Seljuqs of Rum at Skullrollers 2021 - Round 4

 

We now turn to the second day of the MeG "Skullrollers" event. After two wins and a draw on day one I'm doing pretty well if a bit off the pace of the leaders. So how did the fourth game turn out ...

Again a reminder of my army:

In this game I played James McMeiken who was using a Mauryan Classical Indian:

Tough opponent, especially as I was feeling a bit muzzy on the Sunday morning - think I have reached the age when 3 games in day is pushing it ...

Pretty much everything in his army shoots, and at a greater distance than I do, and being the Mauryan version the infantry are not Tribal and so can manoeuvre reasonably well to boot. On the plus side apart from the elephants none of it is overly strong and my better units can potentially knock lumps out of them.

Despite James having a Talented C-in-C to my Competent I win the PBS dice off and choose to defend in Plains. James manages to get a Deep Water secure flank but otherwise we have no terrain. I think broadly we were both OK with this although I'm sure James wouldn't have minded a few bits of rough going.

I outscouted the Indians by 50% so got a good look at where James was deploying, and we finished deployment with the battlefield looking like this:

I had expected James to put his warwagons on his open flank and so decided that it was not a good idea to flank march, however, they instead were deployed by the river on his left. He was quite sure that this was the right thing to do, I remained unconvinced but happy they were where they were.

Obviously my army is weighted to my left and I fully expected to pull the cavalry on my right to the left wing and, if necessary, abandon the camp to its fate. For once I deployed my heavier cavalry up front as the relatively weak cavalry on James' right, along with the infantry next to them looked a suitable target especially for my Christian mercenaries.

With the aforementioned Sunday morning muzziness I kept for getting to take pictures in this game, not helped that I really needed to concentrate. To compensate here are a few pictures of the armies at deployment:

My ally teased me about whether they would play today, but in the end agreed to. It would have been a significant issue if they hadn't.

Early moves saw the Indians advance cautiously on their right and bit more aggressively on their left where my army was weakest. Unsurprisingly my advance was strongest on my left whilst on the right I immediately started pulling troops back towards my left - no point in delaying this and getting into a traffic jam later on.

Although I had troops, the Christian mercenaries especially, within charge range I decided that it was not yet time to charge and needed to let things develop a bit on my left - mainly I wanted to bring Skilled shooters and the skirmisher horse archers in Cantabrian up to pressure the cavalry unit holding the right of James' line. He prudently withdrew them a bit but I still had some troops within shooting range of them.

Elsewhere the Indians continued their advance on their left, wheeling a bit to start to point at my camp - although the warwagons just trundled forward. My withdrawal of my right wing continued apace.

We now enter a photo-hiatus so here are some closer in pictures from the end of move 2.

In the following couple of moves my Christian mercenaries charge in and fairly quickly break a unit of Indian cavalry and the Javelinmen unit. They then turn to their right and move to be able to charge the flank of the nearest unit of elephants - the latter having been pinned in place by a unit of the mamalik.

You will also note that the other unit of Indian cavalry has also disappeared. They had been ganged up on by the large unit of Skilled shooting Turkmen and the skirmisher horse archers. 5 green dice shooting produced a very lucky 3 Skulls and a Wound to break them in a single shot. Don't give me a good general, give me a lucky one and all that ...

Overall at this stage the battlefield looked like this:

My pulling back of my right wing has now inevitably exposed my camp. This will now be brutally attacked by elephants as this picture shows at the bottom right:

Next move see the Christian mercenaries hit the elephants in the flank and break them on impact, this means they then pursued into the infantry unit next in line - although this wasn't as devastating. They proceeded to break these infantry but then were themselves destroyed by a counter attacking elephant unit. However, by this stage they had destroyed 4 enemy units pretty much on their own - great value for money in anyone's terms.

However, whilst this was happening my camp was well and truly trampled by 2 units of elephants. It didn't need both but they didn't have anything else they could do so why not. The ensuing KaB tests on the whole of my army didn't result in anything catastrophic, thankfully, but I do have to admit to one of the mamalik units being somewhat lucky at this stage as having been reduced to 4 bases it didn't suffer from the KaB for the breaking mercenaries or for the camp being sacked.

At this point I was then able to line these mamalik up to charge a unit of the Indian infantry and also be able to charge it in the flank with a unit of Turkmen. The table looked like this:

Close up of where my camp had been:

I had also teed up to be able to attack the elephants who had broken my mercenaries.

Here I made a mistake that could have been costly. Whilst my mamalik were in a position to charge the elephants in the flank I completely forgot that James would be able to Countercharge them which, with the allowed wheel, would mean that they would not be hit in the flank. As I had also thrown in a unit of Turkmen to try and make the combat quick I was putting 2 units on the line. To make the mistake worse I didn't need to do this and could have stood back and shot them down, but I hadn't realised I was only 1 unit off breaking the Indians so didn't really need to force things. I think I thought we were closer to time being called than we were.

Fortunately my cavalry survived attacking the elephants.

And my attack on the infantry unit broke it quickly.

As you can see the red bannered mamalik continued to be lucky only suffering a single wound from being shot at when they charged and the charge and melee combats. I think James was a bit sick of them by this point ...

The game ended 15-6 to me. A game that turned on the speed with which I broke units on James' right, it would have been quite different if I had done that more slowly.

The final game can be found here.