Dublin Game 4
With the 3-1-0 scoring system, my 2 draws and 1 defeat were hardly doing me any favours, and to add insult to injury the 4th game saw my becalmed Han Chinese facing another "you can't beat us" army of Rus.
The report for this game is in the form of a documentary film.
Click play to start the film.
Post Match Analysis
I didn't really see how the Han were going to be able to beat a Rus army, as as long as they formed a solid line and advanced, I really had no answer to them. I therefore approached this game with the intention to try not to lose first and foremost, and then hope for some mistakes or good fortune. This meant a cautious game plan, and deploying really far back so as to maximize the amount of bounds it would take before the Rus even got into combat.
I however messed up yet again with terrain here - firstly by placing some of the terrain thinking I was going to move first, and then by wheeling the left end of my spear line forwards as in the process it negated my only real pre-game idea of forcing the Rus to create a hanging flank as they advanced past a wood I had set down.
When the battle was eventually joined, a combination of terrain, wheeling of my line (which the unwieldy and irregular Rus found difficult to counter), some probably unnecessary reshuffling of troops by the Rus (to get their dismounted Druzhina blades into action) and some impressive shooting by my bowmen all conspired to create a bit of a pileup of Rus elements, which in turn gave me some opportunities to nick the odd element - however in the game of attrition of spear on spear I was slowly but surely losing, as my 6 Sp (I) proved a weaker link even allowing for their regular status.
We did manage to get 16 bounds in, which is very respectable, and in the end if I had launched a "Hail-Mary" style attack with as much success as was done against me in game 2 I could well have ended up with an improbable win, but in the end it was another draw - what I expected.
The Hammy Charts below show the following:
Total Pips (The Rus army had 4 commands and so had more dice than me)
Modified pips - taking 3/4 the total of the Rus dice each bound
Pip Comparison excluding the Pechenegs and the command facing them off.
Really this just goes to show that the more commands you have, the more pips you get to use ! In terms of the game however, it does show that the Chinese were working hard to fend off the Rus from the very beginning, as their first few pip scores were excellent, and allowed them to race across the table quite quickly. In retrospect, they might have been even quicker had they not worked so hard to involve the Druzhina, and also if they had all been on foot, as the mix of mounted and unmounted elements in each command acted as a drain on pips that also disrupted their formation rather than something allowing them to advance more quickly.
Next game (my final DBM game??)...