"Dark Age Fort" Topic

Nice!

From here
link

Amicalement
Armand

That is cute and nicely done. But, the design is truly pitiful from a defense standpoint. The tower is exposed. And the tower and gatehouse cannot support each other. A proper "hill fort" has the tower/keep in the center of a surrounding palisade, on a very steep motte. If the bailey falls you retreat to the tower. This tower, all you do is walk up the hill and axe the lower timbers to bits. There's no ditch to prevent easy access to the yard palisade either. Finally, stone stairs?? The proper access to a second floor entrance to the main tower is one that can be dislodged by the retreating defenders into the ditch around the motte (or raised like a drawbridge). You don't make stone stairs to give attackers a firm footing before the door.

Al good points. And unless there's a well hidden inside the tower or gatehouse I say that a siege would last about 3 days until the defenders keel over from thirst.

Its nice modelling work in any case…

Very nice piece of work.

A very nice piece of modeling.

As an actual fort it is also so small as hardly to be worth the effort constructing it. Look at the size of the men compared to the size of the fort.

I suspect that as with most wargames terrain it is supposed to function as something to put on the table that says "here is the _____!" I think it succeds admirably in saying "here is the fort!"

Glad you like it boys!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Tower would be able to flank shoot on both sides of palissades if in this general disposition.
External Door in the middle so to have axess covered a bit from the sides.
Tower door in the middle so intruders can be attacked from both sides.
As said , wooden stairs to be collapsed in case.
Stairs going the other way as in every medieval fort I saw, so right weapon arm is hampered by the wall.

The moat can be played as existant in game, as not easy to do ona model if not sort of grounded in a big tile.

Otherwise very nicely done. I have seen remnants of forts tactically poorly done, historical ones, recently from Rus people vs Mongols.

If you don't play games attacking the thing, who cares about what was written up there.

I wonder how common it was to make the stairs go up from the right instead of the left. If I was going to ax in the tower door, I'd send in my "lefties", or ambidextrous.

This would be very fun to play with. Who wants perfectly "scientifically" designed forts all the time? Despite my criticisms above, the designer might have deliberately created a "below average" effort on the part of some border lordling to defend his turf. Also, a lack of manpower or means could result in a less than formidable fort being settled for as better than nothing. Time could be critical. "Get it built", top priority. It's all in the back story….

And as I said we do find lots of forts which do not use all the period refinements for some reasons, likely ignorance.

The thing is, in games, once you've discovered the shorcoming of the model, you'll use the knowledge all the time, no fun. I know, I did have one such fortification.

I would say that this is a fortification just sufficient to defend a village vs. raiders. There is space for villagers and lifestock in the stockade, and you can fight off anything but a determined assault by ranged weapons.

Naturally is not enough vs. a serious effort, but any fortification that would be also needs some serious construction, which is often not worth it.

So, imho, nice work. And this way you can play out the assault with some chance of success, which makes for much better games unless you apply siege rules :-)

It looks like the "lid" comes off, so you can play inside the main room. That would be really cool….