The Siege Test was a success – there were a few things I
now understand better, a few things I won’t bother with again, and a few things
I didn’t get to try out properly – specifically mining and the little matter of
provisions. These last bits I’ll look at again; for the moment, the chief
success is that I played through a siege and it worked. It would have been
awful if I had collected all these houses and fortress parts and trenches and
gone to all this trouble and then the game had been a complete washout. So I’m
very pleased with that.
Another valuable lesson was that it reminded me, once
again, why I play wargames in the way I do, and what does or does not work for
me. What (in short) I get out of it.
Well, I mostly play solo, for a number of reasons, and one
reason that this is good for me is that I regard myself to some extent as a
privileged witness to a bit of fake history. I’ve written this here before,
and, yes, I am the presenter and the facilitator, and the fake history is more
or less compromised by my own understanding and preferences (and bias, however
unconscious), but the reason I still get a buzz from it, after all these years,
is because I want to see what happens. It’s fun, it’s kind of educational, and
in a solo setting I can attempt things which would not necessarily make an
attractively balanced social game. So I can have campaigns which have heavily
one-sided fights, I can even attempt a siege, for goodness sake. The concepts
of victory and defeat – even the idea of the points value of an army – I
understand what these are, but they are not things I normally consider as a
priority.
One thing that I have learned in the past is that, in this
kind of solo setting, a re-enactment, or any kind of walkthrough, doesn’t work.
If I know what is going to happen then grinding through it is not worthwhile –
no point – only passing moments of interest – no surprises. Nothing to learn,
except about myself. Just a little fiddling around before it’s time to tidy the
toys away. On the face of it, a siege might just be a perfect example of a
procedural activity which doesn’t entertain for exactly that reason. Well, it
was OK. In fact, I think I have demonstrated that a solo attempt at a siege has
certain advantages.
I have read a lot of the better-known sources on how to
make a siege into a game. The most useful, I think, is the famous Sandhurst
game described very concisely in Chris Duffy’s Fire & Stone (David & Charles, 1975) – this sets out the
important concept of accelerated time for the boring bits and the spadework,
and dovetails this with a (Charge-based)
tactical game to handle the exciting bits. It also sets out the pitfalls to be
avoided and the need for a simple approach – I can’t recommend this too highly
as a starting point. The snags are that the Sandhurst game uses simultaneous
moves (and thus written orders) and – that’s right – an umpire. Ah. You can do
anything with an umpire, I think.
The Duffy game is expanded a bit in Part XII of Henry
Hyde’s The Wars of the Faltenian
Succession, which appeared in Battlegames
magazine a few years ago. This applies an alternate-move structure, and gets
into more details about orders, event cards and Old School ideas like
shell-burst templates and all that. It is a more detailed game, but it is still
fundamentally the Duffy/Charge concept.
I also have the Perfect Captain’s Siege component of their Spanish
Fury game (which is a free download from their excellent website). Like all
the Perfect Captain games (and I’m sure they are very good), this relies on
data cards for units, and some of the concepts are getting towards
role-playing. That excellent fellow Nundanket
kindly loaned me the König Krieg
documentation, which includes the famed (but rarely seen) siege game Festung Krieg – again, a source of good
ideas, but to me it lacks the simple appeal of Duffy’s game.
One thing to avoid, I think, is stuffing as many tactical
sequences as possible into a siege – for the leaguer of a fortified house that
might be just the thing, but in a large siege it is also a means of avoiding
the fact that it is a siege as far as possible. I tried to meet this head-on,
rather than fudge the game into something more familiar.
Gary asked a very good question in response to my previous
post – why, he asked, was there no attempt to put a secondary barrier inside
the breach at Middlehampton?
I gave this some thought at the time, though, to be
honest, in the absence of a sensible reason to fight on, my own Resolve was
beginning to droop! In Chester, in the ECW siege, they marshalled gangs of
civilians to pile earth (and dung, apparently) in all the gates and behind the
stone walls. In my test, Lord Bloat was handicapped in this, since the
townspeople's Loyalty had slipped further to zero, at which point they are not
a valid workforce, and his two remaining infantry units were all he had
available to do any kind of work of this type (cavalry, dear boy, never dig).
On average, at 2-hex range in my rules, a siege gun has a 5/12 chance of
damaging the wall during a strategic (1 day) turn, so I reckon (and Lord Bloat
may have reckoned) that two cannons might take best part of a week to generate
5 gravelsworth of damage and effect a viable breach - so there was maybe time
to do something - one possibility was demolishing the buildings near the wall
and piling up the rubble, but maybe he felt (? - we'll never know) that
surrender to the Scots would be the less disastrous of the options - certainly
their reputation at Newcastle and York was not too awful - they were ravenous
and tended to nick stuff, but slaughter, rape and ransacking were off-limits to
the Presbyterians. I think the 5-chips collapse rating is maybe too high
(though this might have been an exceptionally strong wall) - from memory, I
think the breach at Chester (the one above the Roman Garden!) came down within
a day, once the Parlies got a few big guns inside the earthwork defences and
set about it, and I think that particular bit of wall had a bank erected inside
it, but it was soft, Bunter sandstone (never accept the job of Governor of a
red stone fort). Methinks 5 chips is too high...
Big lesson for me from these few days is that it is very
important to put more effort into a thorough context and scenario narrative.
There should have been better reasons for doing things, there should have been
clearer time constraints, the supply issue should have been more central and
there should have been some threat of Mad Prince Rupert appearing from
somewhere to give the Jocks a jolly good bashing.
I enjoyed my few days at Middlehampton very much - it had
the rather academic resonance which is common to many solo games, but it looked
and felt like a game. I need to re-examine some of these numbers in the rules -
the old walls were too tough, the digging was very straightforward (especially
since the garrison did very little to interfere) and mostly procedural. The
Sconce didn't last long, but was a threat while it lasted - the Sconce, by the
way, could have been used as two half-sconces, and placed against the walls as
hornworks, but that would have brought the siege closer to the town more
quickly (which, in the absence of a sensible storyline, maybe doesn't make a
lot of difference).
If I had been Bloat, I think I might have agreed with the
townspeople's guild that the best strategy would be to meet that nice Lord
Leven and his pals on the lawn with a tray of drinks, and discuss terms right
at the start. Mind you, my mindset, my library of books and (importantly) my
religious views are not likely to coincide with theirs.
An interesting few evenings - time to tidy up now! I’ll
set out my thoughts on mining and supply in a week or two. As ever, my humble
thanks to anyone who took the time to read about the test game – I am still
delighted but rather surprised to hear from readers.
Next test siege I run will be a Napoleonic one, with the
Vauban fortress bits.
