed me pictures of what a proper head of sap looked like. If I can identify some suitable figures in small 20mm, I could make up a couple of little set pieces. I could convert a couple of the Les Higgins ECW gunners, though they are a bit upright. I've had a look at various plastic sailors and pirates and so on - nothing obvious - I'll keep it in mind. Anyway, thanks very much - here's what yesterday's picture should have looked like.

Cross section view of a head of sap - notice how the follow-up men cut it deeper

The Test Siege of Middlehampton resumed with a few tactical turns initiated by the Scottish attackers; they quickly eliminated the cannon in the defenders' external earthwork, and drove the trained band musketeers away - the militia status of the trained band men requires them to take triple retreats, which simply eliminated them, since they had nowhere to go - presumably the survivors just ran away into the countryside.

Back to strategic turns - the big Scots siege cannons opened fire at close range on the old curtain wall, they soon started to cause damage, but in fact it took 3 days of steady fire before the wall collapsed.

The militia have mostly scarpered, and the damage chips are beginning to
accumulate against the wall

Tactical again. George Heriot's Regt of Foot stormed the breach, drove back Sir Henry Spale's Foot, and then broke the last intact Royalist Foot regiment, that of Col Leonard Winthrope. The Stockgate was opened, and the Scots streamed in. General William Baillie, the 2-in-C of the Scottish army, met the distraught Lord Bloat at the Market Cross, and accepted both his sword and the surrender of the town.

Eventually, the wall falls, and Heriot's RoF storm the breach

Spale's Foot attempt to stop them...

...but the Scots break into the Market Ground and drive off all attempts at resistance

With all his Foot troops eliminated, Lord Bloat surrenders to General Baillie

And the Covenanters march in - a total of 22 days from arriving on the table

The garrison lost about 3200 men, including 1700 prisoners; the besiegers
around 500; the townspeople suffered about 200 casualties 

Middlehampton is now for Parliament, gentlemen - better get that wall fixed

Siege Testing – (3) Scales, Artillery Ranges, Saps

Things are getting a little busier, as you see. The game is hex-based – I am confident it could be played without hexes, if you really like measuring things.

My hexes are 7” across the flats, and the game scale equates one hex to 200 paces across (or 100 toises, if you prefer the classic terminology). That fits with the size and theory of the (15mm scale) fortress pieces. A lot of the logic of the game is related to artillery ranges, so let’s get to that now. Since this is a little section on artillery, I’ll go into a little more detail than this discussion really needs – if the mechanisms strike you as reminiscent of Charge!, or the closely-related Sandhurst siege game rules in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone book, then I can only plead that this is not a bad source. I propose to use Commands & Colors style rules for melées and movement (though not the Command Cards), but I’ll stick with Chris Duffy for the artillery.

In the Tactical game, the maximum effective ranges for roundshot are:

Light guns      -           4 hexes

Medium guns -           5 hexes

Heavy guns    -           6 hexes

Subject to the range limitations of a particular piece, the effect of a shot is calculated by throwing two dice; one of these is the Accuracy Die (which is a black D6) – this has to turn up a number greater than or equal to the range in hexes for a hit. If it is a hit, a second (red) die gives the Effect; this die is a D6 if the target is close-order foot in the open, a D4 for horse, artillery, engineers or open-order foot in the open, or for close-order foot in soft cover (hedges, trees, temporary gabions), and it’s a D3 for anyone in hard cover (earthworks, stone walls). This score gives the number of figures lost. If, like me, you prefer your casualties to occur in whole sub-unit bases or not at all, then you have one more step – the owner of the target unit makes a Saving Throw (you may now groan). It works like this – we need to round odd hits up or down to a number of whole bases – if the unit suffering loss is organised with n figures per base, roll a Dn – an n-sided die; if the roll exceeds the number of odd hits, forget the odd hits; if it doesn’t, you lose a complete base.

Example: a medium cannon fires at a range of 5 hexes (its maximum) at an enemy unit of horse (and my horse is organised in bases of 3 figures). The horse are in the open.

(1) Roll the black D6 for Accuracy – at range 5 we need 5+ for a hit. Comes up 5 – good enough – a hit.

(2) Horse in the open are a middling sort of target, as discussed above – roll a D4 for casualties – comes up 2 – OK – 2 figures lost.

(3) Additional step because I want my losses to be counted in bases. At 3 figs/base, 2 figures is zero bases plus 2 odd figures. The Saving Throw has to be a D3, to match the base organisation – must roll a 3 (“beat the 2”) to save them. Throw is a 2 – tough – the horse lose a complete base.

Siege cannons (i.e. nominated wall-battering guns) and siege mortars have no tactical function at all, since they are too ponderous to move and too slow to load and fire in a tactical context (though they may be overrun during such a phase, of course).

The Strategic artillery system is basically the same, though there are additional rules for siege cannons and mortars in the Strategic game. If it seems odd that a 24-hour Strategic turn should produce similar casualty levels to a 30-minute Tactical turn then I can’t disagree – however, the arguments in favour of this oddity are thus:

(1) During a Strategic turn, rates of fire are deliberately slow (to avoid overheating the guns) and the troops would stay in cover and keep their heads down. A Tactical turn is a much more intense period of action.

(2) It is very convenient to make this assumption.

(3) Chris Duffy recommends it – if it was good enough for Sandhurst...

In the Strategic game, I had thought of giving siege cannons some extra range – maybe 8 hexes – but on the grounds that 6 hexes is already 1200 paces, the guns were pretty inaccurate and you can only fire at what you can see, I kept it at 6 hexes, like the other heavy guns – siege cannons, however, can break down walls. Fire on a section of wall is like other fire – the black Accuracy die tells you whether you hit the right place, and a D6 Effect die needs to score 4+ to do damage to an old-fashioned stone curtain wall, 5+ for a low Vauban wall with earth backing, and whatever else you fancy. A single, damaging hit to a wall is denoted by a piece of gravel placed below the target area (classy, eh?) – in my game, I have been working with the assumption that 5 such gravel-generating hits on the same section will produce a breach in the medieval walls of Middlehampton.

The common all-garden damage markers I borrowed from our driveway - this is
good whinstone, but it's a bit dark to match the walls - do you think I could get a
sample of some rather paler Cotswold stuff from my local garden centre?

Mortars also feature in the Strategic game – the range is up to 6 hexes, like heavy cannons, but the target need not be in direct sight and the effect of cover is negated. There are strict limits on the number of mortars (just one in my present game!).

Right – that was a fairly lengthy introduction to the idea that “artillery range”, broadly speaking, is 6 hexes, and this is relevant to the necessary task of Sapping Forward. In the last instalment, I mentioned that the digging of parallels and other general-purpose trenches requires infantry bases to match or better the day’s Digging Number. The procedures for such trenches mean that the position is first of all protected with gabions, to offer “soft” cover to the shovellers while work goes ahead, and then the main challenge is to score enough decent dice rolls to complete the work. Digging toward the fortress is a different deal altogether – in this situation, specialist sappers work towards the front (well, obliquely toward the front, to avoid the sap being enfiladed), and the particular challenge is staying protected from the enemy’s fire while working. In this, the challenge has less to do with the state of the ground, and more with the proximity to the enemy. Accordingly, digging a forward sap requires an engineering presence of some sort (I have sappers for my Napoleonic armies, but for the time being for the ECW I have to attach a designated “engineer” figure and imagine there are sappers present), and some infantry to follow up to widen the sap into a trench in the normal “Digging Number” way.

The current situation is a bit crude - the token "Engineer" is followed up by some
infantry, who will enlarge the sap to full trench proportions - in this form, without
any identifiable sappers, it looks a bit like a firing squad. I hope improved elegance
will follow soon.

The actual head of the sap is traced out, one hex at a time, using gabions, and the infantry follow up with the trench work. To advance the head of the sap is automatic until the sap gets within the 6-hex artillery range zone, and therafter success requires a roll of 2D6 – and at least one of these dice must come up equal to or less than the distance in hexes from the walls (or the covered way, if it is that kind of fortress). It gets slower and more fiddly the nearer you get.

Once the sap has reached the correct distance, digging a parallel and new gun positions is simply a question of doing the spadework with dice against the Digging Number. Since the Strategic game allows the besiegers to move troops to anywhere which is not forward of the heads of sap, some good dice can enable a complete parallel to be dug in a single day.

Enough nuts and bolts for the moment. In the Test Siege of Middlehampton, the attackers (Leven’s Covenanter army) were forced by the existence of the Duke’s Sconce (a modern outwork) to build their First Parallel further from the walls than they might have chosen. Once they had taken the outwork, they sapped forward without incident and constructed the Second Parallel just outside artillery range of the walls. Leven opted not to advance this first sap any further, for fear of some form of sally on the part of the defenders.

Now within range of the town’s heavier guns, further sapping was rather slower, and an engineer was among the (few) casualties, but it brought the Third Parallel within 4 hexes (800 paces) of the walls, and a position was constructed for the giant mortar (Auld Aggie). This mortar, along with the two heavy guns captured in the Sconce, now produced a steady fire on the town which mostly served to frighten the inhabitants. There were a few casualties on both sides, but the Loyalty of the townspeople had now slid to 1 (“indifferent to the garrison, but not yet a threat to them”), as a result of the Governor’s unpopular demolition of the northern suburbs and the harrowing effects of night bombardment by the Scots.

Still the forward saps continued – still there was no action on the part of Lord Bloat to disrupt the approach work with any kind of sally. By the end of the 13^th day of the siege, a Fourth Parallel was ready, and the mighty siege cannons were in place opposite the section of the curtain wall which had no earthwork protection.

Not looking good for the Royalist town of Middlehampton?

Siege cannons in place to start bombarding the old North Wall

The Scots' works, with the Second Parallel in the foreground

Lord Bloat (mounted, with red plume) must surely be thinking of asking for terms.
We have to assume that he has faithfully promised the line of red-coated musketeers
manning the earthwork outside the walls that he will open the Stockgate to let
them in pretty smartish when the time comes 

I'm not sure who this little drummer is, nor why he's involved - I guess I must
have accidentally included him as one of the singly-based engineers. He has
a certain plucky quality - I like him - he's a sort of talisman for the Resolve
Number of the garrison, but I fear his time is running out

That’s as far as I’ve got – thus far I have to say that the sapping is slow and would not necessarily be a lot of fun in a competitive game, though it is fine for a solo effort. The artillery is not as effective as I expected, which is probably historically correct – I could have done more with sallies if the garrison had been stronger.

Next steps will be the start of the bombardment of the curtain wall, and I might say a bit about food supply – let’s see how it goes!

Siege Testing – (2) Getting Started

Just baby steps to start off.

Today’s main priority for me was scarifying the South Lawn before the rain came, so the siege was delayed until late on. There was a lot of trying things which didn’t work too well, and then trying them again. My developing siege game is played in two modes – strategic and tactical. A strategic siege turn represents a complete day elapsed. At any point in a strategic turn, either side can declare a switch to tactical – a tactical turn represents about half an hour of more detailed action, and the game becomes simplified, up-and-down-the-table Commands & Colors until the tactical spell is over.

Middlehampton, ready for the siege

Thus a sally, or a storm, or anything outside the scope of the normal day of bombardment, digging and attrition requires a tactical switch.

Each army has a number (range 1-3) for each of the following indicators: Resolve, Vigour and Leadership. These affect the troops’ fighting effectiveness, and also their ability to carry out digging and other labouring tasks. I have a sketchy mechanism for controlling rations, and reduced rations can have an effect on Resolve and Vigour. There should be some system for Plague, but I haven’t worked that in yet. The fortress defenders also have the mixed blessing of a civilian population – these have a number of interesting attributes, but in particular they have a Loyalty Number, which can range from +3 (fiercely supportive of the garrison, will fight alongside them, if required) to -3 (hostile, require constant policing, prepared to revolt or collaborate with the enemy). Thus the townspeople can be a valuable source of labour, or they can be a major nuisance and distraction, and this has a knock-on to the Resolve and the effectiveness of the garrison.

At the start of each day, the Digging Number for the day is set. Initially, this is set by rolling 2D6 and taking the lower; in subsequent turns, roll a die at the start of the day – if it is higher than the Digging Number, increase the Digging Number by 1; if it is lower, reduce the DN by 1. The DN must be in the range 1 to 6, and is the score which must be achieved by diggers to complete a section of work on that day – it is, if you like, a simple, rather bovine abstraction of weather and other imponderables which make shovelling earth more or less difficult. It is possible, for example, for the DN to get so high that it becomes almost impossible for the besieger to make any progress.

Never had a use for the Giant Die before - here's today's Digging Number - seems clear enough...

In the Test Siege of Middlehampton (for such this is), the initial Digging No came up as a 3. The population is between 4 and 5 thousand, the soldiers placed there for defence include 3 companies of musketeers from the county trained bands, plus 2 full regiments of foot, 2 regts of horse and a total of 7 guns, of which only 3 are heavy. The townspeople – strong supporters of the King – have a Loyalty Number of 2 – they will gladly work to help the garrison, but will not fight. The initial scenario tests also revealed that there were 6 days available before the attacker (those Covenanters again) would appear.

Very neat job - no trace of the old suburb, and a nice new earthwork - these
boys are good - they will give you a competitive quotation for raised flower beds

The Military Governor of the Town, Sir Edward Bloat, took advantage of the available time, the easy Digging Number and the sunny disposition of the citizens to demolish the suburb of ramshackle sheds and farm buildings outside the town’s Stockgate, and – under the direction of his German chief engineer, Captain Von Schuwel – to erect an earthwork embankment in front of the section of the curtain wall west of the Stockgate, complete with a “mount” – an entrenched artillery position. This would give valuable protection for the old masonry wall footings, eliminate the risk of the suburb buildings providing shelter for the enemy, and add to his available firepower. The walkways and most of the towers of the old walls were unsuitable for artillery.

Man the Sconce

The rest of the town garrison are kept off the table for the moment - if I had little
houses with detachable roofs, I could put them inside the buildings, and maybe
they could all have cups of tea and sandwiches

He had also considered the alternative of building earthwork walls right around the suburb, and leaving it in place, but there was insufficient time to complete the work. He installed 2 of his heavy guns, plus Bertram’s company of the musketeers, in the Duke’s Sconce, a modern addition to the town’s defences, and waited for the visitors.

Lord Leven’s boys duly arrived, and got busy setting up a first parallel, placing the two heaviest cannon and an enormous mortar in emplacements to bombard the Sconce, which was seen as a major obstacle to an otherwise systematic operation to approach the walls of the town.

A regiment of foot (of 3 bases, in full Vigour) gets to throw 3D6 – that becomes 4D6 if they have an engineer attached. To build a section of trench, one of the dice must be equal to or greater than the Digging No. To build a gun emplacement, 2 dice must meet the number. If the work is not completed, the position of what is planned is denoted by gabions, and until such time as the earthwork is finished the diggers get reduced cover. I haven’t done any forward sapping yet – the plan is that the engineers will be more important in this.

One of the gun emplacements isn't finished - just a few gabions, which will give
the diggers very little protection in the meantime

Good view here of the new earthworks pieces from Fat Frank - I rather like them

It became obvious very quickly that the Scots’ heavy guns were going to make little impression on Von Schuvel’s fine Sconce, so, concerned about the time in which the town was to be taken, Leven ordered an assault on the Sconce, to attempt to take it by escalade. So the call went up - "Tactical"! The advancing foot were hit by a storm of iron from the artillery, and two regiments were stopped with heavy losses, but the remaining 3 units in the assault pressed on, and captured the outwork very easily, in the end. The cannon were taken, and turned on the town, and the musketeer company, though it is said they asked for quarter, were cut down to a man.

This very serious mortar was Leven's original main hope for blasting the Royalists
out of the Sconce, which would be a better idea if it was less inaccurate - the mortar
has an additional disadvantage in that it is possible for the grenado (shell) to ignite
but not the propellant charge, which requires a lot of sprinting on the part of the
gunners, and usually wrecks the mortar

The besiegers' two Full Cannons are the main wall crushers, but they have to be
at close range to score consistent hits

That’s as far as I’ve got. I haven’t even started working with food supplies, and there’s a pile of stuff (not least the dreaded mining, for which I have a cunning scheme) which I shall get to. It is very easy to come up with draft rules which make it impossible to cause any casualties in certain situations. Tweakle, tweakle. Fix it and move on.

With the Sconce in Parliament’s hands, the spadework should proceed in a more standard manner. I say this, kind of hoping that it implies that I know what that should be – in fact I am learning a lot as I go along. Keep Chris Duffy's book open at the right page.

Good fun – chaotic, but good.

More soon.

Siege Testing - (1) Town Planning

I have a little spare time available, and today I received a shipment of what originally was intended to be an interim solution for the matter of trenches, but the interim solution seems so good that it may become a more permanent solution - I'll say more about this in a later episode...

Since all my reading and scribbling notes have only gone a little way toward developing a working ECW siege game, I think the time is right to set something up on the tabletop and try some ideas out. This is not really going to be a proper game, I hasten to add - merely an extended test of ideas - but I have a few days to work on it.

View over the formidable Bridgegate, looking west - the dodgy-looking suburb
outside the Stockgate is an immediate issue for a military governor, I would say
- it will have to be cleared - this is where trouble starts if the mayor owns
the land. Note the mighty Duke's Sconce defending the North Road.

Tonight I set out a fortified town - tomorrow I'll have to work out the population and the appropriate size and composition for a garrison, estimate what size of attacking force is needed and allocate engineers to the two sides.

It is not a real town - it has a couple of features I borrowed from Chester and Carlisle - it may develop a proper identity later on.

View of the North Wall, seen from the direction an enemy will approach! The
medieval walls, as you will see, have no earthworks to protect them (this is the
situation Newcastle was in in 1644 when the Scots arrived).

With a bit of luck, the backbone of an ECW siege game should be adaptable for Napoleonic sieges without too much grief. I have fiddled about with sieges for some years now, without managing to produce a best-selling siege game - that's why you have never heard of me.

View across the Market Cross, inside the Stockgate, with St Thomas' church in
the distance and the Old Barbican back left. A prosperous town? - I think it will
declare for the King...

More soon...

Hooptedoodle #218 – The Pheasants' Wars

It hasn’t been a severe winter here – it’s been long and dark and wet (for the first time ever, our front door expanded with the damp until it wouldn’t open), but not particularly cold or stormy, yet it is still wonderful to see some sunny weather as the year starts to roll along.

As ever, the bird-feeders are busy all day, and the perching customers, who are clumsy eaters, spill enough to maintain a steady crowd of ground-feeding chaffinches, blackbirds and other fellows who prefer not to eat while hanging onto something precarious.

Which brings us to the pheasants. The Rite of Spring is here, and no mistake. Deer were fighting in our neighbour’s garden this morning (it only looked like a rehearsal, to be honest), and the pheasants have now turned our garden into something very like Jurassic Park.

Algernon - Are you looking at me...?

We’ve always had pheasants here – they have featured in this blog from time to time – they are great characters, some of them, and we usually have the odd one wandering about, but their domestic and nuptial arrangements have always been carried on in private, in the woods behind our house. This year is different – we now have a family who actually live in our garden – in fact a more accurate expression would be “own our garden”. They have taken over. I have previously introduced Algernon, who is normally here anyway (he is the fellow who surprised us by surviving last December’s shooting parties – he returned after I had written him out of the saga). Algernon and his immediate family and friends have now requisitioned our garden. They are entertaining, but they are very noisy, and they are becoming something of a nuisance.

Some things to understand about the ring-necked pheasant, at least as we know it here in the Scottish Lowlands:

(1) They were introduced, centuries ago, from China (or somewhere), they are heavily inbred, and an adult pheasant has about the same intelligence as an average peanut. Officially, the hens nest under hedges and bushes, but in reality they make a very poor job of this, and frequently forget where they have left their eggs (to the delight of hedgehogs and similar). Our resident ghillie (gamekeeper) buys in many pheasant chicks each year – without this, I’m not convinced that natural pheasant demographics would sustain the population. If they died out in this part of the world I would miss them, of course, but what would the local farmers do with all those shotguns during the Winter?

Bad mothers - we will never know who left this egg on the terrace - they
refuse to do things by the book

(2) An adult cock pheasant can grow to something a little short of 2Kg, though they look much more substantial than that. They are aggressive, raucous, and have the aerodynamic properties and natural grace of a Christmas pudding. To put it bluntly, they are very poor flyers.

Note the fight damage on Algy's neck

(3) Mathematics. Algernon has acquired no less than five wives. The truth of the matter is that there are not enough females to go round. At 5:1, there is a desperate fight for mates. Algernon has a dreadful time trying to keep interlopers away from his hens – mostly unsuccessfully. There is a constant, and very noisy, French farce taking place behind our house.

Algernon is starting to look very ragged, and it’s hardly surprising. When his ladies are feeding, all together, he stands guard – often on one leg – glaring about for threats, real or imagined. This frenzy reaches its peak in the early evening. Two days ago, after tea, my son and I were outside doing some work on one of the bicycles when suddenly all hell broke loose. Algernon chased a rogue male right across the garden, and they both crashed head-on into the timber fence between our garden and Zebe’s, next door. If we had had a pond it would have had ripples on it from the shockwave. Then the fight spilled over into the woods – the fugitive escaped, but The Bold Algy collided with a tree trunk, and staggered back to his garden in rather bewildered triumph. The females were running about the place, shrieking, throughout.

This is not the sort of incident you can choose to ignore as you sip a relaxed glass of wine on the terrace – it’s really pretty alarming. No doubt things will calm down quite soon. Algy’s hormones, or his memory, will lose interest, or maybe he will injure himself seriously, and life will return to something a bit more normal.

On a gentler note, we have seen some more old friends in the garden. We haven’t had Blackcaps here for years – well they’re back; the Contesse has yet to get a decent picture of the female (who is similar to the male, but has a rusty-brown cap).  We think the Siskins have moved on now, but I thought I should put up some nice photos of them. Blackcaps are a variety of warbler, I understand - we don't get any other warblers here, so they are special visitors.

Mr Blackcap

Mrs Blackcap is a little more shy - she's just visible inside the fat-ball cage, with
a performing Bluetit trying to attract attention at top left

And some more Siskin shots...

Oh, how lovely, they all murmured.

Elsewhere, I saw about half a dozen Avocets flying over the farm fields - they are not really supposed to be around here - certainly I've never seen them before.

Avocet - library picture