After a busy weekend away we went back to a bit of DBA this Tuesday, providing Chris with some more battles for the increasingly bizarre narrative for his Mappa Mundi campaign. I've recently finished some WotR pikemen, so I took along what DBA calls the Henry Tudor Army. As opponents, should they be needed, I took another DBA WotR army making use of the Knight options to provide a Richard III Bosworth type set up.
With five of us in total I sat out the first game, before bringing out Henry T to take on Steve's late Northern Welsh.
I was defending, and set up with my longbow units to fold out to provide more width. Steve, with pretty much an entirely "Fast Pike" army obliged me by setting up in a two deep mass in the centre of the table.
PiP issues meant I was able to fold out on the left but not advance. I moved my general across to behind my artillery to plug the gap should things go badly.
Steve managed to cross the open ground without taking any shooting hits of consequence. He's given me a free overlap on my right by letting his psiloi lag behind, if only I can close the gap.
As expected I lost the artillery as I wasn't able to even get a single recoil. More successful with the longbows on my left.
Then it all collapsed for Steve fairly quickly. By bouncing his knights out of the TZ I was able to detach a rear rank of pikes to flank the end of his line, and shooting hits opened up the other end so I could flank that too. That gave me a 6:1 victory in just under 30 minutes.
Next we swapped round and I fought Tim with the Bosworth Yorkists.
To cut a long story short this game just went on and on. It took us 50 minutes to get to a conclusion. The armies cause each other to get little recoils all along the line, so moving forwards safely requires a load of PiPs. Mine can't deploy out wide which means it takes a while to get into place. Tim's has a unit of Cv so it can use a bit of the flank area, but even so.
Skip to the end and I lost 4:1 after a dreary slog fest, even by the standards of WotR armies in DBA. Dice Rolls were relentlessly even handed (except for when Tim's archers shot my Artillery). Bases kept recoiling each other. My blades couldn't even kill a bow unit when they had an overlap.
If I'd been a head at any point I'd have called it a day and offered to pack up. However Tim was marginally ahead most of the time and as he's still a newbie at this and very rarely beats me I didn't want to deny him the joy of a well earned win. So we slugged it out until Good King Richard, supported by his Stanley allies, finally defeated the Franco-Welsh Usurper.
Then it was time to go home to bed.
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