Dublin Game 5
The Han Chinese against Early Ostrogoths
Going into the final game, a reasonable performance in old money (I think I was on about 20 points?) was a way below mid table result under the 3-1-0 scoring system. Would my last ever DBM competition end without a single win ?
The game saw me drawn against Linda Fairhurst and her Early Ostrogothic army - a chill wind was blowing across the table, drawn in no doubt from the November weather outside, and a deep blanket of white cloth lay across the board.
The Chinese were defending and cluttered the board with as much rubbish terrain as possible. Unfortunately the cluttered areas were by and large exactly where the Ostrogoths would have wanted them, providing safe areas in which to hide their allied warband command safely from my chariots.
With a line of knights almost certain to extend across the table, I chose to squeeze my army up into one corner, assuming the Ostrogoths would struggle to do much more than charge forward.
And so it proved, with the Ostrogoths rushing forward as the Chinese light horse turned tail and fled from the onrushing wall of over-laden horse flesh and over-eager riders.
Yet again the Horde Inferior were cast in the unfamiliar role of being a key part of my battle plan, as they advanced timidly against the Ostrogoth horde, hoping to die quickly and painlessly, but in so doing break up the Ostrogoth formation, who would then (in theory) crash onto the wall of waiting spears.
On my left the 4 chariots - who had generally underperformed (or barely appeared) throughout the previous 4 games - found themselves in a potentially excellent position - if only the Warband facing them would decide to advance out of the rough going!
With the Ostrogoths sweeping forward relentlessly, the Chinese offered up a sacrifice to the Chinese Gods - a green-clad light horseman, again hoping to break up the Ostrogoth formation.
The Ostrogoths however didn't quite have enough mounted nobility to cover the entire table, and part of their frontage was patched up with some poor quality bowmen. They advanced to the half way line putting pressure on the Chinese Chariotry, and forcing them to absorb pips that were needed elsewhere to get out of the way of the hail of arrows.
The Chinese Gods decide to smile on the light horseman who had so bravely sacrificed himself, and he survived the initial 0-4 combat, allowing him to break off and draw the Ostrogoths out of formation without having suffered any losses.
But then, with the Chinese Chariotry cowering beneath their umbrellas from the shower of arrows, the Warband command decided that they wanted some of the action, and lurched forward out of the rough going. It was decision time for the chariots - they weren't ideally placed, as some of them were lined up against the bowmen, however they also had yet to suffer any losses from bowfire. Deciding valor was the better part of discretion, the 4 chariots released their hand brakes and rolled forward into contact with eth bowmen and warband, scoring an initial success.
Despite the best efforts of the Chinese light horse and the peasant hordes, the Ostrogoths had managed to maintain their formation and were sweeping down on the main body of Chinese troops.
The line of spearmen were relatively confident, however the blades and bowmen extending the line were rather more reluctant to get involved in the fighting. But with the table rapidly running out behind them, they too would soon be forced to stand and fight!
The only saving grace was that the Ostrogoths would have to fight the supported spearmen first, and so one of their commands would hopefully have suffered some casualties before they started to engage the soft underbelly of the Chinese army
The two lines crashed together, and with spear buts anchored in the ground, the Chinese stood their ground.
As the main lines clashed, the sideshow involving the chariots and the warband suddenly assumed greater significance, as the Bw I were in the command of the knights fighting my spearmen - where were the Chariots to concentrate?
Beat up the warband command before it could break free and potentially fall on the flanks of my spearmen, or concentrate on chewing up the rather tougher bowmen to hasten the demise of the knights fighting my spears, opening up the flank of the other 2 commands of knights?
In the end , logistics & geography took precedence over strategy and tactics, and the chariots ploughed forward against anyone they were facing - with the weight of the attack falling on the bowmen. The warband would just have to wait....either way it looked to be quite a task for 4 wooden go-carts hiding under umbrellas!
The spearmen were faring somewhat better, but were far from decisive in dealing with the Ostrogoth horde. However the true heroes proved to be the soft underbelly of bowmen and blades, who made very short work of the onrushing Ostrogoths with a combination of accurate shooting and stoic combat. They now stood like an island of fortitude as the waves of mounted nobility crashed either side of them.
The focus of the battle shifted to the unlikely candidates of the Chinese cavalry (O), as their supporting light horse scuttled away behind a hill over right in front of the bemused Ostrogoth nobility, who were unable to turn in time to follow them. This time, the Chinese had learnt their lesson, and the Chinese General stayed well out of the way !
The 4 chariots, desperate to salvage their reputations as the game-winning element of the army, were making great headway against the Ostrogoth infantry and soon were wheeling ponderously onto the flank of the now panicking bowmen, as the warband command had imploded under the assault of one knight aided by a flock of light horsemen circling eagerly to pick off the survivors.
Against all odds, the Ostrogoths continued to batter senselessly against line of stoic spearmen, but with the invincible bowmen now moving up to threaten their flanks and the chariotry chewing up their supporting peasant bowmen surely the command could only survive for a little more time? The second command had by now lost almost all its knights, and so the bowmen were the only solution the Ostrogoths could find to plug the gap as the 14 bowmen (I) moved up to try and prove that quantity does have its own quality against the 6 Chinese Bw (O).
With the warband command broken and the bowmen's command teetering under losses of knights and bowmen, the Chinese chariot command was able to afford the unusual luxury of bringing up the unlikely force of Cv (O) to help deliver a speedy coup-de-grace to the bowmen.
The Ostrogoths were by now down to bare bones, as the last remaining nobles regrouped for a last brave charge against the gaudily painted Cv (O) holding up the Chinese right flank. This in turn prompted the Chinese light horse to have a sudden rush of bravery, as they came back from their hiding place to threaten the nobles rear.
With nothing left for them to do, the Spear command also joined in the attack on the surprisingly resistant Ostrogoth bowmen, who teetered on the brink of collapse under the combined weight of 2 full commands of Chinese troops - they had stood longer and fought more bravely than their nobles, but in the end they were staring down the reality-barrel, and the vision at the end of it was that they were almost certainly going to end up just as dead...
In the center, the Ostrogoths were also teetering on the brink in a sustained bow battle - now both large commands only had the odd element to go before the army crumbled to total defeat.
Finally, the Ostrogoth left flank vaporized under a fearsome charge from the Chinese cavalry - tipping the entire army into a total defeat, and leaving the Chinese with their first win of the weekend to claim a mid table W1 D3 L1 outcome.
Post Match Analysis
A straight head-to-head hard-fought fight against a textbook army with the Han Chinese draws a curtain over my world of competitive DBM (I think..!). The game plan of the Ostrogoths was both simple and correct, and they also managed to out-wit my attempts to break up their formation as they swept forward across a barren featureless plain.
Unfortunately their luck was used up by their good pips in the advance, and once combat was joined the Ostrogoth knights proved to be no match for the Chinese bowmen and - less surprisingly - the supported spears. The Chinese adopted the rather un-clever tactics of standing in 2 straight lines, and creating a flank for my weaker bowmen by pushing forward the line of spears.
Initially I had needed to throw all my pips to extricate the mounted command from the onrushing wall of Ostrogoth nobility, but once they were safely away, the emphasis was able to shift to my Knight command on my left to dispatch the bowmen.
The bold maneuver from the Chinese that in the end proved decisive was in fact committing to their attack against the bowmen. When they decided to wade in, the command were supposedly trying to focus their efforts on the unwise and unlucky warband command (who suffered 2 "1" pip bounds relatively early in the game, bringing them out of the rough ground too soon) but a shortage of pips on my left meant I had could not redeploy the knights and so - being shot at - I had little option but to attack the bowmen as well. This could have worked out very badly, as then only one knight was fighting the warband - but in practice the rest of the relatively small mounted command did well to quickly despatched the disorganized warband, and the eventual crushing of the bowmen was the decisive move to break the Ostrogoths.
Final Summary
Overall a fine tournament which in many ways neatly tidied up my DBM competition career.
Dublin is a fine place full of fine pubs, and my opponents included a wide selection of nationalities and armies. I managed a couple of late nights, several boozy lunchtimes, and some astounding quantities of fried and fat-rich foodstuffs.
But in the games a simple lack of practice (Atlanta & Burton had seen my only other DBM games all year) meant I made some daft mistakes in the first game against a better army list, which cost me the game from a winning position. The 2nd game saw my army again throw away a winning position, this time against better quality troops who when on the brink of defeat responded with a great round of combat to leave us both with a command each that had broken it opponents, but both of which lacked time to get to grips with any one else. Games 3 & 4 were in many ways non-games right from the off with matchups that made it very difficult for either side to get a win unless the other attempted something stupidly aggressive - and all parties involved knew that this would certainly end in defeat. Finally, a textbook game which - in the end - had ended up with the outcome predicted by the statistics book.
Things could have been different if I had taken a different army, but too many games with my "favourite" (winning) armies meant I ended up wanting to take an army which hadn't seen much action (as they, like so many of my figures, never see light of day). The Han definitely wasn't a "Rolls Royce", but had some things going for it, and taking Han would mean I couldn't slip into auto-pilot as a combination of a weaker army list and my unfamiliarity with using it would mean I would have to concentrate and play well to get results against any player in the field - sort of a self imposed handicap designed to make all my games more interesting.
But, even with a deliberate attempt to make things interesting, two of the games ended up as entirely predictable non-events, one went in my favour largely with the matchup, in another two almost identical armies cancelled each other out over course of the games combat dice, and the one game where I worked hard to overcome a bad matchup ended up being one I lost due to lack of "competition-quality" (erm, "any") practice.
If I'd practiced more, I could probably have done better. If I'd taken a better army, I'd almost certainly have done better. But both of these would mean playing more games with the same limited number of figures, and coming across any given opponents army and on-table situation and knowing from a great deal of past experience exactly how to react to them. This was the "boring" experience I was trying to avoid by taking the Han - but even in taking them I still ended up with 2 or 3 predictable games out of 5, as well as the added, niggling feeling that I was never in any danger of troubling the trophy engravers even before I rolled the first dice.
To boil it down to basics, DBM has simply accumulated too much history for me, to the point that every game feels like "Deja-vu BM". I want to keep going to pubs, bars and nightclubs across Europe and beyond to drink and talk impenetrable rubbish with an oddly shaped set of gamers from an even odder mix of nationalities, but I need something slightly more interesting to do during the daylight hours, where I don't know what will happen, whether I'm sober or not before I start !
Lets hope 2008 throws up something capable of being as interesting as DBM - whatever it turns out to be !!
Look back on 10 years of DBM history..?