Blind Spot

 The other day I made an assertion here about the recent ratio of wargaming posts to those on other subjects which was so inaccurate that perhaps even the Mango Mussolini himself would have hesitated before saying it. In an effort to nudge reality nearer to speciousness this post is about wargaming.

Nothing much of note has happened in the annexe for quite a while, but in the background I have trying to work through a small issue with the Vauban siege rules. When we first played them a couple of years ago I dropped a couple of elements that I couldn't work out how to deal with while we wrestled with the big picture of how they hung together overall. One was the 'blind spot' at the point of bastion into which the guns of that bastion cannot fire. The guns of adjacent bastions or other elements of the fortress can, of course, target anyone entering that space - that being the raison d'être of the star design - but they will do so at longer range.

There were three elements to the issue: what the rules say, what my bastions actually look like and how to make some sort of measuring device that reflects where we end up after considering the first two. To help playability the rules treat a lot of the aspects of siege warfare in an abstract manner. When it comes to bastions this means that each bastion is deemed to be a unit of fortress guns, that can fire to either side, but not to both sides at once, with the number and position of models being simply for aesthetic purposes. That in turn means that arc of fire and dead ground need to be defined without looking at the toys. There is a large colour diagram in the rules which aims to do this, but whilst I can see what the author has done, I'm a bit unsure as to why he has done it.

Putting that to one side for the moment let's turn to the bastions which I designed using a CAD system, made with a laser cutter and which feature in my games. They're the wrong shape; or to be more precise they are a bit squished up. Had I made them to both reflect 18th century reality and also to fit in the necessary models (necessary for aesthetic purposes only - see above) then the fortress would have stretched most of the way across the table and there would be any room for the siege lines. So they are somewhat foreshortened with very different angles to both commercially produced bastions that others may have and indeed to the diagram in the rules. It's time for the application of wargamers common sense. The dead ground at the point of my bastions will be laid out in a way that looks all right to me; my table my rules.

But how to measure it out? You would not believe the lengthy discussions that have taken place around this essentially trivial topic.  Ideas have ranged from drilling holes in the bastions themselves and fitting lengths of piano wire, to marking the table edges, to amending the original CAD drawings and thereby 3D printing an angle wangler. In the end, and based largely on a conversation with a non-wargaming boardgaming friend of mine, I have gone seriously cheapskate and cut some shapes from foamboard and painted them green. The main advantage being that if the area of dead ground doesn't seem right after all when playtested then I can just cut some more and try again.

Now all I have to do is work out how to represent ricochet fire.