The Monday Night Group, or at least over half of us, are going to a DBA tournament in February. It's intended to really give DBA (F) a thrashing in terms of the Light Horse amendments ahead of publication. The theme is therefore "Steppe Armies" with a minimum of two Light Horse. So we decided to have a bit of a try out. Probably the first of several. I have two steppe armies, Mongols and Ilkhanids from my "Caucasus collection". They don't get out much as they're both aggressive armies (4 & 3 respectively) and so tend to end up fighting on unfavourable terrain.
You won't be surprised to hear that I do have some issues with a) what is classed as a "Steppe Army" and b) what terrain counts as Steppe.
There are c150 "Steppe Armies" in the DBA 3 army lists, and some of them have fewer LH elements that some of my European armies. Some of them have nothing about them that says "steppe" to me. I faced late Hungarians last night, with War Wagons, Knights (3kn and 6kn), Spears and blades and a few LH. That's an "Edge of Steppe" army at best. I'd say pretty much all of a proper steppe army should be mounted. I predict at the tournament I'm going to face a lot of armies with the minimum 2LH.
Well, enough of that and my holiday snaps, and on with the games.
I took along my Mongols (IV/35), and went with the 50/50 Cv/LH split. Chris had assembled something to make use of the Kushite list (II/46), so he had Cataphracts (4Kn), an Elephant, Pikes and Psiloi. As expected I was attacking, and Chris went with a BUA and a gully to go with the two GH required as standard. I went for a bold set up, splitting my army between the two flanks, so I could do an encirclement with my LH.
First turn is okay, as the LH get to move for 0 PiPs, so I can use what I roll to sort my cavalry line out. Chris takes advantage of the only 1 PiP to move an elephant group concession in turn 1 to get everything going. I may have cocked this up (that cone shaped thing is my Barker Marker).
Oh flip. With only 1 or 2 PiPs the left flanking move is only going slowly. I decided to move up the cavalry, so at least when we started fighting it would be closer to my LH than the baseline. Hopefully.
Chris comes in hard with his Cataphracts, spotting that I'd made a couple of errors. I had surrendered the up slope advantage on my left centre, but crucially I thought he was just out of range, but he wasn't, due to the way group conform rules work. However, his reluctance to commit his LH on his left meant I had an overlap on his General, evening things up a little.
Meanwhile my LH continue their long weary journey round the back of Chris' army. It's keeping the rest of his army in place, but as that's 6 of my elements tying up 5 of his I'm losing on that deal.
A pair of turns on, and things are looking up. My cavalry has been bounced all along the line, but I managed to double on of Chris' LH on my right, drawing first blood. On consideration I am more than happy that my flank movement is keeping Chris' elephant away from the action.
Then I'm round on Chris' other LH elements, and with some results going my way I'm able to get a double overlap on Chris' general as his elephant storms to the rescue.
The elephant pounded into the left flank of my line, killing a Cv element. at the end of Chris' last turn The picture shows the position after it had followed up. Top right you can see I've killed two more LH, and then got a Cv element into the rear of his general. He's double overlapped, fighting up hill, and he's toast.
4:1 to the Mongols, much to my surprise. The result was mainly due to some good combat dice rolling as I never got enough PIPs to get the flanking sweep into action. I'm not convinced it was the best use of those chaps.
Still, a nice win for the Mongols, and I don't often get to say that.
We then swapped round and I faced off against Phil's later Hungarians (IV/43c).
The Hungarians had all the gimmicks, as I said up top. I accordingly brought in my newly painted catapult to deal (partly) with the War Wagon and artillery threat. Despite the Aggression factors being 4:2 in my favour I ended up defending, which was an issue as it meant that Phil could get his match ups sorted. I went for an open battlefield with the terrain in the corners to give more scope to my cavalry.
This photo is several turns in. Having lost the Attacker/Defender roll off, I then rolled 1 PIP for my first turn. Damn. Even with the LH moving for free in round one I was in danger of being swarmed all over on my left whilst the War Wagons and artillery pinned my right. What I did was move some cavalry forwards in preparation to shifting my artillery to where it is in the photo, and then push my right hand LH out wide to hug the table edge.
Phil rolled a 5 or 6 for PIPs and came at me all guns blazing. Metaphorically, as his shooting stuff was out of range, but it all galumphed forwards. Turn two I rolled another 1 for PIPs, which I used to put out a flank guard on my left, as Phil's LH marauded in that direction. Another high number for PIPs and he has me cold, more or less.
At last, some reprieve with a massive three PIPs. With Phil almost on top of me the best I can do is slide the artillery to where I can shoot at the War Wagons and straightened the line a bit.
At this point Phil accused me of being windy for not attacking him. I did find that irritating, as it wasn't for lack of desire..
The combats did go my way. This picture tells me that I've lost one element, a Cv, and Phil has lost two. One of his losses is his 6Kn block so that counts as two. He'd tried to be clever, and had offset his line to my left, to give himself an overlap. This worked, as it killed one of my cavalry units as I said. However, I got a draw against the 6kn, so in my turn I'd been able to flank them, win the dice roll and kill them on the recoil.
This is the end state. Phil got an overlap on my solo LH on the left flank, which was enough to get him a kill. But his attempt to flank my line failed and I was able to get lined up and flank his general element, killing it. Despite only killing three elements, with the 6kn counting double and the general this was a 5:2 win.
I was pleased with that, although I was VERY lucky at times.
Also, Phil's army was illegal as it should have had 2 x 6kn elements. I think he had issues packing his bag for the games as he had to borrow some 3Ax off Steve as well.
So, what did we learn? Well, in resect of the LH amendments I don't know if we learnt very much. Some of the changes didn't come up, like fleeing from shooting when doubled, rather than being killed. Most of us used the 0 PIP first move, but I don't know how much difference that made. In my case I never had enough PIPs to capitalise on it once the game got going. It was interesting to use the Mongols against armies where they are more evenly matched and can play to their strengths, but the outcomes were mostly decided by rolling better dice than use of the new rule changes.
We will be back here again.
Comments
Post a Comment