SC Campaign Siege Rules

Blockhouse at Georgetown, South Carolina which is occuppied by two SPs of British troops. Building is a model of the powder magazine at Colonial Williamsburg, made by Herb Gundt. The figures are Fife & Drum British.

Well we have the first potential siege in our South Carolina 1780 Campaign, so I had to quickly gin up some simple rules for the siege or blockade of a fort or town.

General Francis Marion, with a force of 3SPs, has moved to the map dot that is labeled as Georgetown. The British garrison in Georgetown is 2SPs.

The British garrison of Loyalists patrol the perifery of the town of Georgetown.

I don't want to work through the complications of digging parallel lines and artillery platforms etc., so I developed these simple concepts to execute the siege during our campaign.

First Step - Determine whether or not the fort is outnumbered by 2:1 or greater

Compare the number of SPs for both the defender and the attacker and if the attacker has an advantage of 2:1 or greater, then role D100 percentage dice (I use two D10 dice and designate one of the dice as "tens" and the other die as "ones"(

a) if the die roll is 1-50% then the defender may elect to Hold Out

b) if the die roll is 51-100% then the defender must surrender and the soldiers have a 50-50 chance of either being Paroled or sent off to a Prison. If the latte, then the attacker must detach one SP from his command to serve as an escort for the prisoners.

c) the defender also has the option to sally forth from the fort and offer battle to the attacker; however, this decision must be made prior to the roll of the dice that determines surrender/no surrender.

d) if the defender offers battle and loses, it may either retreat up to 2 dots on the campaign map or retire back into the fort, deducting the appropriate number of SPs remaining after the battle.

Second Step - conducting a siege

The attacker will always have the option of blockading the fort or town, rather than fighting a battle, and wait for attrition to starve out the garrison.

a) Turn 1 - defender may sally out, otherwise it is considered "out of supply" as long as it is under blockade.

b) Turn 2 - defender can no longer sally out to fight, it will lose one SP on this turn.

c) Turn 3 - defender loses another SP

d) Turn 4 - defender must surrender

Automatic Surrender

After Turn 1, the defender must surrender if it is down to one SP.

Conclusion

I think that this will prove to be a very simple and fast method of dealing with the attack or blockade of forts and towns in our campaign. We shall see shortly how the siege of Georgetown progresses.