Jan 02, 2026

Anatomy of a Siege

From Walls and Ladders to Rubble and Cellars

Siege warfare is where war slows down and closes in. Instead of sweeping flanking moves across open plains, you get trenches, walls, ruined streets, and a clock ticking in the background: supplies dwindling, morale eroding, options closing. For wargamers, sieges are often where a game’s engine shows its real depth – how it models fortifications, isolation, and that grinding mixture of patience and violence.

This post takes a chronological walk through siege warfare as portrayed in several WDS series:

Medieval fortress assaults in Sword & Siege: Crusades (including ladders, which will be introduced in the upcoming Crusades: Book II),
Trench and fort warfare around Petersburg in the Civil War Battles engine,
Street-by-street urban sieges in Squad Battles, especially Stalingrad and other city fights,
...and operational encirclement and reduction in Panzer Campaigns.

Same theme, four very different lenses. Along the way, you can see not only how siege tactics changed over time, but also how the different engines turn those tactics into playable systems. If you’ve ever wondered why a siege in Sword & Siege feels so different from one in Squad Battles or Panzer Campaigns – and yet oddly familiar – this is your guided tour.

Walls, Towers, and Ladders – Medieval Sieges in Sword & Siege

If you say “siege” to most people, the mental picture is medieval: high stone walls, siege towers edging forward, ladders slammed against the battlements, and defenders dropping rocks, arrows, and boiling oil from above. Sword & Siege: Crusades leans into that imagery and turns it into a ruleset.

Crusaders hurling decapitated Muslim heads into the city, Siege of Antioch (1097–98) by an unknown artist

The fortifications are not just a terrain modifier – they are the battlefield. Walls are discrete hexes with strength values. Towers, gatehouses, and inner keeps are separate features. Stack limits are lower on the ramparts than on the ground, so you cannot just pile a regiment onto one wall section. When a unit gets onto a wall hex, there often isn’t room to retreat; close combat there tends to be decisive. You quickly learn that getting a foothold on the wall is half the battle, and holding it is the other half.

Siege Towers, Rams, and Catapults

The classic assault tools are all present:

Siege towers act as mobile extensions of the wall. You load infantry into the tower, trundle it up to the rampart, and then let them rush across the gangway into the wall hex. While they’re inside the tower, they’re relatively safe; once they step onto the parapet, it becomes a brutal fight in very cramped real estate. Towers have to be assembled and pushed up under fire, and they can be set ablaze by defenders, so they’re powerful but vulnerable assets.
Battering rams attack gates and sometimes wall sections, chipping away at their structural strength each turn. In game terms, they conduct attacks that target the fortification’s strength rather than the units behind it. Eventually, the gate breaks or a wall segment collapses into a “breach” hex – rough terrain that troops can cross but that disorders them in the process. If you’ve lined up a column of heavy infantry behind the ram, that collapse is the cue to throw them forward.
Artillery – catapults, mangonels, trebuchets, and in some scenarios early bombards – can target both units and fortifications. You can concentrate their fire on one section of wall to soften it up, or use them to knock out enemy engines and dense defending stacks on the ramparts. They usually have limited ammunition and must be set up at specific ranges, so you can’t just shell everything forever.
And at the slower, more subtle end of the toolkit are miners: specialist sappers tunnelling under towers or wall sections to bring them down from below. Historically, a successful mine could collapse an entire bastion in an instant; in Sword & Siege, that role falls to sapper units and the mining rules, which we come back to later when we look at how walls actually fail.

The decision space for the attacker is surprisingly modern: where to concentrate, how to synchronize, and how to protect your enablers. A tower is useless if your infantry is still halfway back to camp when it touches the wall; a ram is a coffin on rollers if you push it up without skirmishers to suppress the battlements above.

A modern reconstruction of a medieval trebuchet catapult. Château des Baux, France. (Quistnix (CC BY-SA))

Ladders and the “Cheap” Assault

On the cheaper end of the tech spectrum are ladders. Ladders are not standalone units but a capability: under the right conditions, your infantry can attempt to raise ladders and climb. The rules make this as dangerous as it sounds. Climbing troops are exposed; only a few can be on the ladder at once, and a failed morale check or a well-timed defensive volley can turn a ladder rush into a bloody heap at the base of the wall.

But ladders are fast and require little preparation. If you don’t have the time or resources to build towers, or if scenario conditions penalize slow, methodical siege works, ladders become very tempting. Historically, commanders sometimes tried surprise escalades at night or in bad weather; in the game, you might wait for a turn when defenders are disrupted or thinned out, then send several ladder parties at once, trying to overload the limited defender stacking on a wall segment.

Mechanically, the ladder rules are fully detailed in the series manual (section 5.2.26), and they’ll see their first wide implementation in scenarios shipping with Sword & Siege: Crusades Book II. Book I already gives you towers and rams; Book II adds scenarios designed from the ground up around escalades, where your main question as the attacker is not “if” you’ll use ladders, but where and when. (Keep in mind, the Ladders feature and its mechanics can change until release)

Sappers and Collapsing Walls

For players who like the engineering side of war, mining is the real treat. Sword & Siege has dedicated sapper units that can switch into “mining” mode when adjacent to a wall. Each turn, successful mining adds hidden damage to that wall hex’s strength. At first, it’s just a log entry — “wall damage at hex X from sappers at hex Y” —, but at some point, the cumulative damage crosses a threshold, and the wall comes down.

When it does, three things happen at once:

Any unit on that wall hex is eliminated, buried under masonry.
The hex changes from wall to breach – passable but disorderly.
The geometry of the fortress changes: lines of sight shift, the defender’s nice continuous line of parapet fire now has a jagged gap.

If you’ve positioned your assault troops properly, you can surge into that gap immediately; if you were sloppy, the defender might reach the breach first and turn it into a new strongpoint. Mining thus becomes a mini-campaign inside the scenario: you protect your sappers with screens and skirmishers, the defender tries to spot and kill them, and somewhere under the ground, the clock is ticking on that wall segment.

Defending the Stone Shell

On the defender’s side, you have your own toys and problems. You have to allocate finite troops across walls, towers, the inner bailey, and potential sortie forces. You can:

mass archers and crossbowmen at likely assault points to chew up towers and ladders,
position reserve infantry just behind the parapets to plug breaches,
and plan sallies — quick counterattacks through postern gates against exposed siege engines or mining parties.

Leaving the walls is risky; zones of control and movement rules mean you can’t simply dash out and back without retaliation. But a well-timed sally that burns a tower or kills a sapper unit can undo several turns of enemy work.

Sword & Siege also acknowledges the slow, less cinematic path to victory: starvation. If a fortress is completely surrounded and its supply line cut, garrison units begin to suffer attrition and morale loss over time. In longer scenarios or linked campaigns, you can tighten the ring and let hunger do some of the work, just as at Antioch or Acre. The game doesn’t turn into a logistics spreadsheet, but you will see defenders become more brittle if kept cut off.

All of this means a Sword & Siege siege feels like a toolbox problem. As the attacker, you have towers, ladders, rams, engines, and sappers; the defender has walls, counter-siege engines, sorties, and time. The puzzle is how you combine these under scenario constraints – limited engines, tight turn limits, variable troop quality – to crack a fortification without wrecking your own army in the process. And because the walls are actual map objects with their own behavior, every breach or collapse has that satisfying “the map just changed” moment you only get from a good siege game.

From there, siegecraft evolves. Gunpowder makes stone walls less decisive, fieldworks become more important, and by the mid-19th century, we’re looking at something that resembles a gigantic engineering project more than a castle storm. That’s where Petersburg comes in.

Trenches Before Petersburg – Civil War Battles

By 1864, the biggest “fortress” the Union army wanted to crack wasn’t a medieval city; it was a railroad network. Petersburg, Virginia, was the key logistics hub feeding Richmond. Once Grant’s offensives stalled in front of Richmond and Petersburg, both armies dug in. The result was a nine-month campaign where trenches, redoubts, artillery, and rail junctions ruled the field – a siege in everything but name.

The Civil War Battles engine (for example, in Campaign Petersburg) is not a pure siege engine, but it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the feel of trench warfare. The same hex-and-counter system that models Antietam or Gettysburg can also handle Petersburg, with the emphasis shifting from maneuver to fortification and attrition.

Entrenchments as the New Walls

Take the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road in June 1864 as a microcosm. Historically, Grant extended the Union southward, aiming to cut the Weldon Railroad. Confederates reacted quickly, dug in where they could, and struck back with a counterattack that rolled up exposed Union divisions. In game terms, the scenario gives you exactly that kind of problem.

(Union) Rifle pits on the picket line in front of Petersburg, Va., Colorized after http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.32430

Entrenchments are the new walls. Civil War Battles represents them as levels of fieldworks: rifle pits, earthworks, sometimes full redoubts or forts. Units in higher-level works are quite hard to shift. Fire against entrenched infantry inflicts fewer casualties and is less likely to disrupt or break them; melee assaults against trenches are risky even if you outnumber the defender. Once Petersburg’s defenders have had time to dig, the map is a mesh of such works, especially on commanding ground and along key roads.

The engine lets infantry dig in during play: if a unit stays put, it can improve its entrenchment level. Overnight turns are especially important – if a brigade accumulates a few quiet turns, it can turn a bare hill into a toothy defensive position. In longer Petersburg scenarios and the campaign tree, you see the same pattern as the historical one: lines extend, new salients appear, someone tries to outflank someone else, and that open flank quickly gets trenched as soon as someone occupies it.

Attackers must treat those works with the same respect that Sword & Siege players give stone walls. Send regiments across open ground at a well-defended earthwork, and you’ll watch them get shredded, disrupted, and possibly routed. They might reach the trench in melee, but even a successful assault tends to leave the attacker exhausted and vulnerable to a counterattack.

Guns, Skirmishers, and Flanks

The obvious remedy against an entrenched line is artillery, but Civil War artillery is not WWI siege artillery. At Petersburg, it’s more about disruption than about literally flattening earthworks. In Civil War Battles, batteries don’t carry their own individual shell counts; instead, artillery expenditure feeds into a side-wide ammunition pool. Every barrage you call in during a long scenario or campaign turn eats into that shared reserve. If you plaster the Confederate works along the Jerusalem Plank Road with enthusiastic preparatory fires on Day 1, you may find later in the campaign that your army’s overall artillery supply level has dropped a notch, and you simply can’t afford to keep that up. It nudges you toward historical behavior: save sustained bombardments for decisive efforts rather than firing every gun every turn “because they’re there.”

The Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road, 9 July 1865, as shown in Civil War Battles: Petersburg

Civil War Battles also has a dedicated skirmisher mode, but it works very differently from Sword & Siege, Musket & Pike, or the Napoleonic games. You don’t peel off separate little skirmisher counters; instead, eligible infantry and dismounted cavalry units can switch into a skirmisher formation that assumes a thin screen has gone forward while the bulk of the regiment stays back. Flipping into skirmish formation costs movement and, effectively, combat heft – the regiment fights as if a slice of its strength is out in front rather than packed into the firing line. In return, that formation gives you better spotting in rough terrain and adds a bit of drag on enemy movement as they push into your extended zone. Under Fog of War, a lot of the “?” markers you see flickering in the woods around Jerusalem Plank Road are really that skirmish screen doing its job: taking the first volleys, revealing where the enemy trench line actually runs, and sparing your main body from blundering into a point-blank surprise.

Because skirmishers are a formation state rather than independent units, they live and die with the parent regiment. If the regiment is too small, disrupted, routed, or already locked in an enemy ZOC, it can’t deploy a screen at all. If it melees or has to make a sudden move, the skirmish line is automatically pulled back in. That fits the Petersburg reality quite well: this isn’t Napoleonic light infantry roaming around on their own; it’s tired veterans pushing a loose line forward a couple of hundred yards in front of the works, then melting back when things get hot.

Even with guns and skirmishers, the best way to crack entrenchments is still the oldest trick in the book: hit them from somewhere they weren’t expecting. Petersburg is not a tidy ring like a medieval city; it’s a long, bending line of works anchored on streams, ravines, and road junctions. In the Jerusalem Plank Road scenario, the Union’s operational aim is to slide down and across the Confederate front, get onto the flank of that line, and cut the Weldon Railroad. The game’s Fog of War and terrain make that non-trivial. You can march a division off on a wide hook through dense woods, only to stumble into hidden rifle pits and point-blank volleys you never saw coming. Or you might find a genuine gap, push through, and suddenly realize your own left is hanging in the air when Mahone’s Confederates arrive and drive hard into it, just as they did historically on June 22. At that moment, all three elements come together: your artillery has to decide whether to keep pounding the main works or swing to blunt the counterattack; your skirmisher formations become the early-warning tripwire in the timber; and the shape of the entrenchments themselves dictates whether this turns into a small setback or a brigade-sized disaster.

Local Isolation and Surrender

Isolation exists here as well, just at a different scale. If a regiment or brigade gets surrounded (for instance, in a salient that gets pinched off), it will be marked isolated. Isolated units cannot easily be resupplied, and their chance of surrender in melee goes up sharply if they are broken and have no retreat path. This models the local effects of the larger siege: a brigade cut off after a failed assault may surrender in large numbers when hit from several sides, echoing incidents like the prisoners captured at the Crater or Fort Stedman.

The engine doesn’t go all the way to modelling the entire nine-month siege in one scenario – that would be unplayable – but Campaign Petersburg ties the individual engagements together. In the campaign game, your choices in early battles affect the later ones – losses, positions, and sometimes even which scenarios appear. If you do particularly well at Jerusalem Plank Road, you may face a different Confederate posture later; if you throw away divisions in failed assaults, you’ll have fewer fresh regiments for subsequent pushes at the railroads or inner works.

All of that gives you the American Civil War’s version of siege warfare: not towers and walls, but miles of fieldworks, carefully prepared assaults, under-fire digging, and a lot of hard decisions about whether to spend lives now or try again tomorrow. It’s a bridge between the masonry siege of the Middle Ages and the industrial siege of the 20th century.

Rubble and Cellars – Urban Sieges in Squad Battles

If Petersburg is a siege of trenches and railroads, Stalingrad is a siege of buildings and basements. By late 1942, huge parts of the city on the Volga were nothing but wrecked factories, gutted apartment blocks, and hills of debris. The front line ran through rooms and stairwells. Every intersection, every cellar could be its own little fortress.

Hauptmann Wilhelm Traub with Russian PPSch 41 in the ruins of Stalingrad; late autumn 1942 (Bundesarchiv Bild 116-168-618)

Squad Battles is built for this kind of fight. At 40-meter hexes and squad-level units, it lets you zoom into a few city blocks and live the close-range nightmare in detail. A typical Stalingrad scenario, as shown in Advance of the Reich, has a map maybe a dozen hexes across in each direction, depicting a factory complex, a dense residential block, or a key landmark like Pavlov’s House or the Grain Elevator. One side might have a company or two of infantry plus a handful of support weapons; the other might have similar forces and some fortified positions. There is no real “rear area” – almost every hex is potentially lethal.

Strongpoints and Mouseholes

Urban terrain drives everything. Building hexes provide excellent cover but slow movement. Repeated bombardment can turn buildings into rubble, which still offers cover but restricts vehicles and complicates line-of-sight. Many units start the scenario hidden, especially defenders in buildings. As an attacker, you advance into a landscape where any window, pile of bricks, or shell hole could hide an enemy squad or anti-tank team. Reconnaissance by fire – spraying suspected positions to provoke a response – becomes routine.

„Die Straße wird nicht mehr in Metern gemessen, sondern in Leichen… Stalingrad ist keine Stadt mehr. Bei Tag ist es eine gewaltige Wolke aus brennendem und beißendem Rauch; ein riesiger Ofen, der vom Widerschein der Flammen beleuchtet wird. Und wenn die Nacht kommt, eine dieser sengenden, heulenden, blutigen Nächte, springen die Hunde in die Wolga und schwimmen verzweifelt ans andere Ufer. Die Nächte von Stalingrad sind schrecklich für sie. Tiere flüchten aus dieser Hölle; die härtesten Steine ertragen das nicht lange, nur Menschen halten das aus.“

“The street is no longer measured in meters, but in corpses… Stalingrad is no longer a city. By day, it is a huge cloud of burning and acrid smoke; a giant furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night falls, one of those scorching, howling, bloody nights, the dogs jump into the Volga and swim desperately to the other side. The nights of Stalingrad are terrible for them. Animals flee from this hell; even the hardest stones cannot endure it for long, only humans can withstand it.”

- Leutnant Joachim Stempel, Panzergrenadier-Regiment 103 / 24. Panzer-Division

Take Pavlov’s House as an example. The building itself is a fortress hex: good cover, multiple squads inside, machine guns covering all approaches. You might have to cross a square under that fire, and if you walk troops across it without smoke or suppression, you’ll quickly have a stack of disrupted and broken squads. Instead, you bring up MGs and mortars to suppress the building, maybe call a short artillery stonk. You throw smoke to obscure the main approach, then rush a couple of squads through the smoke into adjacent hexes. From there, you set up for an assault: engineers with flamethrowers or satchel charges, close-range SMG squads, and a leader to boost assault odds.

Pavlov's House, Stalingrad, as shown in Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich

One hex, one building, one assault – and that’s just a fragment of the scenario. In another scenario, you might be defending a factory floor where both sides have literally blasted “mouseholes” through walls to move between rooms without exposing themselves in the street. The game abstracts that with normal movement between adjacent building hexes, but the feel is similar: you’re not maneuvering on open terrain, you’re snaking through an interior maze where a wrong move can put you in the wrong room with an enemy squad.

Sewers, Snipers, and Flames

Stalingrad is also about vertical and underground movement. The engine abstracts building levels, but it does have sewers and tunnels. Some maps mark sewer entrance hexes, allowing infantry to move underground and emerge at another entry point, out of sight. Historically, Soviet troops used this to great effect; in the game, it gives the defender (often the Soviets) a way to reposition or counterattack that the attacker must constantly worry about. Ignore a manhole near your rear, and you may suddenly find a Soviet SMG squad popping up behind your MG or mortar position.

Weapons load-outs reinforce the siege feel:

Flamethrowers are terrifyingly effective in assaults against buildings – units equipped with them get big bonuses and can cause disproportionate casualties, mirroring historical accounts of German Pioniere clearing basement after basement.
Molotov cocktails, especially on the Soviet side, can disable tanks that stray too close; a single hidden militia squad with Molotovs can make you think twice about pushing your armor into narrow streets. Tanks that dominate in open country become very fragile in the city.
Snipers range across the map, pinning movement and forcing you to devote resources to hunting them down. A single sniper can sit in a ruin for half a scenario, picking off exposed leaders, machine-gun crews, and anyone foolish enough to cross an open lane.

The result is a tactical environment where movement is cautious, assaults are costly, and a single overlooked hex can ruin your plan.

Morale, Command, and Fragmentation

Morale and command are crucial in this micro-siege setting. Leaders have small command radii; squads outside that radius rally poorly. Under the constant stress of urban fire, every move can trigger opportunity fire from multiple directions – units disrupt and break frequently. It’s not uncommon to see your whole advance stall because several squads are huddling in the rubble, unwilling to move until a leader gets to them.

Squad Battles tracks individual squad morale states: OK, pinned, broken, routed. Broken units may flee back several hexes, sometimes into awkward positions. Rallying them costs time and risks exposing leaders to fire. The “command” layer that in other titles is about brigades and divisions becomes, here, about keeping a handful of squads under firm leadership as they creep from building to building.

Urban scenarios also generate fragmented fights: you quickly end up with three or four semi-independent local battles. A platoon is trying to clear a warehouse; another is stuck at a stairwell; a third is desperately holding a ruined house against repeated assaults. You have to decide where your next flamethrower team goes – reinforcing one local fight might mean another collapses.

Fighters of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) fighting Nazi occupiers in 1944

And Stalingrad is not the only urban siege the engine tackles. Warsaw 1944, Warsaw Ghetto, late-war Berlin, various Eastern Front city fights – all use the same tools: buildings as fortresses, rubble, subterranean approaches, short-range HE, snipers, and highly brittle morale. The cities change, uniforms change, but the pattern is recognisable: once the outer “wall” is breached (in operational terms), the real siege is this block-by-block extermination or eviction of defenders.

Squad Battles can’t show you the entire Stalingrad battle in one go; instead, it gives you lots of small vignettes. Each scenario is a mini-siege: seize this factory, relieve that strongpoint, hold this block for X turns. Played together, they sketch the larger picture: month after month of local assaults that slowly, painfully, grind down one side. It’s an intimate level of siege warfare: you care about the fate of specific squads, specific buildings. The sense of “we took that corner at last” is strong.

Encirclement and Collapse – Operational Sieges in Panzer Campaigns

Where Squad Battles shows you a siege from the cellar window, Panzer Campaigns shows it from the operations map. Hexes are a kilometer, units are companies or battalions, and daylight turns are an hour. At this scale, a siege is not just fighting in a city; it’s an entire operation: sealing off a pocket, holding the ring, fending off relief attempts, then reducing the trapped force over days or weeks.

The Siege of Budapest (late 1944–early 1945) is a textbook example and a central subject of Panzer Campaigns: Budapest ’45. Historically, Soviet forces encircled the city in December, trapping German and Hungarian troops inside. Hitler declared Budapest a Festung; the Soviets settled in to crush it, while German Panzer divisions repeatedly attacked from outside in failed relief attempts.

Supply Lines as Lifelines

Panzer Campaigns makes the supply network the spine of the siege. Every unit traces supply to a source; if that trace is broken by enemy units or zones of control, the unit is isolated. Isolated units suffer progressive penalties: they struggle to get ammo and fuel, their morale drops, and they become easier to break and wipe out in assaults. In a city siege, the whole garrison inside the encirclement might be marked as isolated once the last road out is cut. You can almost hear the clock start ticking.

The engine doesn’t make you micromanage rations. Instead, isolation is a state with escalating consequences. The longer a unit stays isolated, the more degraded it becomes. In a Budapest campaign game, you’ll see the inner garrison gradually weakening as the siege drags on: more units showing “low ammo,” more breaking under bombardment, fewer effective counterattacks. As the Soviet player, you can choose between immediate, heavy assaults (costly but faster) or a more patient strategy – hold the ring, keep up some pressure, and wait for the isolated units to crumble before committing to the final push.

Encirclement of Budapest, 31 December 1944

While this is happening, events outside the city matter just as much. German relief attempts, modeled as powerful mechanized groupings, attack from the west and northwest. You, as the Soviet player, have to allocate forces to both the siege and the outer front. Strip too much from the encircling troops to fight off a relief attempt and you risk the Germans breaking through and reopening a supply corridor. Ignore the relief attempts, and they may smash your ring, allowing the defenders to escape or be resupplied.

That interplay between inner siege and outer battle is something only the operational scale really captures.

Fortification Belts and City Hexes

Fortifications at this scale are belts, not individual bastions. Trench lines, bunkers, fortified villages, minefields, and urban hexes all layer to create defense zones. Around Budapest, outer defenses lie in the hills and suburbs; inner ones are inside the city districts. Assaulting into these layered defenses usually requires you to think in terms of set-piece attacks: mass several battalions, support them with artillery and engineers, attack on a narrow front, and be ready to exploit a breakthrough with mobile units.

In-depth defensive lines with minefields, bunkers, etc., northeast of Budapest

A direct assault on a fortified urban hex with a single battalion is a good way to accumulate losses and fatigue for little gain. In some scenarios, you’ll find hexes representing historic strongpoints – a bridgehead, a fortress on a hill, a city square – with higher fortification levels. Taking those often becomes operationally decisive: once that hex falls, a whole sector of the line becomes untenable.

Urban hexes are abstract but nasty. They give significant defense and assault modifiers; vehicles moving through them are slow and vulnerable, infantry stacks are more easily disrupted by heavy fire, and command penalties make coordination harder. Combined arms still matter: an infantry battalion supported by a tank battalion and engineers has better odds in an assault than either alone.

Surrender, Fanatics, and the Endgame

Surrender is an explicit mechanic. Under the optional surrender rules, broken units that cannot retreat (for example, because they are surrounded) may surrender instead of fighting to the death. Certain nationalities or unit types can be given “fragile” or “fanatic” traits: fragile units break and surrender more easily; fanatic units hang on and have to be killed hex by hex.

Ceremonious swearing-in of the "volunteers" of the Berliner Volkssturm (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1971-033-15, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In Budapest, you might see Hungarian second-line units evaporate when hit hard while surrounded, while German SS units fight to annihilation in certain hexes. In a hypothetical Berlin scenario, Volkssturm units in outlying districts might surrender quickly once isolated, while a core of elite defenders in the center fights on until they’re wiped out. This lets scenario designers mirror historical behavior without scripting each event.

The result is a very distinctive siege arc:

Break-in and encirclement – creating the pocket in the first place.
Stabilizing the ring – building your own defensive belt facing outward.
Relief attempts and counter-encirclements – high-stakes maneuvers that may open narrow corridors or fail disastrously.
Erosion of the pocket – bombardment, local assaults, and isolation steadily grind down the defenders.
Final collapse – a few key hexes fall, surrender thresholds are met, and the garrison disintegrates rapidly.

You can see similar arcs in other Panzer Campaigns titles: Stalingrad ’42, Kiev ’43, and Korsun ’44. The details differ, but the logic is the same: the real weapon in an operational siege is not a battering ram or a flamethrower but a noose.

Panzer Campaigns doesn’t give you the visceral feel of a single squad clearing a stairwell, but it gives you the commander’s anxiety: is the ring tight enough, are my own supply lines secure, do I have enough artillery shells, can I afford one more day of attacks? It’s a different flavor of tension, and an essential piece of the siege story.

Closing the Circle

Across these four engines, you get a layered picture of siege warfare.

Sword & Siege shows you the classic picture: stone walls, ladders, sappers, towers, and the brutal calculus of how many men you’re willing to lose for a foothold on a crenelation. The fortress is literal: a defined space with a hard shell you must crack, using tools that feel medieval, improvised, and direct.

Civil War Battles moves the fortress into the landscape. Petersburg’s “walls” are miles of trenches and batteries protecting rail lines and crossroads. Fortifications are built rather than inherited, and the siege is as much about digging, night movements, and attrition over days as about the dramatic assault. It’s where siege warfare and field warfare blend.

Squad Battles drops you inside the fortress – not a castle, but a city. In Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin, and similar battles, the siege is conducted room by room. The terrain is vertical and subterranean as much as horizontal. The biggest threats are often hidden in the next hex, and the tempo is measured in meters gained and lost rather than miles.

Panzer Campaigns then zooms out to show the siege as a campaign: encirclements, relief attempts, belts of fortifications, and the slow strangulation of isolated forces. You trade tactical detail for operational nuance: supply levels, morale erosion, multi-front coordination, and the timing of the final assault.

Detail of a medieval miniature of the Siege of Antioch from Sébastien Mamerot's Les Passages d'Outremer (Public Domain)

What ties all of this together are a few recurring themes that any experienced wargamer will recognize:

Fortifications are never just numbers. They shape the battle by channelling movement and creating focal points. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a wall hex in Crusades, an earthwork outside Petersburg, a factory in Stalingrad, or an urban hex in Budapest – your whole approach plan bends around those features.
Engineering and logistics matter. Whether it’s sappers under a wall, soldiers entrenching overnight, combat engineers in sewer tunnels, or supply columns trying to reach a pocket, sieges reward players who think beyond pure firepower. Engines like Sword & Siege and Panzer Campaigns make your “support” units feel as decisive as your combat units.
Isolation is often more decisive than pure casualties. Cut the enemy off, and time will do work that divisions alone cannot. Sword & Siege models the starving garrison; Civil War Battles punishes local units cut off in salients; Squad Battles rewards isolating strongpoints before assaulting them; Panzer Campaigns makes isolation the main lever of operational sieges.
Sieges force uncomfortable trade-offs. Casualties versus time, bold assaults versus cautious containment, where to commit scarce reserves – these decisions run through all four engines. In a castle assault, you decide when to push the ladders; at Petersburg, whether to attack again today or let your men entrench; in Stalingrad, whether to risk your last fresh squads on one more building; around Budapest, whether to finish the pocket now or reinforce the ring against another relief attempt.

Taken together, the WDS engines give you a coherent “anatomy of a siege” across nearly a millennium of warfare. You can storm a gate at Acre in Sword & Siege, push a brigade across an open field toward a redoubt outside Petersburg in Civil War Battles, fight a desperate close-quarters battle in a Stalingrad factory in Squad Battles, and coordinate multi-corps attacks around Budapest in Panzer Campaigns – all within the same family of games.

And that, really, is the appeal. Sieges are where history slows down enough that you can feel every decision. Do you commit the ladder assault now or wait another turn for the sappers? Do you grind at that salient or extend your line and risk being counter-flanked? Do you send your last fresh battalion into that city block or hold it back for the next day’s push? Do you tighten the noose or launch the big assault before your own supply runs down?

From walls and ladders to rubble and cellars, siege warfare remains one of the most demanding and rewarding challenges on a wargamer’s map.

This concludes our short excursion into various aspects of siege warfare. Finally, we want to point out some noteworthy books around the topic of sieges and siege warfare, sorted by era (as usual, clicking the cover brings you to the relevant page on Amazon)

Book Recommendation

Medieval sieges (walls, towers, ladders, mining)

Bradbury, Jim. The Medieval Siege. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1992.

Fulton, Michael S. Siege Warfare during the Crusades, 1097–1291. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2019.

Petersburg and Civil War entrenchment warfare

Hess, Earl J. In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Greene, A. Wilson. The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012.

Stalingrad and urban siege fighting

Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. New York: Viking, 1998.

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. Armageddon in Stalingrad: September–November 1942. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.

Budapest and operational encirclement

Ungváry, Krisztián. The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Nash, Douglas E., Sr. From the Realm of a Dying Sun, Volume II: IV SS Panzer Corps in the Budapest Relief Efforts, December 1944–February 1945. Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2020.

Anatomy of a Siege

From Walls and Ladders to Rubble and Cellars