After a low scoring 3rd game I am definitely in the bottom half of the draw. The last game of the Ribble Rumble matched me up against Matt Poole who was using Chola Empire.
It will include elephants, but we did OK against the last lost so it'll work out alright won't it?
Read on to see if it did ...
For the last time in these reports, my army:
Matt's army, and all those used, can be found HERE.I won the initial dice roll with a Skull and chose to invade. I wanted quite a bit of terrain, not because I wanted to fight in bad terrain per se, but if I could get Difficult Going on the table it would give me a good idea of where the inevitable elephants were likely to be.
We ended up with quite a bit of terrain, however, all the Difficult pieces ended up on the flanks with just a large piece of (elephant friendly) Rough Going in the middle towards the left as I looked at it. Ah well, I tried 😉 However, Matt had to deploy troops before I did and so I could still get a reasonable look at where his elephants were likely to be.
Matt placed 3 groups of elephants each of 4 bases - quite tough. One was Superior and deployed on my left along with a Superior infantry unit to move through the Rough. Tough combination. The other 2 units were towards my right supported by Swordsmen. There was an archer unit on Matt's left which deployed to move into a vineyard - in theory this was a weak unit being Combat Shy, but I wasn't really likely to be able to get at it quickly.
The Koreans formed roughly the centre of my line this time, but the Long Spear cavalry were held back so as to be able to manoeuvre to avoid the elephants. To their right were 2 units of archers and 1 of Japanese cavalry. Their role was to take on one of the elephant units and, hopefully, deal with them through archery. Facing off against the Superior elephants were my spearmen who would hope to win through having 4 times as many bases. More archers including the guard extended the line to my left.
There are some photo gaps for this game; my apologies.
Initially both sides pushed forwards reasonably strongly across the line. A bit more so from me but I think that was due to Matt being a bit restricted by his discs whilst I had sufficient usable ones. He was initially unable to move one elephant unit much and instead had to bring one of his relatively weak cavalry units up to try and push my Japanese cavalry away. Of course this meant I could move archers to shoot at them.
In general I was trying to get my archers shooting as soon as possible. This included pushing the Guard well forward to be able to shoot at Matt's Superior infantry unit to attempt to wear it down somewhat before combat.
Matt was pretty much forced to charge his cavalry at one of my Japanese units. These failed to skirmish far enough and were caught. In the subsequent fight the Chola cavalry did well taking off 2 bases of Japanese before they succumbed and broke. The now badly weakened Japanese cavalry then pursued into a Chola swordsman unit - they were unlikely to last long against them.
The cavalry attach had, however, allowed Matt to advance his tardy elephant unit who were really only faced by 2 archer units now which improved his odds. In the centre another elephant unit was being skirmished with by the Korean Nomad cavalry. Although they were doing little damage, and lost a base themselves, they were occupying the elephants.
On my left the Guard shot away a base of the Superior infantry and, thanks to good discs, my spearmen and the Korean infantry fell back to draw on the Superior elephants.
Somehow the Japanese cavalry fighting the swordsmen weren't broken (although they were reduced to 3 bases) and could break off to safety.
On my right, thanks to good discs and generals being with the units, my archers could fall back in front of the advancing elephants and so get a shot or 2 more in before any melee would happen. As they need a Red to fall back (or Yellow with a general) I was fortunate here.
In the centre the elephants again charged my Nomad cavalry who just evaded, ending with the elephants almost in contact. However, this allowed my Long Spear cavalry to move up into a position to charge the elephants in the flank in the following turn when I would be the Active player and so be able to get my charge in first. I was pleased how that worked out and, IMO, rewarded a bit of patience.
On my left the Chola Superior elephants advanced right up to the spearmen - we'd be fighting in the next turn, there was now no way to avoid it. At the same time the Korean infantry moved up to fight some more Cholas swordsmen. Again, fighting was inevitable now.
The next few moves would basically decide the game.
Definitely a photo gap here I'm afraid; so a couple of moves of action lead to the next one.
As you can see from the next picture, something has happened to Matt's elephants. They have all been removed from the table. This is the story ...
The elephants with my cavalry on their flank were destroyed in the charge phase. I could get 2 files into contact but also rolled good dice. The cavalry pursuit then took them into a position with a Chola swordsmen unit on their flank, however, as this was not wholly behind the flank the cavalry could Countercharge when charged and fight the infantry frontally. Because of this they did a lot of damage to the swordsmen and this is what you see in the picture below.
Further right, another elephant unit charged into my archers. Matt's combat dice were woeful and I seemed to roll a Wound on every White die I rolled. The elephants were thus destroyed. Ouch.
The Superior elephants did no better with their dice rolls, and my spearmen did what the archers did. Each of my spearmen units lost 1 base to the elephants, but the elephants were broken. Ouch again.
All 3 elephant units were destroyed in the same turn 😲
The Chola SUperior infantry suffered from archery from the Guard which slowed them so they took 1 more move than expected to reach combat, and when they did they also couldn't roll combat dice.
The only bright spot for Matt was that the swordsmen fighting the Korean infantry were holding their own with both sides taking damage.
Next move saw the collapse of the Chola. The Korean cavalry finished off the swordsmen they were fighting aided by a flank charge by a unit of archers, and the Superior infantry died ignominiously to the spearmen they were fighting.The score was 15-0 to me and Matt can feel justifiably very hard done to by that.
That propelled me to the dizzy finishing position of 9th out of 20. Upper mid-table mediocrity 😂
All in all it was an extremely fun competition with an unusual theme that worked very well. I enjoyed using the Yamato Era Japanese and they ended up doing better than I thought they would.
And finally, some additional pictures of the armies as they were deployed.
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