Thursday, August 23, 2018

Siege Warfare ECW era, rough planning

carnage after a wild rush assault ... maybe 6 men got into the castle out of more than 100 ...

In preparation for a siege warfare game ... in planning for Salute 2019 ... we set out some sample troops and used a chalk board to simulate the planned 'sections' for the game.

for the first run, we just lined up the troops and assaulted over the glacis ... the results were 90%+ casualties among the attackers with nearly 100% for the defenders

for the second attempt, there was an 'offset' second parallel that got dug out, then the attack went in 'piecemeal' ... results again nearly 90% casualties among the attackers with 100% losses for the defender

the second run featured an attempt to scale the walls facing the enemy guns ... with devastating results on both forces

Third time being the 'charm' we ran one more go, this time the focus was to be all about engineering ...

Day 1 with two LONG saps

day 3 after more saps and now a proper second parallel

day 6, the counter mine opened into the third parallel and the assault went in, the defenders were overwhelmed by cannonade from the forward moved guns and lost 100%, while the attackers losses were less than 30%

More revisions and plans need to be made to help make 'clear' such things as 'sallies' and the 'strategic digging day' vs the 'tactical combat day'

There's going to be another go at this game - this time to include simple morale rules.

2 comments:

daveb said...

Grid based wargaming had some interesting stuff on vauban era seiges. You might want to read his posts to avoid recreating the wheel/inspiring some rules.

https://gridbasedwargaming.blogspot.com/search/label/Siege

MurdocK said...

The Fire & Stone book is the exact same one we are using in our planning.

The idea is to have 'sections' of the table made to do the long and short saps and the second and third parallel trenching (with the wall at one end and the first parallel at the other), this way we can run this at convention and be able to show the different possibilities.

Ultimately we are also setting this in the very early siege era of the English Civil War, meaning the professionals of Europe are not involved, nor are there any of the Vauban forts built.