"And the seventh sorrow is the slow good-bye..." - Ted Hughes
Turn 6 ended before it started, with a tied dice roll. It cost the garrison one food supply, although I don't think that will come into play; feel free to throw that back in my face at some later stage. On the plus side, I found the missing card at that point. Overall turn 7 hasn't gone well for the besiegers, against whom the tide would appear to have turned.
While they were occupied repairing the sections of sap flooded by the torrential rain during Turn 5, they were driven off completely from the third parallel. Sensing an opportunity the garrison started to dig out from the covered way, aiming to seize and destroy the gun emplacements.
Before they could do so the besiegers managed to move up a couple of siege guns, surviving the opportunity fire as they did so, and, for the first time, bombarded the wall. It is, I suspect, too little too late.
The die next to the wall shows the cumulative hits against that section. When it reaches ten the section will drop from level six to level five. As you might guess it needs to reach level zero before there is a breach. It's not going to happen. The other die is showing the cumulative hits from the mortars which have been shelling the town. Once again, this isn't going to amount to anything worth talking about very soon.
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| Ignore what it says - it's really Turn 7 |
And this is why: the attackers have very little morale left. To add insult to injury one of their commanders has died of disease, meaning that they weren't able to rally any units this turn.
I've mentioned before that I'm not confident about my grasp of either rules or tactics - and that definitely still stands - but I have had a bit of an epiphany regarding the role of infantry in the game, which is progress of a sort.
This is interesting stuff, glad you are keeping it up. It is clearly full of tension for both sides - hence a good game? Considering how important sieges were in the Horse and Musket period, it's a shame that wargamers very rarely attempt to game them - though this may be because it can seem as complicated and costly as the real thing!
ReplyDeleteI hope it doesn't drive you as batty as the guy who did the Siege of Dendermonde articles all those years ago..
I just reread my earlier comment about had badly things looked for the besieged side...shows how much I know! Accepting your caveats that you may not be playing the rules as intended, at least they seem to give both sides a fair chance of victory....which has always seemed the challenge to me in making a siege into an enjoyable game
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