The Worlds in Charleroi 2016
Italian Condotta - Florence vs Italian Condotta - Florence
Game 1 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Condotta Italian
Game 2 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Medieval Scots
Game 3 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Han Chinese
Game 4 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Late Roman
Game 5 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Seleukid
Game 6 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Italian Condotta - Venice
Another lunch, another sweaty change of t-shirt, another game. The relentless pace of 3 games a day was actually not that bad at all, especially with shorter games and the distinct possibility of ending up with 3 consecutive wins and a submarining approach back up to mid table mediocrity in prospect as well ....
Fittingly, in this most international of international competitions the last game was against an Italian, using an Italian army - not Rome, but another internecine Condottieri civil war!. The lists for the Italian Condotta - Florence and Italian Condotta - Florence from this game, as well as all the other lists from the games at Charleroi can be seen here in the L'Art de la Guerre Wiki.
The table was textbook for a battle - hills on one side, forests on the other pinned the Venetians into a narrow frontage whilst my Florentines were able to spread wider and threaten the enemy flanks as they presumably strode forwards. Hawksmoor was in the middle, where he faced ...enemy Knights, and on the right the bow-strong command faced fast-moving Swiss allies with halberds. Oops...
The Venetians threw out their "better than mine" LH formation to put immediate pressure on the left flank of the Florentine army, pinning my knights back and taunting the lone LH crossbowman on the Florentine side with their numerical superiority ..
On the other flank the Swiss advanced cautiously and slid towards the extremities of the board... a big gap was appearing in the enemy line, but Hawksmoors pedestrian infantry were not the ideal rapier-like fast moving formation to exploit it.
Florence in action
Keen to push the enemy LH back straight into the steep hill behind them, the Florentine knights got up close and nose-hair personal with the Venetian Stradiots, ready for a subsequent charge as Hawksmoors Longbows tried to join in and pile on the pressure.
The enemy Swiss had a luxury of attractive targets - unattached bowmen, or maybe some Inferior Spear mixed formations? The choice was so tempting they were unable to decide, and the mercenary Florentine longbowmen fired furiously as they advanced, in an urgent attempt to cause combat-ability-sapping hits on the Swiss before they close to combat range in a vague attempt to drag them down towards parity.
Pictures of Longbowmen 15mm from my Ancients Photo Directory
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It looked a tall order, but at least some of the Swiss were being pincushioned effectively. Maybe it was not an entirely lost cause...?
Florence in action
On the opposite flank both sides had similar plans - enfilading longbow fire and a mounted matchup which one side wanted to conclude and the other didn't. The Florentines however had taken one of their Knights away under the personal supervision of their General in the hope that he could redeploy to the opposite flank to cause havoc amongst the Swiss, whilst still retaining enough pips to keep these knights rolling forwards. A tall order, but the prospect of Swiss halberdiers ripping a hole in the right flank was not one that could be allowed to happen uncontested.
What's Going on Here Then?
The clear mismatch on the tabletop is the Swiss halberdier command facing off against the weak end of the Florentine infantry line. Elite Halberds against Bows and Inferior Spears is about as bad as it gets, and so the Venetians are racing forward here whilst the rest of the table is involved in a cautious fencing match. Needing Knights all over the table, the Florentine commander is driving a unit over to support against the Swiss, but this leaves his main Knight force badly underresourced and without his personal encouragement (and pips) they struggle to press the fast-shooting Venetian crossbowmen effectively. Hawksmoor in the centre has more width than the enemy Knights facing him, and with halberds able to ignore their better armour pushed forwards looking to put pressure on the enemy advanced flanks in the process. .
The Swiss were in!!
Swiss halberds in action
After the initial combats the Longbowmen, astonishingly, held a narrow advantage with more hits inflicted on the Helevetic mercenaries.
L'Art de la Guerre hint - Most stuff in ADLG is written to allow you to shuffle bases around a bit so geometry cant prevent you fighting - no kinked lines here, just a common sense ruleset that wants you to fight. The one exception is that a flank charging unit has to be able to fit, and conform properly to the enemy in order to count as a flank charge. This is a bit irritating if - like this situation - you want to do a flank charge but don't quite have enough room, but given how important flank charges are, and how devastating, is on balance not that unreasonable as there would be far more abuses of this type of attack that would become possible if partial contacts were allowed to count. Oh well...
The rest of Hawksmoors men had pushed forward, in the clear expectation that the Swiss would soon threaten their flank if they stayed put - and also to put pressure on the huge gaps inbetween the enemy knight formations which were only weakly filled by some Venetian mercenary Longbowmen. One halberdier detached himself and started the usually-brief process of cutting down unprotected bowmen as the rest of his command pinned the Knights and dared them to initiate combat.
The enemy LH were proving rather tricky to deal with, although at least the Knights General had now returned to the part of the battlefield where the majority of his fighting men were located, greatly easing the command and control problems that had prevented this being sorted out sooner.
The longbwomen were hanging on stoically, but as more Swiss got into combat and their Commander started to roll for rallying his men the chances of a swift and unlikely breakthrough started to recede
Halberds against bowmen should be by rights over quickly, but just as the Swiss were struggling so were my heavy foot too - even with overlapping handgunners the English mercenaries continued to rack up the hits...
In a mighty blow, the English finished off the halberd unit and swept towards the flank of the by-now engaged White Company, sorry, Free Company halberdiers... although if they had been White Company they perhaps could have used some spare linen bedsheets to signal their surrender at this point in proceedings...?
What's Going on Here Then?
The Swiss are now in a winning position, and it is only a matter of time until this part of the Florentine right flank is eliminated. The distraction of sending support to a losing situation has also left the main Knight force unable to recover from sustained shooting and now they too are feareful of pushing too hard on the other flank without first regrouping. Hawksmoors attack has been unhinged by an unfeasibly heroic stand by some of the enemy Longbowmen, who have taken down a halberdier unit against all the odds, and coupled with a fiercer than expected Knight charge Hawksmoors command suddenly looks in real trouble.
The venetians Swiss were now breaking through and Longbowmen were falling all over the park. This flank was lost....
Swiss halberds in action
The Swiss general rallied his men, and the Italians picked up markers.... the lone Knight was too litte too late
Hawksmoor was also losing units rapidly - with holes appearing in his lines and the enemy English about to fall on his flank things had not looked grimmer all weekend for the mercenary captain
The Venetians were now pushing forward all along the front of the battle line, swinging into action as the overly-thinned out Florentine lines tried to shore up their shooting and combat-damaged forces wherever they could and braced themselves for another charge..
Small victories were taken where they were on offer, but this was only going one way from here...
The Swiss had a fabulous turn, and an entire Florentine flank pretty much evaporated in a single turn
Isolated units succumbed to multi-directional charges as the Swiss became fully rampant
With no reserves to plug gaps, Hawksmoor was being similarly overwhelmed in a maelstrom of the physical proof that Knights are a great counter to halberdiers.
What's Going on Here Then?
The right flank of the Florentine army is gone, and the only saving grace is that Hawksmoor and his men are so far away that the Swiss cannot exploit their winning position. Part of the reason Hawksmoor is so far away is however that he has lost many units and his force is a mere shadow of it's starting strength, and so this too is looking like a lost part of the table. The main Knight force on the left is relatively becalmed, but they already know the game cannot be saved by their heroics.
The invincible longbowmen of Venice were causing merry havoc as they contributed to the demise of yet another Free Company unit in a crushing envelopment.
Nothing could stand in the way of the Venetian army as it swept forward in a tidal wave of victory...The Condotta had won, but the Florentines had very much lost. 2 out of 4 wins....
Read on for the post match summaries from the Generals involved, as well as another episode of legendary expert analysis from Hannibal
Post Match Summary from the Italian Condotta - Florence Commander
Of this specific game, I will say little as I fear that Hannibal has all of the learnings from this debacle, this proof of poor list design and this instigator of frantic list-flickings-through in the car on the Shuttle way home. Perhaps the Condotta will be seen again, but in a different and better form - who knows?
Despite this sad end to the weekend, I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of the biggest and most international competition at this years Worlds. The results may hark to a chastening experience, and one where the sweat my brow has generated has resulted in little trouble for the engravers of trophies, but the sport, the spirit and the etertainment have all be as good as ever, and a great reminder of the classic days of the global hegemony of DBM, when it again seemed like the whole world was playing the same, game and the world was all the better for it.
2 Victories and 4 Defeats have demonstrated clearly that despite the small table size (and arguably in line with modern trends for small figure count games such as Saga) that there is much for us poor anglophile Anglophone players of ADLG still to learn when we are poured into the crucible of international competition.
Despite these defeats I look back on these four games and I see not any failings in understanding of the rules, nor in basic management of factors, distances or simple play - no, there were no tricks, no tabletop shenanigans and no Franco-Ital0-Belgian cheese which condemned me to such a series of defeats but merely the proper wargaming meta-level actualities of list design, deployment, having a plan that matched the capabilities of the troops and simply plain experience in battle management which saw many of my opponents triumph over my now shell-shocked forces.
The saving grace here is that this was just not my defeat - the rest of the London contingent, and a good (but not complete) slice of Americana also suffered tragic lacks of success, although the one American to have a vaguely French-sounding name did OK, so maybe there is a secret to success here after all?
Hannibal's Post Match Analysis
This ADLG ruleset may well already be the most widely played and popular Ancients Competition Ruleset in the World as of today, but you are surely still a novice at doing anything other than losing in spectacular style. After the glimmerings of success had started to break through the sweaty miasma of evaporating wargamer which have hung like a cloud over the pizza oven of competition all weekend, at last, a game which showcased all of your follies in one neat and perfect package to conclude this weekend lessons.
As has been the case many times before your poor list design, and most notably the use of only one block of Knights has proved your tragic undoing. Clearly, and yet again, Knights were needed on both flanks - those Swiss which so neatly and efficiently ripped your bowmen a new one would have been utterly outmatched by them had there been two Knights there as well. But, worse than that, your inane decision to reinforce likely defeat by shoving just one (as in, that's Italian for "not enough") Knight over to the other flank to try and stem the Swiss tide merely served to deny the remaining 3 knights enough command and control pips to pursue a coherent and aggressive advance to sweep away the thinnest possible shroud of enemy LH crossbowmen that somehow ended up delaying them almost all of the game.
With Knights committed in the wrong places, and not included in sufficient numbers either it was then a game in which your many units of halberdier foot, so potent against Pikes and Spears, suddenly found themselves with no proper enemies to fight and instead a clever deployment by your opponent meant they were forced into relying on luck to avoid being trampled underfoot by enemy horsemen. Really I saw no purpose to their attack save to distance themselves from the obvious and foreseeable debacle which occurred when the Swiss ran over your bowmen on the flank.
As this weekend concludes the only good thing to draw from these embarrassments and narrowest of victories is that there is clearly far more depth to the game of ADLG than you believed at the start of the weekend. You, and your comrades in arms from the UK who also suffered the same volume of ignominy, clearly have much to learn in the fields of list building, command structure design, deployment, terrain selection, strategy and, of course, also tactics. I look forward with glee but some trepidation to many years of education at the hands of those far more experienced in these rules than you, and I hope that El Kreator, Herve, will not take the poor showing of the Anglophone contingent at this event as a rationale to decide that you are not worthy of further reprints of these well put together yet deceptively complex rules.
Charleroi 2016 - The Podcast!
Yes, as well as the pictures and the text there is also a post-Charleroi Podcast available to stream or download from Podbean. This podcast was recorded on the way home from the Worlds, and features me and Dave sat in the car queuing for Le Shuttle, discussing the weeknd, from a culinary, architectural and gaming perspective. Already reaching legendary status, this podcast has been described online as "the wargaming equivalent of Test Match Special". Ideal for listening to whilst you are painting or basing figures, it is available to download or stream here:
ADLG Resources on this site - the ADLG Index
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El Kreator selfie!
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Game 1 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Condotta Italian
Game 2 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Medieval Scots
Game 3 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Han Chinese
Game 4 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Late Roman
Game 5 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Seleukid
Game 6 Italian Condotta - Florence vs Italian Condotta - Venice
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