Genius Tactician - DBA Thursday

Chris K has been running what he calls a DBA campaign on and off on Thursdays for the last few months. He admitted today that it is a loose campaign with the battles we fight retro fitted into the outline after he has the results.

My South East Asian armies - Khmer, Siamese and Burmese - have featured without me, as I have been otherwise engaged, and the Burmese have performed very well.  This week I was able to find the time to get over there and join in.

As well as me, Chris was hosting Richard from the MNG and Phil. Recognising that the Burmese had been all conquering I put the Khmer on the table instead, an army I have had spectacularly poor performances out of.

I fought Phil in game one, using an army I didn't recognise. It had hoplites and knights. The terrain layout is confusing a bit. Everything to the right of the blue line which has the ship in it is water, and so impassable. The hill is difficult ground, and the other terrain is a marsh. I was attacking, and completely misread the set up. I put everything in the wrong place, including my bolt thrower (which is mounted on an elephant but isn't one) on a hill where it effectively couldn't hit anything and couldn't really move. My left centre is elephants, including my General, which I also started on the difficult hill, so giving me even more mobility issues. My right is held by solid auxilia, and were screened by psiloi. The psiloi have run away behind them when seeing what they were faced with. My left is cavalry and fast auxilia.

Phil helped me by rolling 1 (one) for his first three goes for his PIPs. I rolled higher numbers, and started to move things around. All of my kit is in the wrong place, and the impending match ups are horrible.

Fortunately I got lucky. Phil came in a bit too close on my left, but not close enough, and with a 6 on the PIP dice I was able to swap my elements round to get better matchups. 

When it came to rolling the combat dice I once again proved the point I've made several times. Mostly it don't matter a whole hill of beans what you roll for your PIPs if you roll high on your combat dice. 

Which I did. I killed four elements in a turn, partly with some neat positioning, but mainly by just rolling 5s and 6s. The game last about 10 minutes once we started moving.

Needless to say, Chris and Richard were still in the early stages of their game, so Phil and I changed our armies and had a second game.

This time I took my Siamese, and Phil swapped some stuff round, including using some unfinished figures and came up with an army with elephants, heavy and light cavalry and spears (pikes). I think they were Massagatae and Mountain Indian allies, hence the elephant and spears. We were not well matched in historical terms, there being over a 1,000 years between the armies.

I was defending and put out as much jungle stuff as I could (no waterway this time). My army is mostly fast auxilia with elephants, some cavalry and some bow. As Phil deployed I could see from where he put his psiloi that he had a cunning plan.

He was luckier on PIPS, but not so much on combat dice, although I did lose an element or two. One of my elephants stormed across the board, pushing back the psiloi, and surviving a flank attack from Phil's elephant. In the bottom centre you can see the gap where Phil's double depth pikes have been destroyed. 

Eventually my elephant did a pushback too far, and lost to the psiloi, being "quick killed". Ugh. Still, over on the right my psiloi doubled his light horse, and then on the left my auxilia pushed either some bows or auxilia off the edge of the table (grey and blue zone to the left), followed by me destroying the unit next to them because I now had an overlap. Another win to me, which Phil described as "cheesy", although I would put it mainly down to a slightly better deployment, and rolling better dice in the combats.

Game three, and we swapped opponents. I was now facing Richard, using Chris' Tibetans. To mix it up even further I pulled out my Normans, who haven't seen the light of day for ages, on the pretext that I was Crusading troops stopping the Tibetan hordes sweeping into Europe with an attack of aggressive Buddhism. As you can see the Tibetans have maxed out on cataphracts (Kn4). As my army is based upon a DBA v1 army pack I had insufficient numbers of heavy horse to match him with knights (Kn3) so I had my left flank secured with dismounted knights (4Bd). The terrain deployment enabled us to have a clear open plain to fight on. As I had to deploy first, Richard was able to overlap my right, and for some reason I couldn't fathom had tucked some of his Kn4 behind the flanks. Perhaps he was intending to expand them out when the time was right.

I can't remember everything that happened. My crossbows on my right managed to survive being surrounded by light horse, bouncing them off.

The double banked Kn4 came unstuck on my left. I hit them frontally with my knights, flanking them with some bowmen. The combat rolls came up with equal scores. Under one of those quirky DBA 3.0 things that means that Kn4 recoil from Kn3, and were thus destroyed, due to being flanked, also taking their chums behind with them.

I had also been able to get my blades into the flank of Richard's line, and so destroyed the end cataphracts, only this time with a conventional Recoil result. The next combat also went my way with a double, due to the overlap just created. Another win. This one also had a fair amount of good dice in it, but Richard did make a couple of tactical blunders, which is unusual for a player who is normally so careful and calculating of the odds. I think he was so worried by the quick kill option for Bd v Kn that he inadvertently created another quick kill situation.

So that means in the last six games of DBA I have played, including Will's birthday party last year I have won all of them, mostly by luck. Admittedly this time I didn't pull of 3 x 4-0 wins, but my first game did finish in 10 minutes.

Truly I am a tactical genius. As long as I roll a lot of sixes. I really do need to hang up my spurs now. I must be heading for a sequence of sound thrashings.