Fantastic Battles - 28mm siege test

Tim hosted me for a further playtest of the Fantastic Battles siege rules this week, using his great 3D printed castle and our 28mm armies - 500 points of Tim's dwarves, defending against 1,000 points of my Bacchae.

We had to proxy in cut cardboard rectangles for siege equipment, but here you can see the tiny defending force surrounded by the much more plentiful Bacchae. The dwarvern fort was built of heavy fortifications and sported towers with integrated archers. The Bacchae had three sets of ladders (carried by satyrs in the lower part of the photo), a siege tower pushed by maenads (at the top), a mine (off camera away to the top left), and had paid off a traitor inside the fort.

While the mine reached the dwarf walls, they were too sturdily built and it failed to bring them down. Bakchos was luckier with the traitor though who, good to his word, ensured the gates were left wide open. The elite part of the Bacchae - the Indian contingent and erotes chariots - surged towards the bottle neck. Unfortunately, the archer-towers played havoc with the elephant, badly lowering its resolve. It still managed to maul a unit of dwarvern warriors inside the walls, and flatten their captain before succumbing to its own injuries.

Elsewhere, the first unit of satyrs brought the ladders to the walls under a hail of black-powder gun fire and were quickly dispatched in melee, while the single maenad company pushing the siege tower suffered a similar fate. Across the table, Bacchae were falling fast while the doughty dwarves stood fast behind their defences. Eros, captaining the maenads, made use of the Phoenix Bow of Precision to target the dwarvern warlord, causing a wound.

Although they had started to lose resolve across the table, the dwarvern units were far from breaking, while the Bacchae were only two companies away from defeat, with five companies close to scattering and a few more feeling poorly. And at that point, the Bacchae rather stole a victory when Eros shot again at the dwarvern warlord and killed him. Leaderless, the dwarves surrendered and the Bacchae reigned victorious.

Artist's impression showing the death of the dwarvern warlord.