French won after the Successor pike/spear centre repulsed the initial charge of the dismounted french knights (I broke 1 unit, the other hung on) yet the Successor pike unit was then broken in a turn of impact + melee after being clipped on its only non-fighting base by some charging French knights, with the pikes losing the initial combat (2 dice each), becoming disrupted and then losing the melee (the knights expanded) and then badly failing the melee cohesion test.
This triggered a massive disaster as several units who had been fighting near, or were behind the pikemen were swept away in the rout/caught by the pursuit (which hurts - Cohesion test as if fragged!!) and broken. As a rules note, the rules seemed unclear how/when pursuits contact fresh enemy in the event of routers dropping back bases to get through a gap - can pursuers step forward etc ?
Again - like Britcon - a unit of my spears fighting alongside the pikes won its combat at the same time as the pikes lost, and my spears pursued into blank open space as the main battle line moved in the other direction leaving them unable to rejoin the battle line in any meaningful period of time. So, my army suffered for having support in depth (well, -ish!!) and Adams army benefited from having no reserves allowing them to neutralise my my spear unit by it ending up roaming around aimlessly in its rear.
There was a bit more to the game than this to be fair - but it reinforced my theory that the mandatory pursuit is a contributing factor to the game feeling unit-ey - or that 800 points is maybe not enough for some of these armies.
The other thought - that contributes to this - I had was that the army lists seem to mandate most units as 4, 6 or 8 bases.
This seemed to have two effects - first you will end up with similar sized formations on both sides that often end up matching frontage and fighting as "unit-on-unit", which then feels by definition unit-ey, and leads to the break-through into space situation described above. Secondly it meant that it was harder to deal with bad matchups at deployment by using the "weight of numbers" counter especially with the mechanics making absolute casulaties relatively unimportant in determining how quickly melees finish. This really hurt with undrilled foot being so hard to maneuver out of the way of bad matchups (especially relative to drilled or undrilled mounted) and I was starting to see why all the armies I faced at Britcon - even those like the Lydians or Rogers outfit - had a strong mounted or skirmisher component.
Maybe some more variation, or even flexibility in unit sizes in the lists would not be a bad thing?
Oh, and the "-" POA for crossbowmen in virtually all situations is terrible and makes them pants against skirmishers, of which there are quite alot. But I knew that from britcon - Adam now knows it too
They are calibrated to work well in period, which they do. Out of period they are much less effective vs foot troops but decent vs mounted which allows chinese history to look ok. We took the view that this was adequate and that in the lists medieval armies had quite a bit going for them anyway so for open comps you have to weigh up whether the clout of the Knights (whcih is rather potent) is worthwhile. It is quite realistic for them to be outshot head to head by bowmen simply due to rate of fire - they were designed specifically with armour penetration in mind or for the chinese to stop mounted. They can stop armoured and heavily armoured troops better than most things. Nice vs cataphracts. They are a point less than a longbow.
