ToIL 2025 - Great Seljuq Empire Day 2

 As usual March saw the regular ToIL early medieval MeG competition taking place at Boards & Swords Hobbies in Derby and I took the Great Seljuq Empire. On the first day I had suffered a big loss and gained a big win to leave me on 17 points (from a possible 30) and distinctly mid-table.

To see if could improve on that on day 2 read on ...

Recap of the list I took:

The draw matched me against Paul Cummins who was using an Early Medieval French. I knew he had a Viking ally so it was reasonably good charging cavalry with a tough infantry component.

Paul won the initial dice off and chose to defend. However, his pre-battle cards were poor and I managed to ensure we played on an open table - there was just 1 piece of terrain on my right which was of no consequence in the game. I out scouted the French by 60% and so Paul had to deploy a lot of his army up front. He deployed his Vikings in the centre with cavalry on each wing. As I felt his right was weaker than his left I concentrated my army on that flank with one unit of my mamalik and horse archers on my right to delay his left.

It looked like this:

Paul was to be constrained by poor cards (well, discs) all throughout the game and this started in move 1 - his ally was nearly hesitant for a start and had consistently rubbish command meaning they contributed very little.

I advanced all across my line and was rapidly in shooting range. Given his discs Paul felt he couldn't try anything too clever and that trying would just play into my hands - I tend to agree.

My initial shooting was reasonably effective and most of my troops could successfully evade from Paul's charges. The one exception was the Sultan's guard who had clearly decided that standing and fighting was the future. We then had a dramatic and brief combat between them and one of Paul's better cavalry units which saw us roll 6 Skulls out of 9 dice on Green dice - both units broke at the same time ... We were a bit stunned to be honest. The French right flank was now rather exposed.

Any chance Paul had to extract his troops were well and truly stymied by his discs, as was any chance of him putting much pressure on me.

I cleaned up 3 more of his cavalry units in short order. One of these also burst through one of the Viking units when it broke which chipped a bit off them with the KaBs as well. On my right my delaying troops were also shooting well and another of the French cavalry units was looking ropey. All going well for me.

I now enveloped the exposed right flank of the French, attacking the isolated Viking unit there. Shooting and a charge from my mamalik reduced them to very nearly broken. Paul did finally get some recompense for hanging in there as best he could. A unit of French cavalry broke the mamalik on my right and closed in towards the camp. But I had taken out another French cavalry as well.

The following move saw the end as I charged the Vikings front and rear, breaking them and the French army.

15-4 to me.

Sunday afternoon and game 4 pitched me up against David Gollop who was using Feudal Castile and Leon - so again I could expect charging cavalry and stodge infantry, probably with some annoying missile foot as well.

David won the initial dice roll and chose to defend, clearly looking for terrain to hamper my horse archers. Whilst we ended up with a secure flank on my right the table was, thankfully, mainly open with plenty of room for my cavalry 😁 On top of that I wholly outscouted the Spanish so they had deploy their entire army first. David put his infantry on his left and cavalry bar 1 unit on the right with a single unit of shooters in between them - I felt that as he had 2 units of these they should have been deployed together as this would have caused me possible issues. I, obviously, deployed heavily to my left rather as in the morning game - felt a bit unoriginal, but why change a winning formula ...

I'm afraid that I managed to forget to take pictures for much of this game; probably because it was a cracker 😎

David chose to advance aggressively at me on my left - he wanted to cut down as many opportunities for me to get "clever" here and trust in the fighting abilities of his cavalry. His infantry would wheel inwards and try and get into the game and the one cavalry unit on his left would push towards my camp to pressure my delaying right wing. I was happy enough with him doing this as I was able to advance to shoot immediately and arrange my cavalry to maximise the chances of my skirmishing not getting caught.

Results were mixed. In a scene reminiscent of the game in the morning my Sultan's guard ended up in a fight with a Spanish cavalry unit and came off decidedly second best breaking quite quickly - but this time they inflicted on minor losses.

However, a mamalik unit which also ended up in combat did the opposite and broke the Spanish for only a couple of bases loss. Green vs. Green can be very swingy ...

I managed to contain and break 2 other cavalry units but to do so I had to deliberately sacrifice a couple of my own units. However, this felt like a good exchange as it meant that I had cleared away all the Spanish right flank which exposed the infantry. On the other hand the cavalry unit on David's left was starting to get rather close to my camp and I was not quite getting the cards I needed to counter it.

It all started to go a bit awry at this point. My camp went down and the resulting KaBs took another unit as this had been badly damaged earlier in the game, being reduced to 3 bases from 6. I was only 1 unit from breaking but needed 2 of David's.

I had to somewhat regroup by pulling troops back a bit and making sure the horse archers had plenty of evade room. Fortunately we had been cracking on pretty well and so time was not an issue.

I managed to mass my mamalik who charged into one of the Spanish spearmen units and broke it. We were both now 1 unit from victory/defeat. Another infantry unit was also a bit isolated as David had had to take his last cavalry unit back towards his lines to drive off soe of my troops and try and get at my troops.

The isolated Spanish spearmen fell the following move to a combination of Skilled shooting and a flank charge by horse archers and this broke the Spanish army.

So I won 15-10 in what was a cracking game, the best of the weekend.

This left me on 47 points from a possible 60 and 4th place out of 22. Not bad at all after the poor start 😁