Another stab at 800pts Venetian Italian Condotta

[fredrik]

I'm working on yet another Condotta list to take to an upcoming tournament, here's what I've come up with so far:

6 x Men-at-arms: Knights Average/Heavily Armoured/Drilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
6 x Men-at-arms: Knights Average/Heavily Armoured/Drilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
6 x Men-at-arms: Knights Average/Heavily Armoured/Drilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
6 x Mounted Crossbowmen: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Crossbows
6 x Turkish horse archers: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Bows
4 x Handgunners: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Firearm
4 x Handgunners: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Firearm
4 x Handgunners: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Firearm
8 x Crossbowmen: Medium Foot Average/Protected/Drilled/Crossbows
6 x Archers: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Bows
6 x Stradioti: Cavalry Average/Unprotected/Undrilled/Light Spear/Swordsmen
1 x Inspired Commander
2 x Troop Commander

This comes in at 800 points with 11 BGs and a +3 PBI modifier. The knights are the main strike force of the list, supported by the stradioti cavalry in reserve to give them rear support. Combined with this I have three shooting brigades (MF crossbows, Mtd xbows, turks) each supported by a 4-base handgunner unit for that spicy -1 on cohesion tests.

What do you think of it?

[philqw78]

You would be better off with the stradiots as LH I think, 2x4 if you can get them, they are better than any other LH IMHO, except Albanians, or the soon to come Lithuanians who will be awesome. They can then skirmish more easily and shoot at stuff. Being drilled put your Kn in BG's of 4 and they will be very manouverable and can be kept together if necessary to take shooting. Sixes are only needed if they get isolated. They only fight one rank deep so 6's would give you a lot of wasted fighting frontage. Dropping a BG of Handgunners would give you 2x4 LH Bow instead of the 1x6 you have at the moment. Again for manouvre and they don't loose a shooting dice if disrupted. Both 4's and 6's need 2 hits to take a test to be disrupted. Drop the IC take 2 TC's, gives 10 more points to play with which is halfway to the 18 pts you need for the Stradiots, but you still need points for 2 more Kn. All this is subject to being legal, 'cos I don't have the army list to hand. If this only raises more questions, D'oh.

[madcam2us]

Why have the knights in BG of 6s?

If to mitigate shooting, IMO its better to reduce to 4s an use the points elsewhere.

Fighting only in one rank, the knights will experience spacial concerns post impact as only 2 bases can be feed into the melee.

Perhaps getting your own counter to bow would be better? I also don't have the army book handy so reader beware.

Madcam.

[philqw78]

I voted you as a military genius as you don't need to be good to be followed in battle you just have to persuade people to follow you. And then you can get lucky

[hammy]

Why have the knights in BG of 6s?

If to mitigate shooting, IMO its better to reduce to 4s an use the points elsewhere.

Fighting only in one rank, the knights will experience spacial concerns post impact as only 2 bases can be feed into the melee.

Perhaps getting your own counter to bow would be better? I also don't have the army book handy so reader beware.

Madcam.

In my experience BGs of 4 average knights have a terrible tendancy to go down to auto break on 2 bases. BGs of 6 are a little more resistant to this horror. Fight on a frontage of 4 with 2 spares or even 3 with 3 spares.

[rbodleyscott]

I tried a version of the Venetian army with 2 BGs of 6 Knights, 12 Italian Average Pikemen, and a Swiss ally with 12 Superior pikes, plus lots of LF & LH. That worked quite nicely.

[jre]

I would consider two typical opponents and see how you plan to face them:

Bunches of undrilled superior knights, with some armoured spearmen and crossbows in support. Are you willing to risk equal odds with average vs superior?

An English army, longbows with stakes supported by dismounted knights...

The pikes are a great complement against those two types of foes, if only to fix part of the line and make them think beyond the simple plan.

José

[Fulgrim]

I think it can be fun to play but im a bit concerned that you might be trying to hard to cope with the Ottomans and my jolly fellows, which i think this list will do very well btw, and risk to lose out on more "ordinary" armies. The open tounaments in Sweden, at this stage, will have mostly converted DBM armies i suspect and thus might not be tailored to be "FOG-Super-Killer-Armies". There will probably be a more even spread of armytypes than you have met up to date. I would take RBS (obviously) and jre´s words to hart in an open tournament.

[davidandlynda]

We came 3rd at the Burton doubles (1000pts) with something close to this earlier this year,the knights were in 4's and we used LH,essentially the plan involved skirmishing and keeping the knights out of the way,occasional flank march worked as well,but using the IC to bolster the skirmishers as they become disr,replace with new one then send them back,we didn't lose heavily to any,Bruce came close to it
David

[timmy1]

Having used my Venetian Condotta, I agree with David and Phil, and Hammy. Ave Kn in 4s are dogmeat. Stradiots in 4s are really nice and floating alongside the Kn casn give you the edge against all those in period Superior Kn that you will face.

Have fun, it is a nice army and much much better under FoG

[Scrumpy]

Yup, I had 4 Bgs of 4 avge Kn, they died to a man from shooting and combat.

[fredrik]

Thanks for your helpful remarks everyone, most appreciated!

Regarding the size of the Knight battlegroups: personally I have had a rough time of it with average knights in fours, being disrupted more easily by shooting and simply not having enough strength to survive combat - even if they do they tend to have dropped to three bases after their first combat which means I'm reluctant to commit them again for fear of them losing another base and autobreaking. My biggest concerns are concentrated shooting and superior knights, both of which are abundant in their period foes (and the club armies currently), and I have found the 6-base avg knights to cope rather well with those (not taking my dice rolling into account, I could most likely lose with Königstigers versus Early Libyans considering how I roll... )

The stradiots: Would you prefer to run them as cavalry or light horse? I have used a 4-base LH BG and found them to be somewhat valuable versus opposing avg light horse without combat poas (your average eastern horse archer for instance) but being unprotected they get pounded by most other "combat" LH which tend to be protected. This might be due to the fact that I've only had a single 4-base BG, several units or bigger units might mitigate that problem.

Here's a modified version of the list for venetians outside Italy where I replace the 6-base Cv unit with 12 LH stradiots and 4 Cv stradiots instead:

6 x Men-at-arms: Knights Average/Heavily Armoured/Drilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
6 x Men-at-arms: Knights Average/Heavily Armoured/Drilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
4 x Dalmatian men-at-arms: Superior Average/Heavily Armoured/Undrilled/Lancers/Swordsmen
6 x Mounted Crossbowmen: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Crossbows
6 x Turkish horse archers: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Bows
4 x Handgunners: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Firearm
4 x Handgunners: Light Foot Average/Unprotected/Firearm
6 x Crossbowmen: Medium Foot Average/Protected/Drilled/Crossbows
4 x Stradioti: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Undrilled/Javelins/Light Spear/Swordsmen
4 x Stradioti: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Undrilled/Javelins/Light Spear/Swordsmen
4 x Stradioti: Light Horse Average/Unprotected/Undrilled/Javelins/Light Spear/Swordsmen
4 x Stradioti: Cavalry Average/Unprotected/Undrilled/Light Spear/Swordsmen
1 x Inspired Commander
2 x Troop Commander

I have replaced one 6-base Avg Kn unit with 4 Dalmatian men-at-arms, I have found a 4-base superior undrilled Kn BG to be equivalent if not slightly better than average drilled and significantly cheaper in points. I dropped the LF archers and one LF handgunner unit, and added 3x4 LH stradioti plus one 4-base Cv stradiot battlegroup. This comes to 798 points but brings up the PBI modifier to a healthy +4 and 13 BGs. The question is if I should merge the LH stradiots into two 6-base units instead for better combat efficiency and higher breakpoint though, might be worth considering. What do you think, better or worse?

[rbodleyscott]

being unprotected they get pounded by most other "combat" LH which tend to be protected.

They do? The only Protected light horse with swordsmen capability I can think of are Northern Border horse in English armies. Jinetes are Protected but don't have swordsmen capability which makes them equal to stradiots but not better. Steppe normad LH have swordsmen capability but are not Protected. Hence stradiots are equal to them in melee but have the advantage in the impact phase.

Definitely run most of the stradiots as LH. I prefer them in BGs of 4 but some people like 6s. I agree that if you are using a lot of them, having some of them as cavalry could be useful, and these really must be in 4s. Though I would recommend having them as Protected - for 1 point it is a bargain, and will make them much more scary against enemy LH.

[whitehorses]

Jinettes against Stradiots would be a close call;
Is it worth having Jinettes as armoured, or just keeping them as protected?

[timmy1]

Jinettes as armoured. No other option makes sense.

[nikgaukroger]

I'm pretty unconvinced that Armoured is worth it most of the time.

[paulcummins]

why would you want to spend 3 pts per base (At least 12 per BG) for armour that you will only use in melee against protected LH.
Unless you want to charge protected foot or cav (when you will be down 50% dice anyway)