Britcon 2025 Day 1 - The Early Shatuo Ride Forth

 

The MeG competition at Britcon was on the August bank holiday weekend this year as the BHGS had to change venues at short notice earlier in the year and the date had to change for the usual weekend to the bank holiday which impacted on attendance. However, 14 players made it for 5 rounds of games in Leicester.

I chose to use Early Shatuo and to see what I chose and how they did in the first game, read on ...

Unlike previous Britcon's the theme this year was not "open", but was any army before 987 CE - so still pretty open and a vast number of lists available. This meant the traditional dithering 😂 In the end I got down to 2 lists - Angkor Empire and Early Shatuo. I decided by a coin toss which came up in favour of the Early Shatuo. The list I chose was:

So a horse archer army with what I usually consider the minimum number of Skilled shooting TUGs (3) plus a bonus Skilled shooting SUG, but also with a fairly chunky infantry component that can also operate in terrain that the cavalry don't like so much. It would have been nice for the cavalry part of the army to have another Protected unit, the Unprotected Mongol nobles can be vulnerable if shot at, but you can't have everything and it was an acceptable compromise. Having 2 allies is not an issue as both were Talented thus minimising the risk of either being Hesitant. The Mediocre army commander might look a tad odd, however, in reality it only loses the army 1 PBS card but the extra points were very helpful; the Chinese infantry mitigate against a lot of possible terrain issues that the mediocre general and low PBS cards could cause.

The runners and riders for the competition were:

In my view this was a tough field with no easy matchups all round and the draw could be very important. I did feel when seeing this that maybe a horse archer army was not the greatest choice, but I enjoy them so what the heck 😁 NB in the end Hammy did not play MeG as he "floated" to ReG to even up the numbers in both comps as both had odd entry numbers.

The traditional Friday "play who is available when you turn up" draw matched me up against Dave Parish for the second year in a row. Always a delight to play Dave and we never seem to have a bad game. He was using Classical Indian so would have quite a bit of shooting not to mention elephants, neither of which are good for my army, but not to a degree where I was overmatched in any way.

Apologies in advance in this game for not as many pictures as I would have liked - just forget to take some at times 😕

As would be expected I lost the initial dice roll (Mediocre general and all that). However, the terrain fell quite nicely for me with a few patches of Rough Going; these were mostly on my right flank but there was a patch to my centre-right on my side of the table. I outscouted the Indians by 10% - not much but did mean Dave had to show his hand before I did to some degree which was useful.

The Indians were deployed with a significant number of infantry to their left, although these were not of the best quality and included some rather vulnerable archers. Their main body was to the right of these but somewhat detached so the Indian battleline was not continuous. However, this did include all the most dangerous troops - elephants, Superior chariots and 3 SUGs of light cavalry who had Cantabrian and so could shoot rather well, although at shorter range than my horse archers as they had Javelins not Bows.

I countered this by massing all my cavalry on my left, the Mongols taking the outside with their nobles to the rear to act as a reserve. I placed the Chinese on the right where I planned to attack the weaker Indian foot aggressively. One thing I was grateful for was that the 2 units of Indian Superior chariots had been deployed separately as I felt if they were together they would be quite a problem as they are more resistant to Skilled shooting. I think this was a point where Dave having to deploy first was to my benefit as he was having to cover a number of possible deployment choice on my part and massing the chariots would have significant risks. It looked like this:

Initial moves saw me push strongly on the right as planned and Dave sensibly held back - in fact he withdrew the weak archers as a way of delaying me being able to get to them. Across the rest of the field both armies advanced and I looked to get my shooting into the most effective places whilst avoiding being shot at too much myself. Whilst I could not avoid this entirely, I was able to use my range advantage in places.

Initial shooting was generally favourable to me and on my right the Indians were mostly unable to do much to counter my advancing Chinese, although they were massing considerable shooting against my unit of Spearmen and Archers. However, as it was the Vanguard Swordsmen who I was aiming to do damage with using the other unit as a "shield" for them was fine by me 😊

This is where there was a bit of a photo hiatus 😖

On my right the Vanguard Swordsmen piled into an Indian infantry unit and chewed their way through in a satisfactory manner - they were Melee Expert and the Indians were not and as I has 2x as many troops it was a bit inevitable. The other Chinese unit fulfilled its role as a shield admirably, but was being shot away fairly quickly - but it wasn't an issue.

My shooting on the left was reasonably good with an elephant unit succumbing fairly quickly as they tend to do when shooting is massed against them, especially if it includes Skilled shooters. The chariot unit alongside them was also taking causalities at a nice rate. However, my shooting against the chariots on my left was not as effective with no base losses caused and they were pushing on towards my rear table edge. That said, because of the situation closer to the centre Dave decided that these chariots needed to come to the rescue of his centre which was falling apart and so wheeled them inwards and this allowed me to pretty much surround them with the whole Mongol command - the Mongol nobles moving up for the first time all game.

Unfortunately we now come to the one part of the weekend where I feel I must criticise the BHGS organisers. In previous years the Friday game has run until about 11pm when last bound is called. This year the information in the "joining instructions" email said that this would be 10:30pm although I must confess I had missed that detail, but it was not highlighted. However, it transpired that we had to finish at 10pm which only came to light just before then. This meant some players found their games abruptly cut short to some annoyance. Dave and I were some of those players 😒

However, before we had to stop there was a little more action.

On my right the Swordsmen ran through the weak archers almost as if they weren't there, although inevitably the badly shot up unit of Chinese also broke. In the centre the chariots who had been reduced to 3 bases from 6 also broke. However, that was all we had time for.

The game ended 11-4 to me and, as ever, it was excellent fun playing Dave.

Beer then followed until the early hours ... 🍺🍺🍺