Khitan Liao at Burton - was Badcon bad for the Liao, or good, or just mediocre? (Game 2)

Following a victory over the Tribal Mongols in game one, game two faced me off against John Munro who was using Khawarij. In recent games John leads me 2-1; can I drag it back to 2-2 ...

For a reminder here is my Khitan Liao army:

The Khawarij is a fairly straight forward army consisting of cavalry who are either standard Aran Long Spear types or Charging Lancers, and a mass of foot who are similar to the Arab Conquest foot but not as good.

I defended and we ended up with a table devoid of terrain apart from a Deep Water secure flank. I outscouted John by 50%, but in all honesty I'm not sure it made that much difference. John's army was quite large, but did not quite fill the table - but significantly more than my army did. At the start of the first move it looked like this:

John has three units of Long Spear cavalry on each wing with 7 units of infantry between them - only two troops types in the army. I have stacked my army to the left with the heavier cavalry and all the Skilled shooters on that flank. The units on the right are just to delay things as best they can. John's plan is, obviously, to apply pressure all along the line and more or less push me off table.

The game opened as you might expect. The Khawarij advanced strongly across the line and I moved my troops up to be able to shoot at them.

Retrospectively I did wonder if John should have pushed harder with his cavalry on his left even if these slowed up his foot - their greater move may well have put more pressure on my right. However, this was a post battle thought so I obviously didn't see John's tactics as wrong during the game.

Unlike the last game my shooting opened up well; a sample shot, four wounds from five White dice on one of John's foot units:

Hand to hand combat soon ensued - much earlier than it would have with other horse archer armies, however, as the Liao heavies cannot skirmish due to the ArmHrs once they are in shooting range they have to fight unless they can Fall Back.

However, I have a qualitative advantage and have a good run of dice. Here I have reduced one of the Khawarij cavalry units and an infantry unit each to four bases - the infantry are thus just a Wound of breaking having started with eight bases. Across my two units I have lost a base and a couple of wounds.

I soon break both of the units, however, whilst this is going on John's other two cavalry on that flank break my second Superior Ordo cavalry unit rather against the odds - especially as I had Skilled shooting in support. Ah well, as I said in Part 1 luck dos tend to even out.

So a move or so later it all looks like this:

Whilst the Khawarij have nothing strong to face where they have won on their extreme right, I am not too bothered as both the units that beat my Superiors have been reduced to three bases - one Wound from breaking - and I have two Skilled shooting units in the area who I think can finish them off. I also have another of John's infantry a Wound off breaking and the right of his infantry line is looking a tad exposed.

On the other hand my right is under a lot of pressure. The unit on my right is heavily outnumbered and will shortly only escape from the onrushing horde of cavalry by rolling a 6 on a Run Away move otherwise it was toast.

The game now became a race. Could I exploit my significant advantages on my left before John could exploit his on my right?

It started well by the weakened infantry unit being broken and some good shooting on the most exposed unit of Khawarij foot - Skilled shooters were helpful here. However, the two three base units of cavalry refused to take the necessary wounds.

Pressure mounted on my right and the table edge was coming into play ...

The whole game now seemed to be compressed into a small area in the vicinity of my camp.

I have finally broken the two cavalry units that were on my left (just out of the above shot) but my right is in a lot of trouble. However, the horse archers who extracted themselves with a lucky 6 now proved highly resilient to John's cavalry attacking them and held on for a couple of moves before breaking - John's combat dice were really bad here.

The game ended when I broke another infantry unit with a flank attack, if that had not worked John's flank attacks on my cavalry would have won him the game.