Slitherine

A Scots Army of 10 units faced an Abbassid army of eights units. Forces were as follows:
Scots:
3 Longbow units
1 Dismounted HA Knights
1 Dodgy Ribauld unit
and 5 spear units.

Abbassids
2 armoured lancer units
2 defensive spear units with light bow support
1 armoured Dailami unit
1 armoured abna unit
and two units of lh bows.

The main actions of interest were:
A light horse bow unit being decimated by longbow.
The dailami and abna mincing two bow units
A Scot's offensive spear unit with a lot of luck breaking a defensive spear unit
and the two lancer units having a pretty much drawn impact and combat with a scot's sp.

Being on our third game we now find that only minimal reference to the rules is necessary with the play sheets being the main source. Rule referral tended to being restricted to those weapons or situation we had not encountered before. Having said this we did forgot about cohesion tests for friendly breaks - this needs to go on the play sheets.
We did not finish the game but this was mainly because we only had a few hours and tended to discuss the realism of situations arising. There is no doubt that in a competition situation the game would have been well finished well before regulation time.
The game was good fun and indeed Hunter who plays nothing else but dbm normally said at the end that he had no enthusiasm to go back to it.

Comments on troops etc are as follows:

Unarmoured horse with bows are a nightmare if they go anywhere near anyone else with a missile weapon. They have moved from the dbm situation of gving two fingers to everyone to a position of I am not sure what use they provide. They can certainly slow undrilled troops who want to wheel at close range but the one unit last night when shot at wpould have been to auto rout in two moves had not they rolled a six each time for death rolls for five casualties.

Protected Longbows seem weak to me in comparison with historical performance. They had three or four shots at medium Abbassid foot without casuing disruption or element loss and went down in droves in melee. Not sure how they would have a chance against ha french dismounted knights. Having said this classing Scot's common longbows as average seems over the top.

Supporting archers behind defensive spear seem to effective in impact. 12 offensice spear charged 12 defensive spear with 6 supporting bows. This resulted in the Scots rolling 12 dice and the Abbassids 18. My Scots were really lucky and won but not likely in most situations. Bearing in mind that in a firing phase these guys would need a miracle to cause a cohesion test they seem over effective in impact. I know you do not want to complicate things but should the impact be varied depending on the troop type they are helping to defend against. For example I would imagine lightly armoured lancers would be at greater risk than a mass of dismounted and heavily armoured knights.

We used counters to highlight disruption etc and found this far easier than using uneven bases etc.

Two games planned for Wednesday and Thursday next week.
John

Thanks John, interesting battle report. Just a couple of points. (I will e-mail you later re Nik's reply to your comments on Scots archers)

marshalney2000 wrote:Unarmoured horse with bows are a nightmare if they go anywhere near anyone else with a missile weapon.

I hope you did not count the bows as ++ against them. There are no missile POAs vs unprotected LH or LF.

Supporting archers behind defensive spear seem to effective in impact. 12 offensice spear charged 12 defensive spear with 6 supporting bows. This resulted in the Scots rolling 12 dice and the Abbassids 18.

The Abbasids should have had 15 dice. The supporting bows are LF so halve their dice vs non-skirmishers.

Richard

Thanks for your prompt reply.
We did not count any poas and the shooting was on straight 4's to hit. The shooting was at long range against 6 figures with an overlap of two bases on each side giving 20 figures throwing 10 dice averaging 5 hits per shoot
Re supporting bows the play sheet under impact supporting fire would tend to suggest 1 dice per base. Agree that shooting is one per two bases for skirmish foot. Am I missing something?
Hope this clarifies
John

marshalney2000 wrote: Re supporting bows the play sheet under impact supporting fire would tend to suggest 1 dice per base. Agree that shooting is one per two bases for skirmish foot. Am I missing something?

Yes, it is one dice per base, but skirmishers always use half normal dice when in close combat with non-fragmented non-skimishers.
I would refer you to a page, but I do not have the rules with me. It is also shown on the ref sheet.

Perhaps we need to make it clearer.

marshalney2000 wrote:We did not count any poas and the shooting was on straight 4's to hit. The shooting was at long range against 6 figures with an overlap of two bases on each side giving 20 figures throwing 10 dice averaging 5 hits per shoot

Ouch. But why use the LH 1 rank deep?

I think using lh 1 rank deep was old DBM thinking on Hunter's part whichI suppose is inevitably still in our minds when we play the new rules.
Thanks for putting me right on skirmishers. I agree perhaps some way of making this clearer would be helpful.

Another area which would be helpful on the playsheet is the different impact of terrain. I realise this would be an additional sheet but at least this could be two two sided laminated sheets.
John