Walls in Ruins

Further to my earlier post about some 15mm ancient city walls and buildings I'd made, I thought some evidence of violent siege would be in order.  So I made these.

Mind the gap

The idea was to have damaged sections that would match lengths of unbroken wall, so that these could be substituted in as necessary.

Rear view

The centre bit of wooden wall could also be removed to leave a gaping hole, if that was needed.

Something appears to be missing

The walls were made from cardboard and polystyrene fixed together with PVA glue.  Fine sand was then glued to the walls and painted.  The piles of masonry were made from polystyrene offcuts and were intended to hold the wooden wall in place.

Time to get the decorators in

Liberated wooden coffee stirrers were used to make the planking, undercoated in black then painted with a dark earth colour.  A couple of black washes were applied and then the wood was drybrushed with a beige or buff colour.

What, no crenellations?

Overall, I think they've worked quite well.  Just need a siege to try them out...

To be honest, the damage is barely noticable

 

The Walled City

Before our pocket money increased to the level where we could buy such wonderous things as those plastic Airfix forts that aren't available anymore, we used to make our own battlements on which we would line up our soldiers. In those days, my dad had a preference for Van Heusen shirts and at that time these came in cardboard boxes, usually with an illustration on the front.

I have a very clear memory of cutting out the drawing of a castle from one of those boxes and then using the rest of it to make the other walls, flimsy battlements and the wobbly walkways between them, all held together with sticky-tape.  It used to take ages to put the soldiers up there (Airfix Ancient Britons, French Foreign Legion and Guards Colour Party mainly) and only one well-placed hit by a nail fired from a Britains 25 pdr gun to knock them all off again.  Those were the days.

Some battlements, yesterday

However, since then there have been some slight improvements.  For one of our early DBM campaigns (my 15mm Lydians vs Geoff's Persians) I made some simple city walls for my troops to man.  Actually that battle was an exercise in my troops trying to get off the table as quickly as possible as I was outnumbered three to one, not to mention being attacked from two directions at once (those pesky Persians).

I remember when this was all fields (of fire)

Subsequently the extent of walls expanded and so did the various buildings I've made to put inside them.  The construction of all walls and buildings uses thin polystyrene sheets and cardboard, coated in fine sand then painted with a mixture of household emulsion and various acrylics.  The buildings are generic enough to also be used for locations such as Mexico (e.g. Mexican Revolution) or arid Africa (e.g. AK47).  They are simple to put together and I keep adding to the pile when I feel like making something (regularly).

Early Hebrews man the walls

Just to add that the figures in these photos are 15mm Chariot miniatures sold by Magister Militum, comprising a DBA 3e Early Hebrew army (that's I/34c for those of you paying attention at the back).

Magna Graecia Redux

I posted a few months ago that I had found again on the web the Magna Graecia Campaign Rules for running an ancient campaign in Sicily (by Rob Smith, 1997).

They are a very useful set of rules for this sort of thing whereby armies progress from node to node for which there are indiviual maps that allow a bit of tactical positioning before battle commences.

However, it has been pointed out to me that at least one of the maps (Node 01, Lilybaeum) is not working, and as I happened to have all of the maps already downloaded I thought I would put the missing one up here for anyone that might be looking for it.

I haven't checked all of the links to the other maps but I think that the rest of them are still functional (Edit - this site is now down, or soon will be, so the rules and all the maps are now here).

Magna Graecia Campaign Rules

As with most of my wargaming activities there are always themes, periods and rule sets that I constantly turn back to in my wishful way.  These include such things as DBA, DBM, DBR, Operation Warboard, books by Donald Featherstone and Charles S Grant and even Bruce Quarrie's Napoleonic Rules (published in the Airfix Guide No. 4).

One of my enduring interests has been finding ways to run wargame campaigns and therefore discovering campaign rule sets has always been exciting (there aren't that many out there really).  One of the sets that I did find and use was the (free) Magna Graecia Campaign Rules for an ancient campaign in Sicily.  These are by Rob Smith and appear to date from early 1997.

Resolving how terrain affects campaign decisions of when and where to fight has always been an issue but these rules cleverly simplify this by having defined table-top maps for each of the numbered nodes shown on the main map.  Land movement is only between linked nodes and battles can only be fought at each node (a bit like the original Shogun & Medieval Total War computer game system).  Therefore each battlefield can be assessed beforehand and hopefully used to your advantage.

Node maps look like this, although I suppose you could make your own if you wished or you could inject some random element based on scouting prowess, etc.  Here is a sketch-map showing our battle on the node depicted above (No.12 Akragas/Agrigentum) when we actually did fight the campaign (in this case it was Lydians versus Early Achaemenid Persians using DBM).  .

In this encounter the Lydians were advancing from Node 13 so the coastline on our battle map was along the left hand side (North is at the right hand side of my sketch-map).  Note the L-shaped wood and walled town which match those on the campaign map.  I actually won this one.  And here is another example from later on in the campaign and further along the coast at node 03 (Selinus).

My sketch-map of our battle is shown below, from which you can see that my army bravely ran away (North is on the right hand side of the map again).

And the reason for posting about this (apart from the opportunity to highlight one of my rare victories in that particular campaign)?  Well, a few months ago whilst checking my links I noted that the Magna Graecia one was dead and I have only today found and restored them after a bit of searching round the interweb.

So I thought I'd use the occasion to draw your attention to this interesting and useful set of campaign rules and the fact that it can be found on the web again.  It also ties in with my current thoughts on running a DBA campaign and what our options are for doing that.

Edit - unfortunately this link is now dead also.  However, if anyone still wants to see these rules and maps you can view them here.

MappingBoard

I can’t remember who I got the link from (freewargamesrules, I think) but I recently discovered some free (donationware) wargame mapping software called MappingBoard.

As I’m currently based somewhere remote (more of that another time) I’ve had the time to teach myself the basics of making maps with it.  It took me about 30 minutes of mucking about until I came up with the effort shown here.  I have to say that I’m absurdly pleased with it and would highly recommend this nifty piece of software.  It's very useful because you can, for example, import textures to fill certain terrain types (standard ones are shown here) and once you have created a feature you can save it for use again on another map, which is very handy if you have terrain pieces of certain shapes you use regularly.

I'd been looking around for a quick computer based map making system since coming across the simple yet elegant Magna Graecia wargame campaign system a few years ago (and slowly fighting a DBM campaign to a standstill with it),   If you check the Magna Graeca link, you’ll see that movement on the campaign map is between ‘nodes’ and for each node, there is a link to a unique battle map.

Linking maps to locations works very well with the Berthier Campaign Manager (another brilliant and free programme) as it allows you to assign an image (of a map say) to any square on the campaign map.  If you can’t be bothered making a map for each square (and on big maps there are literally fahsands of ‘em) you can either place them at certain ‘nodes’ or perhaps assign values to them and look them up using the reference tables.

That said, I like the idea of the generalship of choosing exactly where to give battle rather than generating maps randomly as you turn up in the square, so associating maps with certain squares is a very useful feature.


Another good thing about the Berthier system is that when there is a contact it indicates from which direction each army entered the square, which can be very useful for making sure you start off on the correct side of the table (perhaps both on the same side if you’re being chased on).

So there you have it - a nice little programme for making up battlefield maps (and a big thumbs up for Berthier, as always).  Hopefully, you'll be seeing more of these on this blog.

Brian