Manlii v Julii Game 12

Game 12 – Byzantine Era 6: Late (fractured) empire

Late Imperial Byzantine (Gordon 6,500 pts) v Early Ottoman Turkish (Alec 6,750 pts)

Minor defence 1361 CE (MeG Magna, 22-Mar-2023).

Battlefield Effects: Byzantines: Quality/Cohesion variations

The Plan (penned in advance of the battle)

This is a MeG Magna game where we’ll be testing out the green Death Die house rule again. In addition Gordon has the Battlefield Effect - Quality/cohesion variations; the first time that category of Battlefield Effect has come up.

As the attacker I have to push the game to a conclusion as it’s a Minor Defence and Gordon will get a Prestige Point for a draw. The early Ottoman Turkish army includes lots of Turcoman Ghazis – horse archers, most of which are skilled shooters. I will have to try to shoot the Byzantines to death and then charge in to finish them off. Simples!

That’s the plan!

The Battle

Gordon got the better MeG pre-battle system cards so managed to get the terrain density he wanted, in fact outmanoeuvring me at every turn. He went for a deep water secure flank; however we both managed to remove most of our opponent’s pieces only leaving a field in my left rear. See battlefield below:

 

With a scouting score of five to his three it was no surprise that I did slightly better on the scouting cards so Gordon had to place 20% of his army first enabling me to match his units as they went down. He decided to place his infantry by the river and his cavalry to their left. I matched this with my infantry lurking in front of the ploughed field on my left, but as I had a larger army I was able to place a three TUGs of Ghazis in skirmish formation on my extreme right after he had run out of troops to match them and kept my best Sipahis in reserve in the centre, see the position after deployment below:

 

At this point Gordon revealed his Battlefield Effect chit and upgraded two of his average quality Stratiotai lancer cavalry to superior after motivating them with a stirring pre-battle speech – nice.

I was somewhat bemused by his deployment as he didn’t have enough units to advance and cover his flanks at the same time so would not be able to use his better lance-equipped cavalry without exposing their flank badly. Accordingly I stuck with my game plan thoughts and placed several of my flexible cavalry in skirmish formation ready to move forward and cause mayhem.

 My first turn cards weren’t great but I managed to push forward my right-wing enough to give him pause for thought. By turn two we were in shooting and charge range on my right, but not on my left as I held my outnumbered infantry back somewhat. See below picture:

 

Gordon decided to charge in order to stop me just sitting in front of him and firing away. I evaded away and was averagely lucky on the shooting dice but did do well against his sole average quality cavalry TUG, taking off first one base then another. By charging, Gordon began to reveal his flanks and realised the peril his cavalry were facing – two of my flexible cavalry TUGs were already behind his line on my extreme right as you can see from the following picture.

 

When I hit his damaged unit again wiping it out, Gordon realised that as he was outnumbered six TUGs to two on his left flank; and as one of his units on that flank was already seriously depleted and both looked like they were about to be surrounded he lost heart and called it a day. The final position was as below.

 

Gordon's comments

Pre-Game

The Battlefield Effect looks to be very powerful so I bid low for the Byzantines, and get them.

As Byzantine I have an interesting choice of troop types. Given I will be fighting a mass of horse archers I expect to get shot to pieces if I go for too many cavalry with no shooting ability. I have only coastal terrain, so should be able to shut down one flank, but even so. There are some interesting foot archers and light infantry to choose, so I choose them: they might frighten and even harm his horse. Unless of course they move to maximum charge range and simply ride down all my archers. So, a unit of spearmen to give me some chance. So: three units of foot archers, one of spearmen, two of skirmishing foot archers.

For a battle winner I take some superior cataphracts and three charging lancer cavalry, three of the units are melee experts.

And four professional generals to try to take advantage of his being all intuitive. With a command range of 5 units, he might be forced into having to make some unenviable choices if I can get at him relatively unscathed.

 The game

My first thought was to write no more than: “the less said the better”. However:

Deep water flank shuts down one area of outflanking risk. I need rough terrain to give my archers some chance of survival, but everything I place gets removed. A very small consolation is that the same happens to Alec, bar one irrelevant field.

The Battlefield Effect allows me to upgrade two units. Hurrah! I now have three units of superior cavalry. I might be able to balance any inferior numbers.

I have a choice of putting my infantry in the centre and dare him to attack them or of protecting them with the river and massing them on that flank. I choose to protect them but deploy them so that they can also advance with an option to wheel to the centre (assuming Alec does nothing to stop that or gets unlucky in the face of massed archers).

The cavalry deploy immediately adjacent to the infantry. This leave a large part of the table for him to manoeuvre. He will then be able to outflank me but there won’t be anyone there. The plan is that the cavalry will advance slowly to protect the infantry flank and wait until he gets close enough that I can then in turn get close to his units so that a charge has some chance of hitting the target. I should beat him in combat, although the first round will be close. Also, he might have some difficulty getting all his units into a position to shoot at mine.

And then it all went wrong.

I forget that horse arches shoot further than in ADLG (a recurring theme this) so advanced closer than I needed to without being close enough to be a charge threat: he killed a cavalry base.

Next turn he closed the range on my left flank and I decided to pass before I had moved more than one or two units. I can only assume the cold I had was causing hallucinations as well as an achy back and a runny nose.

Anyway, next turn I declared a couple of charges with the units in charge range: the left flank took no casualties but didn’t connect (see above about needing to get very close to be a real risk to skirmishing cavalry); the other got shot to pieces and the unit broke.

I had blown it by then so conceded. (Camp open to attack in two or three turns, infantry too far back to be of use; cavalry outflanked in centre).

 Post-Game

I lost badly. 

 Result

Ottoman win - Minus two Prestige points to the Julii