Saturday, November 29, 2014

DBMM game: Western Frankish vs Carolingian

Played a Dbmm game today to give Stephen a practice game for Munster competition in January (which sadly I have to miss for second year in a row).
The theme is Armies and Enemies of the Celts but has a broad range of possible armies from all four list books. Stephen is thinking if trying Carolingian and nearest I could field from the theme list was Western Frankish (a sort of a successor army).
He used Charlemagne so his Knights were Regulars. However he used a Croatian ally which is disallowed by theme restrictions but made no matter to me.
My Franks where of course Irregular with a Viking Sub General.
It has been a while since we played Dbmm and both now find we have an 'issue' with several things the most glaring being with the amount of manoeuvre that is possible which we find is way too much for Ancients  period when thought about logically/historically.
After deployment it feels like we are re-deploying every game with the ability to march large groups of 'units'.
It happened today as my Knights found themselves facing diddly squat and marched across table to opposite wing (aided of course by good Pip rolls despite being Inept Irregulars)
The Carolingian knights done similar to switch sides and attack my now weakened flank. Hard to think of too many historical accounts were this happens so regularly.
The standard two Light Horse marched past my open wing into the 'backfield'.
However despite this it turned into a really good game as it essentially became a race to crush opposite left wings.
I was aided by the Croatian ally being Unreliable and allowing me to try to gang up on them. I was however unable to break through the Croatians and accompanying Franks and found my own left wing crushed by the highly mobile Regular Knights.
Dbmm certainly has a lot of variety built in with weather, time of day, and suchlike compared to Field Of Glory but now on balance I think I prefer the unit based approach.
And despite our chatting about how we have gone look warm on what was very much our favoured Ancients set we had damn good fun actually playing !!

The photos do show a good 'look' to the 'battle'.


My center






My Knights start their trek across battlefield leaving a doomed rearguard





Their destination a hill in front of static Croatians







Overview of set-up (note Light Horse at bottom starting their 'outflank')





Knights arrive and begin to form for charge



 Carolingian Knights doing same on opposite flank







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