The Dailami problem

[ianiow]

For those of you that don't know. Dailami is a troop type from the Decline and Fall Army lists that features in large numbers in several army lists.

Dailami MF Armoured Superior Drilled ImpactFoot Sword (Bow) 12pts

Most players now have realised that this is the best, most versatile and deadliest troop type in the game. It is fast, it is both armoured and superior, it has shooting capaility which comes FREE. It can easily withstand charges from superior lancers, it can soak up missile fire, and it can roll over any other foot troop type in its time period.

Basically, in Dark Age League games and competitions the players that choose one of the dailami armies will undoubtably come in the first few places in the league! So players that play other armies (Byzantines, Fatamids, Crusader) will need a heavy dose of both luck and skill to do anything noteworthy in their division.

I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed and it would be great if Cothyso and his team could be made aware of this problem and hopefully find a solution with their FOG 2.0 release.



Some top players have already briefly expressed their views on other threads and emails:

From what I've heard you are not the only one to be fed up fighting dailami armies. I only picked up DAF a week before the deadline for choosing armies and only chose Musafarids because i wanted a different army to my HF spartans and Cav lombards. They looked good but i was worried that a lancer army would run over them in open terrain. It was only after a couple of trial games that i thought. blimely, these guys can stand up to anything.

Apart from imposing a competition ruling that you must pay extra for them, or limit their numbers, or even ban them, I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe you should post on the main boards and we can thrash out a solution somehow. It is for sure going to ruin future Dark Age competitions.

Ian

sure happy to be totally beaten by another army consisting of MF Sup Armd impact with LF bow for free. best troops in the game for the points. But boring. I just didnt expect everyone to use exactly the same army type. I have been chargingf all my troops to end the battles quickly and annoy you a bit
Pity as I really enjoy playing with the Nike Byzt, just no one to match up with

never mind. I will make this as quick as possible

OOB isn't really a mystery for the Buyids. Dailami and more Dailami. While I had some variations, I always got the 3 MF sup bows, 3 superior armored lancers, the elephant, a ghilman general, and the rest Dailami, heavily weighted to the superior armored types with a few average armored thrown in for levening. In the early rounds I bought the indian swordsmen for bulk, but I abandoned them in the last round for protected average dailami. A much better unit for a few additional points. The only real disadvantage of the army is a lack of LF and its small size. As a result, it depends on fighting and winning as a clump.

The Daylami Buyids can get virtually unlimited amounts of superior, armored, MF impact foot swordsmen with the free rear rank LF archers. You can also get them as protected and average if you prefer. This is probably the single best all-round troop type in the game, which is what makes them such a powerful army. Which is why the results in Dark Ages LOEG season 9 seem to be directly proportional to the amount of Daylami one can include in one's army.

This is one of those instances where a half point option would be useful, as the RR LF are useless in a lot of circumstances and against a lot of opponents, but very useful against a few opponents (protected lancers in the open in particular). Certainly the ability to shoot 1 die in missile fire should go away. That's just gratuitous. Also, in TT there are disadvantages to having RR LF (you lose your armor when shot at in the rear and when charged in the rear the LF end up fighting in the front rank) that don't carry over to PC.

Sometimes I also think if the BG with LF Archers as support shouldnt roll only 1 dice when charged by Cavalry. That is the number of dice they roll when they do normal shooting.

Leave the 2 dice of support when charging by Cav to the BG's that have MF as support.
Do you remember those HF Def sprs supported by MF archers? Pretty useless right now. Only cancelling some enemies POA'S is almost a certain death

Cheers!

[Turk1964]

Have to agree with you about the Dailami Ian.Forget it if you have a Lancer army as these guys just take them apart with ease.Most of the DAF armies have defensive spearmen or light spear swordsmen Heavy foot theDailamis totally destroy them with ease aswell.Choose Dailami armoured impact foot with LF archer support and well not much stands up to them.Of all the armies i come across ther Dailami are the mos feared.About the only army which can beat them in Daf is Arab Conquest and thats a struggle if Dailamis win Initiative.Personally and these are my thoughts only is that The Dailamis need to be toned down somewhat as they are near as good asSuperior Impact foot armored Romans and for the period they fight in totally Wrong.Anyone who knows their history will tell you the Dailamis wernt that good agaist good Cav/Lancers and had to seek allies with Cav to counter this.Infantry Sworsmen with Rear archer support would not of with stood a concentrated Lancer/Cav attack. So yes Ian something needs to change but will it ?I doubt it

[ianiow]

Thanks for the historical lowdown Turk. I am a complete novice when it comes to this time period. I will do some reading about them and try to figure out why the authors classified them as they did, and wether there is a case for downgrading them a little.

Have to agree with you about the Dailami Ian.Forget it if you have a Lancer army as these guys just take them apart with ease.Most of the DAF armies have defensive spearmen or light spear swordsmen Heavy foot theDailamis totally destroy them with ease aswell.Choose Dailami armoured impact foot with LF archer support and well not much stands up to them.Of all the armies i come across ther Dailami are the mos feared.About the only army which can beat them in Daf is Arab Conquest and thats a struggle if Dailamis win Initiative.Personally and these are my thoughts only is that The Dailamis need to be toned down somewhat as they are near as good asSuperior Impact foot armored Romans and for the period they fight in totally Wrong.Anyone who knows their history will tell you the Dailamis wernt that good agaist good Cav/Lancers and had to seek allies with Cav to counter this.Infantry Sworsmen with Rear archer support would not of with stood a concentrated Lancer/Cav attack. So yes Ian something needs to change but will it ?I doubt it

[Morbio]

I know nothing about this army, to be honest I'd never heard of Dailami or Buyids before the KO competion. I accept what is said about the armies from all the posts and it seems that it is a super army to fight with - What I don't know is how representitive it is of its army of its era. If the Dailami Buyids were a super army of its time then I don't think the composition should be changed because FoG is meant to be (AFAIK) representative of the armies of their time. I guess the question is whether the points per unit is realistic because my understanding is that all 500 point armies should be more or less equal.

[Turk1964]

Ok found this reference to the Dailami,Interesting to see what they were armed with no mention of Archers

During the Sassanid period, they were employed as high-quality infantry.[5] According to the Byzantine historians Procopius and Agathias, they were a warlike people and skilled in close combat, being armed each with a sword, a shield and spears or javelins. They supported the rebellion of Bahram Chobin against Khosrau II, but he later employed an elite detachment of 4,000 Dailamites as part of his guard.[4] The Sassanid general Wahriz, who was sent by Khosrau I in 570 to capture Yemen, was also probably of Dailamite descent, and his troops included Deilamites, who would later play a significant role in the conversion of Yemen to the nascent Islam.[4]

If we can source what evidence the Fog producers used to portray these Elite troops then we may have an answer?Maybe they should be similar to the Catlans and could be deployed as Spearmen or Impact foot.I would feel these troops if classed as MF probably should be Protected and not armoured.

[Turk1964]

Ok found this reference to the Dailami,Interesting to see what they were armed with no mention of Archers

During the Sassanid period, they were employed as high-quality infantry.[5] According to the Byzantine historians Procopius and Agathias, they were a warlike people and skilled in close combat, being armed each with a sword, a shield and spears or javelins. They supported the rebellion of Bahram Chobin against Khosrau II, but he later employed an elite detachment of 4,000 Dailamites as part of his guard.[4] The Sassanid general Wahriz, who was sent by Khosrau I in 570 to capture Yemen, was also probably of Dailamite descent, and his troops included Deilamites, who would later play a significant role in the conversion of Yemen to the nascent Islam.[4]

If we can source what evidence the Fog producers used to portray these Elite troops then we may have an answer?Maybe they should be similar to the Catlans and could be deployed as Spearmen or Impact foot.I would feel these troops if classed as MF probably should be Protected and not armoured.Or Maybe they should be Heavy Infantry which seems more likely if armoured. This would make them very formidable and even harder to beat.

[Tiavals]

The book Shadows in the Desert says this:

"The Dailamites, who hailed from the forests of northern Persia, were among the most prestigious non-cavalry units by the late Sassanian era. They were equipped and decorated much like the Savaran, and are the only infantry force positively praised by Greco-Roman sources. They fought at close quarters with swords, battle-axes, slings, archery, daggers and two-pronged javelins against the Byzantines, especially in the Caucasus. They are often described carrying brightly painted shields. Later Arab warriors highly praised the Dailamites' martial qualities and actively sought to recruit them into their armies."

The FOG army book says that as an elite force in other armies, it's supposed the best warriors are recruited and thus they are naturally superior and Armored. For a dailami army itself, there's an option of getting Average and protected units since not all warriors will be equally good. Which makes sense. The problem is that the Dailami armies can take ALL of their units as superior armored guys with LF bow support. It would be reasonable if you could take just 20% of your army as them or something, and the rest have to be average protected. It'd make the dailami armies a LOT less monstrous.

[Turk1964]

The FOG army book says that as an elite force in other armies, it's supposed the best warriors are recruited and thus they are naturally superior and Armored. For a dailami army itself, there's an option of getting Average and protected units since not all warriors will be equally good. Which makes sense. The problem is that the Dailami armies can take ALL of their units as superior armored guys with LF bow support. It would be reasonable if you could take just 20% of your army as them or something, and the rest have to be average protected. It'd make the dailami armies a LOT less monstrous

Yes i agree that only a percentage should be able to be armoured.We then have the question of LF archer support this doesnt seem to go with what the history books tell us. So if allowed should cost extra and this would also make them less capable of holding of Lancer attacks.....

[Tiavals]

Well, the thing I quoted said they used slings, archery, etc, which you might take into meaning that they had LF support. You can always take the variant that doesn't have LF support. (Why does it exist?)