Manlii v Julii Game 46

Game 46 - Roman Era 1: Early Republic

Tullian Roman (Gordon 172 pts) v Italic Tribes - Aequi (Alec 180 pts)

Minor invasion 400 BCE (ADLG Std, 24-Apr-2024)

Battlefield Effects: None

The Plan (penned in advance of the battle)

The current Prestige Point score in this era is three to one in favour of the Manlii. A Roman Minor Invasion event was rolled against the Aequi Italic hill tribe at 180 army points. On completion of bidding I let Gordon have the Romans at 172 points. Whilst it would have been better for me to be the Romans, as I would have still been ahead in Prestige Points even on a loss, I felt going lower would have been too much of a disadvantage in the only Region option when fighting Italic hill tribes - Mountain. If Gordon wins he could tie the score but a heavy infantry army achieving a victory against medium infantry in mountains whilst at a deficit of eight points is going to be a hard task to pull off, so I’m confident of my chances for success.

The main troop type for the Aequi are the infantry warrior units which can all be plain medium swordsmen or can all have the impetuous characteristic; a minimum of six must be taken and four may be upgraded to elite. Given that the Roman infantry in this Era are all heavy spearmen I’ve decided that, on balance, using the swordsmen with the impetuous characteristic gives me the best chance of success as spearmen don’t cancel the initial impact effects of that characteristic (like swordsmen do). The downsides of the impetuous characteristic - the propensity to charge if uncontrolled and the lack of manoeuvrability - I’ll have to cope with as best I can.

 So I’ve gone with three fairly equal commands containing six or seven impetuous medium swordsmen each led by a competent commander. Two also have a couple of cavalry, the third has four of its swordsmen upgraded to elite, and all have some light infantry javelinmen.

My plan is going to be to try to use my undoubted superior numbers to threaten Roman flanks in order to try to thin out the Roman attacks to the point where overlaps, combined with the Aequi infantry’s impetuosity bonus, will give me an initial close combat advantage against the Roman heavy spearmen. If I can cause a few disorders in that initial charge my medium infantry will still have a melee advantage in subsequent turns, and the extra cohesion losses from my units’ Furious Charge will even up the fight against those Roman heavy spearmen with their higher cohesion.

I will, of course, try to maximise on-table rough terrain as it negatively affects the Roman heavy spearmen in combat, if it falls well for me so much the better, but I can’t rely on that. Gordon has more sense than go into any with anything other than light infantry, unless he selects some javelinmen, but hopefully what it will do is channel Gordon’s attacks into predictable pathways for me to take advantage of.

Other considerations:

·     There is a chance Gordon may decide to go with a Hernician ally and/or even a flank march, like I did in the very first game in the competition when I played the Romans versus the Volscii. If Gordon does the former then the battle may play out the same way with medium swordsmen fighting it out in the bad terrain, however, if he does the latter, learning from that battle I will try to take the fight to the Romans as fast as possible.

·      I should have a significant superiority in infantry units. I’m sure Gordon will attempt some sort of plan to mass his units on one side of the battlefield whilst fending off my units on the other side in order that the superior quality of his units deployed on a narrow front will give him the advantage he needs to win the battle. The challenge for me will be to try and get all three of my commands’ infantry to bear simultaneously. To that end I will avoid any flank marching or ambushing as that generally keeps one’s own forces away from the action and makes it harder to co-ordinate them.

·     We can have roughly equal numbers and quality of cavalry. Given that my infantry suffers from being harder to manoeuvre due to its impetuosity I will split my cavalry 50-50 on each flank and try to limit it to guarding my infantry's flanks. If Gordon chooses to mass his all on one flank this may be difficult but I'll just have to cope as best I can.

That’s the plan!

The Battle

 Terrain

The only region available under the ADLG Italic tribes list was Mountain. I picked two steep hills, one covered in brush and two further areas of brush. Gordon chose a coastal area and a road, enabling him to remove one piece and move one, even so I still managed to get two areas of difficult terrain on my side in useful places for an army of medium swordsmen. As usual I'm on the left of the photo. 

Deployment

As the defender I had to start deployment first. I didn't want to deploy hard up against the coastal area. as I wanted to try to make Gordon stretch his line as much as possible, so I decided to use the left hand hill to anchor my left-most command on and deploy my other commands to its right. I refused my left flank, even placing that command's cavalry behind the line and as I wasn't sure if Gordon would choose to go with a flank march I placed some swordsmen of my right-most command facing right. I placed one light infantry unit in ambush on the brush-covered steep hill.

Gordon placed three commands, one very large command of twelve units on his right under a brilliant commander - his family representative, another largely infantry command of allied Latin troops in the centre containing four heavy spearmen units, two light infantry slinger units and one heavy cavalry unit under a competent commander, and one cavalry command on his left consisting of four medium cavalry units under a competent commander. Twenty three units in total.

Gordon's command structure looked quite interesting, he seemed to be under the impression that one of his commands had to be an ally, not sure why but it left him with one very large command which I thought would prove to be quite hard to keep in action. It included two first class infantry units, five second & third class units, two units of javelinmen and three units of light infantry armed with javelin.

Gordon's turn one

On his first turn Gordon advanced boldly all across the length of his line, as he needed to do if he was going to win the battle, as below:

My turn one

Seeing there was no Roman flank march in the offing, and because my plan involved getting as much of my line into action as possible, I began to swing my refused right flank units around as fast as possible, otherwise I was fairly content to leave things as they were. Thinking that my left flank cavalry weren't going to see much action where they were and seeing Gordon had massed all his cavalry on the other flank, I used the availability of some spare command points to move them across towards my right. The position at the end of my turn was as below:

Gordon's turn two

Gordon continued to advance strongly on my left revealing my light infantry in ambush in the process. He pushed his two javelinmen units slightly ahead of his other infantry towards the steep hill. On his left though he kept his cavalry back a bit, probably because, now that I had swung them out into line, my line of infantry extended well past his cavalry, as below:

My turn two

I largely sat still waiting for the axe to fall in my centre and on my left. In accordance with my plan of trying to put as much pressure on Gordon's units all across the line I continued to push my right-most infantry and cavalry forward so that it would be in a position to get stuck in whenever Gordon decided to commit his own right flank, as below:

Gordon's turn three

Gordon carried on developing his attack on his right, he continued to move his right-most heavy spearmen around my left flank and pushed his javelinmen and light infantry onto the forward slope of the steep hill into javelin range, scoring the first shooting hit of the game. 

Gordon was wisely keeping four of his heavy spearmen units slightly back from the hill. To have advanced them onto it to fight against my medium swordsmen would have been to sign their death warrants but I was interested to see what exactly he was going to do with them, I had a feeling that they were already out of the fight.

In the centre Gordon advanced his Latin allied heavy spearmen and light infantry slingers forward, as below:

My turn three

Up to this point on my left I had been content to sit and watch the Roman and allied Latin infantry advance towards me but it appeared to me that Gordon had now advanced too close to the difficult hill on my left wing with too many of his heavy spearmen units. I considered they would now be hard pressed to either advance any further or be able to redeploy safely anytime soon, so, as my right-wing forces had moved forward enough to make their presence felt, I decided now was the time to advance in the centre in order not to give Gordon the time to redeploy any of his forces opposite my left wing. 

As Gordon had moved his light infantry slingers into charge reach in the centre I decided to charge them with my impetuous medium swordsmen, if nothing else it would relieve the shooting pressure on my units for a time. As it happens, following the slingers' evade move to the rear I rolled up in my pursuit roll so crashed into the Latin heavy spearmen behind. I hadn't expected to get into combat quite this quickly so I was a bit concerned about those units' flanks but I had gone in now so that was that.

Sensing that this would be the most important turn of the game I even threw my C-in-C into the fray, if I didn't win the majority of the combats now I would be in trouble. Luckily the resulting combat phase was as successful as I hoped - my units' impetuosity bonus had given me the advantage in all the combats so it wasn't unexpected that I won three of the four combats. Against the odds Gordon still won one of them.

Gordon, at this point, announced that for him the game was now unwinnable. I suspected and was hoping he was actually right; if I could destroy his centre I felt Gordon would be hard pressed to recover the situation.

Gordon's turn four

In Gordon's turn he decided to evade with his javelinmen that had previously advanced onto the hill, most likely as I was now in a position to charge into one of those units' flanks. On his left he decided to charge into my forces on that flank with most of his cavalry and on his right Gordon moved forward a bit more.

In the combat phase Gordon got lucky, in fact far luckier than I had been in the previous turn, despite being down in nearly all the combats - of the seven he won five. I did manage to destroy one of his units though where I had thrown my commander into the fight in the last turn. The position at the end of the turn was as below:

My turn five

I didn't do much other than continue the fight. In the centre I destroyed another of Gordon's Latin spearmen units, which as my winning infantry unit was impetuous meant it had to advance to a position where it could be attacked in the flank by Gordon's javelinmen units next turn - unfortunate but I could afford to go down one on one and still win the game due to my superior numbers and higher army break point.

I forgot to take a photo at this juncture, however one thing I was happy about was that Gordon was finding it difficult to develop his attack on my left flank. Seven of his heavy spearmen, including his first class units, one javelinmen unit and three light infantry units were basically sitting doing very little other than tying up the six medium infantry units of my left wing command whilst my centre and right wing were grinding away against Gordon's centre and left wing with greatly superior numbers. I felt at this time it was only a matter of time before Gordon's forces succumbed.

Gordon's turn six

On my extreme left Gordon finally advanced his flanking heavy spearmen to within my units' charge reach, elsewhere the fighting continued, casualties racked up on both sides. Gordon did indeed attack my swordsmen unit that had advanced in my last turn in its flank and succeeded in getting a disorder result on it. In desperation Gordon added all three of his commanders into the fight.

The position at the end of Gordon's sixth turn was as below:

My turn six

The game had now switched to the usual ADLG endgame rugby scrum where units are turning on enemy flanks and losses are occurring all over the place - including Gordon's commander of his Latin allies who had bravely tried to stem the tide of losses. On my extreme left I had no choice but to charge with one medium swordsmen unit where I didn't have the command points to hold it. To Gordon's chagrin it caused three disorders on his heavy spear unit!

Picture as below:

Gordon's turn seven

Fighting continued as below. The writing was on the wall at this point, despite the number of destructions and disorders on my units building up, Gordon's centre and left were disintegrating even faster.

My turn seven

In my turn I pushed Gordon's army nearly to it's break point destroying four more units whilst losing one as below - dead units are marked with a D prior to removal, one of Gordon's javelinmen units and the Latin spearman in the centre were also destroyed though haven't been so marked.

At this point Gordon conceded, I only needed to inflict one more hit; Gordon needed nine. The end game position was as below - the losses were Romans: 22 out of 23; Aequi: 18 out of 27.

Post-Mortem

A bloody battle that went largely as I had hoped - my superiority in infantry in the centre and right enabled me to turn on flanks after holes had been made just as I was counting on. My plan as initially envisaged was modified on my left wing as I hadn't developed the attack on that flank, but I was more than happy to sit back there whilst tying down Gordon's right wing units and keeping them out of the fight whilst I proceeded with my plans on my right and centre. 

Gordon's comments

Pre-Game

I bid to be the Romans. Aequi are lots of medium swordsmen, probably impetuous. Either way Alec will want terrain and I want to try to tempt his troops out of position.

The Romans have the option of a reasonably large army of spearmen or a smaller army of elite and armoured spearmen. Given the relatively low cost of medium swordsmen and their speed I will go for numbers rather than quality and try to win on the dice (if I survive the furious charge).

I also take a command of medium cavalry. Useful for protecting or turning a flank and the medium rather than heavy is less of a concern against medium infantry without missiles.

A brilliant commander to command a large command of spearmen with some javelinmen in case I need to guard a terrain flank. An ally of spearmen with some light infantry and a cavalry unit, and the cavalry command.

The Deployment

I get a waterway to minimise chances of being outflanked. Otherwise not too much terrain, but Alec does have a terrain fortress of two steep hills. I am not going to get up them so need to make the most of the open spaces.

I put the cavalry on my left, to delay the outflanking manoeuvre, the ally in the centre where Alec has no option but opt approach and activate them in the unlikely event they are hesitant and the main command on my right.

The plan is to advance on the right and outflank and support the centre as required. Will be tricky with heavy infantry and I am relying on my light troops to prevent much happening on the hill. The centre and left are to move slowly forward to prevent the bulk of Alec’s army doing much until I can get into combat on my right.

Alec has a big advantage on my left and I imagine he will take advantage of that to move off the hill. My cavalry are quite a threat to his medium infantry in the first round of combat, so hoping that will keep him a little cautious. The manoeuvrability of his largely impetuous infantry is something I will try to take advantage of, but that is usually beyond my skill. 

The Game

I advanced a little further than I needed with the centre and cavalry and was too optimistic in my ability to get round the right flank; that was always a big ask as the command proved too large even for a brilliant general to command effectively. It didn’t help that I placed the javelinmen to break up the solid line of spearmen. Putting them directly opposite the hill was deliberate, but I never made the opportunity to redeploy the units to form the solid line of spearmen that I needed. I ended up fighting about 2/3^rd of Alec’s larger army with half of mine. I held out fairly well given that mistake, but it was largely over after Alec’s first furious charge. 

Post-Game

Poor deployment of the main command, which was to be the battle winner. I should have put it in the centre. But there was always the chance that Alec would concentrate along the waterway and that the ally would be hesitant leaving me outflanked on both sides.

I moved the centre and left forward too quickly – as they were largely tasked to delay the enemy left and centre I could have held them back a turn. 

Result

Aequi win - minus one point to the Julii