Over the weekend of the 14th and 15th June at Battlefield Hobbies in Daventry, UK, 22 MeG players took part in an "armies and enemies" of the Persians competition.
I took a C4th CE Imperial Roman army and to see how they fared in the first two games read on ...
The list I took was:
This is more cavalry oriented than Imperial Roman armies I have used previously, and this was partly driven by wanting to use newly painted figures that work for the Armenian cavalry as much as anything 😎 I am not convinced the guard are good value, partly as the C-in-C needs to directly command them, but decided what the hell and took them anyway. I went with the bolt shooters in the average legions as the theme could throw up quite a few elephants and catafracts and these are useful against those. They curtail movement but it is an acceptable trade off in my view, and you can voluntarily drop them if you feel you need to move faster.
All the lists used at the weekend can be found HERE.
The first round draw saw a civil war against one of the other two Imperial Roman armies in the competition; this one was led by Gareth Evans and was much more infantry oriented.
The PBS saw me defending and I aimed to get as open a table as possible to allow my cavalry room to operate. This worked as we ended up with just one terrain piece, a gentle hill on the table. I outscouted Gareth by 10% which, whilst a small amount, did give me the advantage of seeing his troops before mine to some degree. Gareth deployed in a strong defensive position on his left flank and I deployed to push against the right end of his line with my infantry whilst holding the Armenians back to see where they would be of most use. It looked like this:
My initial moves were to advance the legions (with the guard on the left of the line) and push my Roman cavalry forward on the right fairly aggressively towards where Gareth had sent his skirmishing cavalry. I was hoping to draw the attention, to a degree, of the better legions that Gareth had on his left. Gareth was clearly happy for me to come to him and only pushed forward a little.
The next move I charged, caught and destroyed a unit of the skirmishing cavalry with my scholae whilst continuing my advance with my infantry. I also put some pressure on the other skirmisher cavalry with my small equites unit and the archers and decided to start to move the bulk of the Armenians to my right to add more pressure. Gareth formed one of his superior legions into orb in anticipation that they were at risk of being outflanked.
The following move was more general advancing by myself. I did, however, try one "clever" thing. As one of the skirmishing cavalry I was facing was sitting just in front of a couple of legionary units I decided to charge them with my small equites unit - as they would have to skirmish or run away this would mean them bursting through the legions with a KaB test resulting. Amusingly the shooting at my cavalry was rather good with 2 of the 4 bases removed, and the skirmishers rolled so low that they failed to burst through the legions ... ho hum 😆 The equites would be destroyed the following turn.
The next couple of moves saw my guard infantry get into combat with one of Gareth's average legions and totally fail to make any impact despite their quality advantage - in fact they got the worse of the exchange. Better results were obtained with the scholae and an Armenian unit getting stuck into a legion on my right
The guard continued to fight sluggishly over the subsequent turns, but the cavalry on the right broke the legion they were fighting and the scholae pursued into, and broke, a unit of archers who were behind the legion.
However, we ran out of time shortly after this and the game ended 9-7 and the guard still hadn't broken their opponents (although they now had the upper hand, just ...).
The second round draw pitched me against Ian Newell who was using Early Byzantine in a very useful configuration IMO.
I again defended and went for Mountains terrain in order to restrict the field against and army that had quite a lot of useful mounted. We ended up with forests on my left flank and another on my right with a nice open space in the middle. I outscouted the Byzantines which was helpful, but only in a minor way as I think our deployments were fairly obvious.
I deployed my infantry on the left to go through the forest with all the cavalry between them and the forest on my right. My scholae were on the right of the infantry as a strong unit covering their flank. The Byzantines were deployed more or less the same. They had a Sabir opposite my legions and cavalry extending to their left. We both had Armenian allies and they were facing each other on my right. It looked like this:
The game was not a complicated affair, but no less enjoyable; it is nice to have a good old fashioned straight up fight from time to time 😁
Ian advanced all along the line with the cavalry inevitably getting a little ahead of the infantry. I pushed the legions, including the guard through the forest but held back the cavalry to begin with. On my left the fight was going to be pretty even. I had the guard and integral shooters in the other units so would hope to do damage in the charge phase and then the guard to tip things in the melee, but the Sabir units were larger.
The infantry clash happened first. There was a Sabir cavalry unit on this flank and my left hand legion had to charge them before they could get into the Sabir infantry. The Sabir cavalry had their targeting sorted and threw 3 wounds; although I could remove the odd one, this wasn't a good thing for the upcoming fight.
On my right I still held back a couple of the Armenian units but did advance others and the legion which wasn't facing the Sabir - these instead faced off against the Byzantine boukellarioi.
We now had a few turns where the infantry fight rolled back and forth. It started off favouring Ian and I was thinking it could all go badly rather quickly. However, as is often the case, it then swung back to me and Ian later said he thought he was going to lose it. I must comment that just like in the first game the guard definitely underperformed, and they were where I was looking to win this fight.
In the end on this flank I broke two of the three Sabir units whilst losing the guard and a legion. The remaining legion was one would from breaking as was the surviving Sabir infantry unit. However, as the Sabir cavalry were still there and undamaged, my legion's fate was obvious.
On the right my scholae and an Armenian cavalry unit had charged two Byzantine cavalry units. Sadly (for me) neither exactly performed as well as expected (damn those dice 😆). We had also teed up a clash between our Armenian cavalry facing each other on the right.
Failed to take more pictures after this, however, the action was pretty straight forward and quite brutal.
Everything that could charge an enemy on both sides did so. In a flurry of dice over the next move or so a whole raft of units on both sides broke. A few from casualties in combat, but as many from the KaB tests for seeing friends broken as they had been battered in the fighting.
And suddenly it was all over with a 10-15 score line. Hugely enjoyable game as is usually the case when Ian and I play.
So, 19 points on the day saw me well off the pace but with two more games on the Sunday a leap up the table was quite possible.
The Sunday games will appear soon.
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