Introducing Siege Ladder

Hi Everyone, my name is Joe, I'm the sole developer behind Siege Ladder and wanted to give you a bit of a deep-dive into the project, what I've built so far, and what I have planned for the future.

Origins: Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game #

Siege Ladder comes from my love for MESBG. I picked up the hobby again about 18 months ago, after a long hiatus having collected and played as a kid.

I had many friends locally that were big into Warhammer 40k, but after only ever hearing them complain about how terrible the game was, it wasn't exactly the most appealing sales pitch. My second-born was six months old, and I needed a hobby that would take me away from the computer/TV screen, but also be something I could drop at short notice when the baby started crying - painting little toy soldiers was the answer!

I managed to resurrect a lot of my old MESBG collection from 20 years ago, and set about getting a few new bits to bulk out the army. With my friends all into 40k, I needed from fellow MESBG-ers to play with, and very luckily, I live close to the home of the Hampshire Hammerers, who just so happened to be hosting the "City of Kings 2024" MESBG Event,, part of the Great British Hobbit League, about two weeks after I first discovered them. I attended that, and then a couple of club nights, and I was hooked again.

Pain Points in Wargaming #

Attending Tournaments #

I've been fortunate enough to attend various local MESBG events over the past 18 months, the South/South-West of the UK has a lot of MESBG events, generally part of the Great British Hobbit League.

To-date, most of them have either used pen and paper, spreadsheets or Longshanks for tournament management. I had a lot of frustrations as a player using Longshanks. I've come from a world of playing online Chess on Lichess, where profiles are rich with data, I can see my progress, and I have a clear idea of the quality of opponent I'm about to face.

More recently, Tabletop Admiral, the wonderful list building application for MESBG, has added features in for managing tournaments, and I still think it has a lot of potential, but then that has lacked the social aspect of it. I still have no visibility of my upcoming opponent's performance, nor do I have a profile I can easily share to show off my own.

This lead me to thinking - if I was to build a platform myself for tournament/event management, what would that look like? But that wasn't all...

Social Wargaming & Data #

When trying to find local tournaments, I'm generally dependent on the GBHL's website or Facebook events, neither of which make event discovery easy, especially in just searching upcoming events near me. 

I'm also part of a few Facebook and WhatsApp groups for MESBG, I'm regularly seeing people sharing photos from their games and mini battle reports with their score, which armies they played, etc. All of this is then lost to the never-ending thread of conversation and posts that make up these groups. If I ever want to recall a particular game, or show off photos from a battle I've had, finding those is almost impossible. For players that podium, or win hobby awards, they don't have a central place with which they can show off their achievements to others.

Tabletop Admiral does an excellent job at providing historical statistics of my own games, but I have no concept of battle reports, attaching photos, or sharing those elements with friends after I've played again, they're locked in a silo for my own viewing. It's also entirely focussed on the gaming side of MESBG. No concept of hobby awards, best sporting, etc.

I also have friends that are a bit more isolated from the tournament scene, but play each other every other week, they've played dozens of games, but have no information on who has won more, which armies work well, etc.

They're still playing plenty of games though, accumulating experience, so when when it comes to tournament play, they wouldn't be beginners as their GBHL ranking (or whichever league they're playing in) would suggest. This is where I'm inspired by the Elo Rating system used in Chess. It's completely game-agnostic, can be applied to any 1 v 1 game systems, and is also used in e-sport leagues for Age of Empires, Overwatch 2 and many others, so why couldn't this be applied to MESBG & Warhammer too? 

With all this in mind, I also thought more about an online platform for storing wargaming data, that I can share with friends, tracks my performance, allows me to post my photos, and have all of the statistical analysis in one place?

Battle Reports & Opinion Pieces #

Once I started considering Battle Reports as a feature, I got into the realm of articles. I regularly see great articles being shared in the MESBG and GBHL Facebook groups - how to play with a particular army, how to play against a particular model, hobby/crafting guides, etc, but again, they're all lost to the abyss of the social media timeline.

So now, Siege Ladder (as I'd loosely named it by this point) needed to support article writing, and for this, I took inspiration from Medium which is a really easy-to-use article/blog content management system.

Features on Siege Ladder #

Features on Siege Ladder so far can be split into five core areas:

• Social Profiles: This is the heart of Siege Ladder. These profiles show your game history, what awards you've won, what articles you've written, your Elo Rating, what events you've attended and will only grow to show lots more.
• Game Reporting: The ability to record a single game's data, with army lists, photos and head-to-head analysis between the opponents.
• Tournament & Event Management: Registration to events, different matching algorithms between rounds, different scoring systems (e.g. major/minor wins), hobby awards and podium trophies are all already supported, with lots more planned.
• Article Writing: Siege Ladder supports a range of content within an article, headers, paragraphs, images (single images, carousels, grids) and even interactive charts. You can also tag armies in your articles, and the hope here is that we build a knowledge centre of how to pay MESBG, which can help new players join the game we all love.
• MESBG MathHammer: I'm a maths-nerd at heart, and recently created some MathHammer simulation engines for MESBG, which I host on Siege Ladder. You can try them out for free here. You can also read more about the maths behind MESBG in this article which I've also published into Siege Ladder.

Social Profiles #

On the left-side here you'll find your account details, and then a list (currently only one game system supported) for any games that you play, along with your Elo Rating for that game. The "Rating History" shows your progress over time, and whether or not you're improving in the game! 

Game Reporting #

Every game played and recorded on Siege Ladder has it's own dedicated Game Report page.

This ensures you don't lose your photos from your games, but can also write up rich battle reports and share with your friends and the community.

Tournament & Event Management #

My main driver for Siege ladder has been the tournament management system. Longshanks and Tabletop Admiral do this well, but something I really wanted to give attention to was Hobby Awards, with full award submission and voting all built in. Awards, as a wider concept, play a big role on Siege ladder, appearing on every player's profiles as they collect them, and available in your "Trophy Cabinet" for you to share and show off.

Of course, the features for scheduling round fixtures, whether using Swiss Pairs or another system, is all supported, as well as multi-list submission, pre-round list submission and element like custom tournament point scoring with bonus points and major/minor wins and losses.

Article Writing #

As mentioned earlier, I really wanted to be able to have Battle Reports as a core feature of Siege Ladder, with which, I then needed to support the ability of writing blog posts or article type content. 

I ended up settling on full support for article-writing, whether this be a Battle Report discussing your most recent game, a crafting guide on how you've created your latest masterpiece, or a how-to guide on facing off against the most fearsome of MESBG armies.

For a given article, we currently have support for text, images (grid-based galleries, carousels & single images), lists and even interactive charts. There are lots more features I can add here too, and will be looking for feedback on what more I could add to provide you the best experience for writing wargaming content possible.

MESBG MathHammer #

Whilst I've written a dedicated article about this feature, I did still want to call out the MathHammer simulators I've created. They will run Monte Carlo simulations in browser for you, so that you can experiment with different tactics and situations to really hone in on your in-game strategy.

If you have any additional requests for these, please do let me know. I'm conscious they don't cover everything, but I need to balance the usability/configuration/complexity right.

You can try them out for free here.

Beta Testing #

I'm very grateful to the many people that have helped me in beta testing Siege Ladder. We've had 4 x events run through the platform so far, I have over 100 x games recorded, and over 50 player profiles on record.

I am making improvements all the time, fixing issues, adding new features, and I can't wait to see where this goes. I truly believe this can be transformative for MESBG and other wargaming systems.

The Future of Siege Ladder #

There are many direction I can take this, and whilst I have a fair few of my own ideas, I'd love to hear feedback from users directly, so please do join the Discord Server, or reach out to me directly, and share your ideas.

Siege Ladder is free to use, and will (hopefully) remain so. The only place where I do see monetisation coming in is when I build in full ticket integration with event/tournament management, at which point I need to take a cut in order to cover transaction fees. It's also worth pointing out, this is not my full-time job, it's a passion project, so please be patient with me!

I would like to venture into other gaming systems too, 40k, AoS and Old World are the obvious candidates, so let me know where I can best serve!

That's all for now, but thank you for taking a look at Siege Ladder. Look forward to seeing you build your gaming profiles, ranking up your Elo and sharing your knowledge with the community through writing your own articles.