Test game Thracians vs Abbasids

[paulcummins]

Test game ??“ Thracian vs Arabs

I thought I would try out a Medium foot army (Thracian) and see what it was like, unfortunately for me Richard decided to try out a super shooty cav army (Abbasid Arab).

Even though the Thracians won scouting (IC and > 25 bases of Cv and LH), the Arabs had the terrain all their way with a couple of steep hills on the Thracian baseline, and one large one in the middle of the Arab side of the board, with a patch of brush next to it.

The Arabs deployed with all their superior armoured shooty cav on the most open flank, impact medium foot on the hill along with a load of light foot, and one bg of 4 shooty cav on the other flank. The Thracians had all their medium foot facing the steep hill, light horse on the closed flank, an allied Roman detachment at the end of the line of Thracians, and then Thracian armoured cav, roman cav and a bg of light horse facing the mass of cav on the open flank.

The Thracian and Roman mounted were annihilated by the super shooty cav in short order. The 6 strong legion BG with attached general was routed by shooting from the 4 base BG of super shooty cav it faced.

The Thracian foot looked like they were going to do a job on the Arab impact foot when one BG charged them impetuously so was unsupported and flanked. But superior showed its metal and they chopped through two BGs of Thracians for no effect, at which point the army gave up (rolled some really bad panic dice) and went home.

Super Shooty cav is way too nasty. Tim??™s point of not having troops break from shooting alone seems even more of a good idea. A BG of 6 Legionaries with a general attached should be OK against 4 cav, OK my dice were not great, but to have my only decent troops running away after skirmishing cav shot at them felt really wrong (and Richard thought the same ??“even though they were his cav doing the shooting)

Didn??™t really get a chance to test out the MF ??“ they got beaten up by a far smaller number of MF, so its not the M of the F that made them pants here

[adrianc]

I can sympathise!

My elite armoured Hungarian knights fell victim to mounted Ottoman bowfire last night. I'll post the full report shortly. It was a fun game though.

Regards

Adrian

[rogerg]

Just to add some balance - my Tatar horsemen struggled against Hungarian knights. The knights were disrupted by the shooting, but the combination of lance and heavier armour held up in impact and melee.
On a couple of bases frontage it is three dice on fours versus four dice on fives. This very marginally favours the knights. It is also a fight of one base against two. I haven't got the points costs with me, but I do not recall knights being twice the cost of cavalry.

I like the way Art of War keeps things quite close. In DBM, if you are one factor down then it is usually best to avoid combat. In many DBM games the main battle lines do not come to grips. I have only played half a dozen game of AoW, but there does seem to be more incentive to fight at a slight disadvantage because it is not so cut and dried. My feeling is that you need to get the extra depth to absorb casualties or have flank charges and overlaps to get more combat dice.

In DBM, the smallest advantage is 1 factor. This is effectively +1 on the dice which gives you twice as much change of winning the roll as you opponent (21 out of 36 v 10 out of 36 with 5 drawn). AoW, being more of a lottery with the dice, means you have to stack the odds more heavily, which means playing better, to get a win.

[nikgaukroger]

Just to add some balance - my Tatar horsemen struggled against Hungarian knights. The knights were disrupted by the shooting, but the combination of lance and heavier armour held up in impact and melee.
On a couple of bases frontage it is three dice on fours versus four dice on fives. This very marginally favours the knights. It is also a fight of one base against two. I haven't got the points costs with me, but I do not recall knights being twice the cost of cavalry.

Elite, drilled, heavily armoured knights will be something like 28 points (IIRC) whilst your Tatar cavalry would be something like 18 points. So about +50% cost for the knights - however, that particular variety are, I think, the most expensive troop type in the game

[rbodleyscott]

Just to add some balance - my Tatar horsemen struggled against Hungarian knights. The knights were disrupted by the shooting, but the combination of lance and heavier armour held up in impact and melee.
On a couple of bases frontage it is three dice on fours versus four dice on fives. This very marginally favours the knights. It is also a fight of one base against two. I haven't got the points costs with me, but I do not recall knights being twice the cost of cavalry.

Elite, drilled, heavily armoured knights will be something like 28 points (IIRC) whilst your Tatar cavalry would be something like 18 points. So about +50% cost for the knights - however, that particular variety are, I think, the most expensive troop type in the game

Indeed, most heavily armoured knights (including Hungarians other than the Royal Banderium) are drilled average (22 points) or undrilled superior (23 points) so only 23% or 27% more expensive respectively.

[hammy]

The trick with knighst against cavalry is to advance to within 1 MU of the cavalry before the knights charge. Then if the cavalry evede there is a 10 in 36 chance that the knights will catch the cavalry in the rear if they evade. The cavalry will do well to get more than three shots on the aproach and needing 5's they are unlikely to cause more than one CT.

What a number of people seem to do is to declare the knightly charge as soon as they are in charge reach. There are ofcourse issues in that if the cavalry move to 4MU then knights have to make a CT to not charge and then undrilled knights have to make another to not move full....

It is a complex interraction but in general what I think causes a lot of the problems when trying to fight shooty cavalry is the tendancy of players to charge first and think later.

Hammy

[rbodleyscott]

The trick with knighst against cavalry is to advance to within 1 MU of the cavalry before the knights charge. Then if the cavalry evede there is a 10 in 36 chance that the knights will catch the cavalry in the rear if they evade. The cavalry will do well to get more than three shots on the aproach and needing 5's they are unlikely to cause more than one CT.

What a number of people seem to do is to declare the knightly charge as soon as they are in charge reach. There are ofcourse issues in that if the cavalry move to 4MU then knights have to make a CT to not charge and then undrilled knights have to make another to not move full....

It is a complex interraction but in general what I think causes a lot of the problems when trying to fight shooty cavalry is the tendancy of players to charge first and think later.

Hammy

Agreed. The big weakness of shooty cavalry in 1 rank deep "skirmish" formation is that effectively the only way they can move away from the enemy is by evading. (Unless they turn their backs on them, in which case they can't shoot). This is what the enemy should be trying to exploit. I have found it gives me significant problems when running shooty cavalry.

In the next iteration we are making two changes to shooting, which reduce the relative efficacy of shooty cavalry, and increase the efficacy of MF (including archers):
1) The cohesion test modifier when shot at is -1 for 1HP2B instead of 1HP3B. This means that a cohesion test is triggered by 2 hits on a 6 base BG, but it won't have a -1 unless it suffers at least 3 hits.
2) MF shoot with 1 dice per 1st and 2nd rank bases at effective range.

This means that protected MF archers are likely to outshoot shooty cavalry, and unprotected MF archers are in with a good chance. It also means that unprotected MF archers should outshoot LF archers.

Moreover we are confining the +POA for mounted vs MF in the open to the impact phase. This also gives archers a boost - particularly those with armour or swordsmen POA.

Yesterday I found that charging Indian unprotected, bow, swordsmen archers with my ghulams was a bad idea. In the impact phase their support shooting cancelled my advantage, and in the melee my net + (armour) was more than cancelled by overlaps. Sure I could have charged them with 2 BGs of ghulams but that would be 144 points vs 48, which really wasn't feasible as the rest of the Indian army wasn't standing around doing nothing!

OTOH at the other end of the battlefield my Dailami allies ran straight over the Indian foot facing them - with very little effect from archery - which also seemed reasonable as my Dailami were armoured and cost 14 points each while the Indians only cost 6.

(For the analytical, the reason the Dailami cost 14 points is because the cost of impact foot capability has gone up to +2 because we have changed the impact foot impact phase POA vs mounted to "+ against mounted, unless charging shock mounted." And to stop this making Romans invincible vs cavalry, skilled swordsmen lose their ability to cancel mounted swordsmen POA.)

[richardcollins70]

As Pauls tormentor in this game, it does seem to me that non missile foot are on a serious hiding to nothing against shooty CvS. To break big blocks of foot you need to force them to take cohesion tests, but by shooting you don't need to get that lucky to force them to take a test in which there automatically at a minus 1 and as you can evade you can force them to take tests with minimum risk - so you can advance rapidly ping away at the foot and then evade back to within the shelter of your own foot.

This means that foot are forced to attack vs the Cv or be inevitably ground down and as the Cv player knows this he can afford to play cagily, sweep away the foots flank supports and then the foot are in a world of hurt. Of course this might just be down to Paul and I's naivete with the rules and there are as yet undiscovered techniques to counter the Cav?

Richard

[terrys]

As Pauls tormentor in this game, it does seem to me that non missile foot are on a serious hiding to nothing against shooty CvS. To break big blocks of foot you need to force them to take cohesion tests, but by shooting you don't need to get that lucky to force them to take a test in which there automatically at a minus 1 and as you can evade you can force them to take tests with minimum risk - so you can advance rapidly ping away at the foot and then evade back to within the shelter of your own foot.

If the foot charge the cav every move (since they have to be in charge reach to fire) you get 2 benefits:
1) The cavalry only fire in their own move.
2) The foot get to rally in the interbound of each of their own moves.

If the foot are 3 ranks deep the cavalry have to hit with all of their dice to cause a test (on equal frontages). Under the new proposals they can't make the 1HP2B unless they have an overlap - so are less likely to cause the DISR anyway.

If you're really brave, you'll move up to 1" off the cavalry before charging, then wait for the 'evade' decision to be made!!...They'll either have to fight you in single rank, or risk getting caught in the rear.

[hammy]

If the foot charge the cav every move (since they have to be in charge reach to fire) you get 2 benefits:
1) The cavalry only fire in their own move.
2) The foot get to rally in the interbound of each of their own moves.

Good advice apart from the bit about the foot having to be in charge range for the cavalry to shoot. Alas HF only charge 3 MU

If the foot are 3 ranks deep the cavalry have to hit with all of their dice to cause a test (on equal frontages). Under the new proposals they can't make the 1HP2B unless they have an overlap - so are less likely to cause the DISR anyway.

If you're really brave, you'll move up to 1" off the cavalry before charging, then wait for the 'evade' decision to be made!!...They'll either have to fight you in single rank, or risk getting caught in the rear.

Yes, that one is always interesting.

Hammy