Fantastic Battles - siege testing

For the first game of the year, Jim and I got together to play around with the draft siege rules for for Fantastic Battles. I took 480 points worth of beastlings, defending a small stockade. Jim led 1000 points of Byzernian besiegers.

There were a number of things that worked well, and a few things that didn't. Serendipitously my army was composed entirely of shooting units, so once the assault started - pretty early, Jim wasn't for sitting and building siege engines - the balance of power was with the defenders. 

However, once the Byzernian axe men were at the palisade and various fantastic elements started to impact on the game (magic and flying principally), the Byzernian numbers and superior martial skills turned the tide.

The palisade was breached in two places, the Byzernian archangel flew over the walls, and their heavy cavalry were probably quite as surprised as I was to find themselves blinked within the walls. At this point, the accumulated resolve loss was too much for my wee beasties and their army collapsed.

Takeaways from the playtest:

• This is probably as small a siege as you'd want to play. Both in terms of the size of the defences and the size of the armies. In this format, there were not a lot of strategic options open to me as the defender once the assault was under way.
• As the defender, the defences need to provide more defence! 
• On a related note, palisades are probably too susceptible to enemy melee attacks meaning there is less onus on the attacker to build siege machinery.
• There is an ambiguity currently around defenders on top of defences when there are enemies outside at the foot and whether that locks them in melee. There seemed to be pretty clear-cut answers, until the attacker was a giant archangel...