Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Chris Damour]

There has been call for "How do you use such and such a troop?" on
the list recently. I wanted to throw my two cents into the
discussion. This is the first in an (as yet unknown how
many) multipart series of emails. I invite and welcome dissenting opinion
and counterpoints.
First, let me say that my 20ish years of experience with gaming has
taught me that troops are troops and tactics are tactics. In general, if
you use historically appropriate tactics, you should be successful. If
you are Vikings, do NOT try to "float like a butterfly and sting like a
bee". If you are Mongols, do not expect to overwhelm the enemy at all
points of their battleline and then hammer them where they crack.
Further, do some reading. Over the millenia, mankind has worked out
how to fight and win battles, pay attention to the "old masters", follow
their advice and you will also.
OK, so how do you go about translating that to the tabletop? First,
let me define some terms that I am going to use. There are "grand
tactics", i.e. how is your army going to fight the battle? as well as
"tactics" which I define as the battlefield role of a particular troop
type/unit and how you use specific units of your army.
I am going to start with "grand tactics". Now is where you have to
decide on "The Plan". You have a "chicken or the egg" question to
answer. Are you picking "The Plan" to fit the army you have, or are you
picking an army to fit a playing style that you are comfortable with? As I
mentioned above, if you have a Viking army, you will probably not be too
successful if you try to fight a "maneuver" battle. And if you know that
you are better at fighting an enemy by gradually wearing him down and then
creaming him when he is at the end of his tether, then Mongols would be a
good choice for you to play. When you have a plan, stick to it. If
you have to change it, change it as little as possible as early as
possible. Try to keep the change at the tactical level instead of
the grand tactical level. Above all, keep it SIMPLE! To (mis)quote
Clauswitz, in Warrior, everything is simple, however, even the simplest
things are difficult. The more complicated your plan is, the more
oportunity for an uncaring universe (i.e. DICE) to screw it up...
As I see it, you can broadly group battle plans into three "types",
Pin and Punch, Counterattack, and Screen and Attack. Obviously, these are
broad generalizations and there are plans that are combinations and
subsets of these groups but you can use these three categories as a basis
for planning.
Pin and Punch means that you use unit(s) to fix the enemy's attention
and then you attack him. Often, the pinning troops are tough, close order
foot that get into HTH with the opponent so that they will standing there
like a deer in the headlights when your strike troops slam into him. Derek
Downs (from whom I shamelessly stole the term), Ewan McNay and Dave
Markowitz all use this plan extensively. Hellenistic Successor, Roman,
Han Chinese and Assyrian armies are suited to this plan.
Counterattack is pretty much self explanatory. 'Ya let the enemy
attack some of your troops and then you hit him with your strike
troops. This plan differs from "Pin and Punch" mainly in two
ways. Firstly, you often deliberately set up unit(s) as "sacrifical
lambs" for the enemy to attack, and secondly that your "bait" are usually
weaker and less expensive than the "pinning" troops are. Oftimes, when you
are playing the counterattack game, you do not care if the
"bait" routs. It is great if it does not, but "The Plan" allows for it.
Larry Essick, Dave Steirs and Sean-Patrick Scott are some of the best
counterattack players that I have played against. Aztec, Carthaginian,
100 Years War English and Medieval Spanish work very well as counterattack
armies.
Finally, you have "Screen and Attack". This is what I typically
use. The general idea is that you have a screen of troops across the front
of the enemy to delay him and strike units to attack him with. You decide
where to attack the enemy and send ALL of your strike troops there to
overwhelm the enemy forces at that point and then exploit the hole. This
plan differs from "Pin and Punch" in that the screen is not necessarily
there to fix the opponents attention so much as it is there to slow down
the enemy long enough for your attack to succeed (or die miserably, but we
dont talk about those battles! <<grin>>). Please note the "necessarily"
in the previous sentence. Sometimes your "screen" troops are also
intended to fight. When I play Vikings I force march Bondi across the
center of the board and put them in the enemy's face. They are there
to both hold up the enemy and fight him in HTH. I have had games
where my reserves never got into combat, my Bondi won it for me all by
themselves. However, any victories, local or otherwise, that your
screen achieve is pure gravy. Remember, their job is to keep the enemy
away from your strike troops. The difference between this plan and
counterattack is that typically you are the one initiating the
combat. Besides myself, Scott McDonald, Jon and Jaime Fish use
this plan extensively. Vikings, Burmese, Byzantine and horse archer
armies work well for this type of plan.
Now that you have a plan, you have to think about how you are going
to specifically go about implementing it. Mind you, I am still talking
"grand tactics" here, how your army, as a whole, is going to
fight. Warrior is a game of morale. You win a battle by breaking the
opponent's units and having them fail morale tests. The more morale tests
the enemy takes, the greater the likelyhood that you will win. Obviously,
you want to minimize the number of morale tests that you take as much as
practicable. This does not mean that you should never opt to take a
morale test, just do not take one unnecessarily. If you choose to take a
morale test, it should only be because it furthers your plan. Ideally,
you should only choose to take a morale test when if you fail the test
your opponent will not be able to exploit that failure and you can recover
OR when if you do NOT take the test you are going to lose the game.
Keep secure flanks. A unit's morale is effectively reduced and it is
easier to rout when it does not have flank support.
Use terrain judiciously. It can help you with flank support, delay
the enemy and it can be a force multiplier for your troops, but, terrain
by itself will not stop the enemy and it can slow you down. Most of my
Auxilia never got into the fight during my last battle at Historicon
because of Rob's skillfull use of terrain. And I did try to attack
through it.
Keep your attack concentrated. Mass your attack in space and
time. Do not be tempted to "piecemeal" out your strike troops. You want
to overwhelm your opponent, not have your troops overwhelmed. Your aim is
to defat the enemy unit swiftly and still have troops to exploit. Hit him
with repeated hammer blows. For this you need a reserve. Keep your
troops in control as much as possible. Get your pursuers out of contact
with his routers as quickly as you can so that you can place them in
reserve, ready to throw them into new combats.
Take and keep the initiative. Make your enemy react to you. If
you get the matchups you want, you should win. If your opponent gets
the matchups they want, you will probably lose. In a related vein, never
reinforce defeat. Carefully weigh the advantage to your plan of using a
unit or units from your reserve to plug a hole in your line, especially if
it is a unit intended for your attack. You may well find that your unit is
of more value causing morale test for him than keeping you from taking
some.
Finally, and most important, NEVER give up! I learned that lesson my
very first NICT. Those of you who have already heard/read the story of my
game versus our very own "Rules Ho" Jon can skip this paragraph... OK, the
setting is Jon is playing Han Chinese, I am playing Book 3 Teutonic
Knights. I have the list organized with every LC that you can buy and
EHK. Jon has the usual mixed bag of Han troops but no Pike armed troops
as far as I can recall. Jon and I both force march all of our skirmishers
to the center of the board and thus start 240 paces apart. We both march
our reserves to the center of the table. On the first bound every single
one of my LC units is caught by Jon's LC as I either evade short of Jon
pursues long. So, at the end of the FIRST FREAKING BOUND I have six LC
units in rout!!! I do not recall the status of my two LI units. So, at
that point I had no flanks, the situation looked pretty dang hopeless to
me and I considered resigning right then and there. However, I said to
myself, "You came here to play and you might get some points." so I kept
playing. On the second and subsequent bounds I threw every unit that I
had at Jon's troops and never let the pressure up. His LC chased mine to
my rear zone or off the board and were so far away from my troops that
they did not have a legal approach. Jon could not prompt them to march
because his general's were dead or fighting for their lives against my
troops. In a way, I wound up winning that game because, not in spite of,
Jon routed my screen. BTW, that was the game that I spilled coffee on
Jon's ground cloth in my excitement and he's never let me forget it
since. <<grin>>
That's it for the first email. In the next one I will start my
discussion of tactics. (Subtitled, why almost everyone except for me plays
this dang game wrong!) <<huge honking grin>>

--
Chris Damour

I'll nitpick a little and talk about a style I think you skipped. This
style only works for a few armies though, usually Late Roman, Aztec, Inca,
Yuan Mongol, or similar armies that can mass a lot of decent morale high
density missile weapon troops. I've always thought of the style as
imitation Napoleonic.

This characteristic of this style is a lot of high density missile fire
usually carried by shielded foot. Lots of missile armed troops out there in
these lists so that there are a lot of shots at the enemy. Sooner or later,
either an opposing unit is going to be ganked by two or three of your units
or a timely up roll is going cause disaster, preferably on their side. :)

High density is important, you need as many figures firing as there figures
in the target unit. An example of this is adding integral archers to Roman
infantry units, the important benefit of the archers is that 8 firing across
an element usually matches the number of enemy elements. Close or regular
loose foot usually have the best density for doing this.

Decent morale usually means RD or better. Regular troops usually have
denser units and counter better. I've never had much luck with irregular
foot missile troops. Shields or pavise matter if the opponent can shoot
back. Midianite Arab is scary to face if you can't shoot back, a piece of
cake if you can shoot back.

Use of shock troops as a reserve is nice but optional. Nobody really fears
the Roman javelin armed heavy calvary but even bad calvary is good enough
when you are hitting tired and disordered opponents.

Jamie


----- Original Message -----
From: "damourc" <damourc@...>
To: <WarriorRules@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 5:33 PM
Subject: [WarriorRules] My Try at a Warrior Primer...


> There has been call for "How do you use such and such a troop?" on
> the list recently. I wanted to throw my two cents into the
> discussion. This is the first in an (as yet unknown how
> many) multipart series of emails. I invite and welcome dissenting opinion
> and counterpoints.
> First, let me say that my 20ish years of experience with gaming has
> taught me that troops are troops and tactics are tactics. In general, if
> you use historically appropriate tactics, you should be successful. If
> you are Vikings, do NOT try to "float like a butterfly and sting like a
> bee". If you are Mongols, do not expect to overwhelm the enemy at all
> points of their battleline and then hammer them where they crack.
> Further, do some reading. Over the millenia, mankind has worked out
> how to fight and win battles, pay attention to the "old masters", follow
> their advice and you will also.
> OK, so how do you go about translating that to the tabletop? First,
> let me define some terms that I am going to use. There are "grand
> tactics", i.e. how is your army going to fight the battle? as well as
> "tactics" which I define as the battlefield role of a particular troop
> type/unit and how you use specific units of your army.
> I am going to start with "grand tactics". Now is where you have to
> decide on "The Plan". You have a "chicken or the egg" question to
> answer. Are you picking "The Plan" to fit the army you have, or are you
> picking an army to fit a playing style that you are comfortable with? As I
> mentioned above, if you have a Viking army, you will probably not be too
> successful if you try to fight a "maneuver" battle. And if you know that
> you are better at fighting an enemy by gradually wearing him down and then
> creaming him when he is at the end of his tether, then Mongols would be a
> good choice for you to play. When you have a plan, stick to it. If
> you have to change it, change it as little as possible as early as
> possible. Try to keep the change at the tactical level instead of
> the grand tactical level. Above all, keep it SIMPLE! To (mis)quote
> Clauswitz, in Warrior, everything is simple, however, even the simplest
> things are difficult. The more complicated your plan is, the more
> oportunity for an uncaring universe (i.e. DICE) to screw it up...
> As I see it, you can broadly group battle plans into three "types",
> Pin and Punch, Counterattack, and Screen and Attack. Obviously, these are
> broad generalizations and there are plans that are combinations and
> subsets of these groups but you can use these three categories as a basis
> for planning.
> Pin and Punch means that you use unit(s) to fix the enemy's attention
> and then you attack him. Often, the pinning troops are tough, close order
> foot that get into HTH with the opponent so that they will standing there
> like a deer in the headlights when your strike troops slam into him. Derek
> Downs (from whom I shamelessly stole the term), Ewan McNay and Dave
> Markowitz all use this plan extensively. Hellenistic Successor, Roman,
> Han Chinese and Assyrian armies are suited to this plan.
> Counterattack is pretty much self explanatory. 'Ya let the enemy
> attack some of your troops and then you hit him with your strike
> troops. This plan differs from "Pin and Punch" mainly in two
> ways. Firstly, you often deliberately set up unit(s) as "sacrifical
> lambs" for the enemy to attack, and secondly that your "bait" are usually
> weaker and less expensive than the "pinning" troops are. Oftimes, when you
> are playing the counterattack game, you do not care if the
> "bait" routs. It is great if it does not, but "The Plan" allows for it.
> Larry Essick, Dave Steirs and Sean-Patrick Scott are some of the best
> counterattack players that I have played against. Aztec, Carthaginian,
> 100 Years War English and Medieval Spanish work very well as counterattack
> armies.
> Finally, you have "Screen and Attack". This is what I typically
> use. The general idea is that you have a screen of troops across the front
> of the enemy to delay him and strike units to attack him with. You decide
> where to attack the enemy and send ALL of your strike troops there to
> overwhelm the enemy forces at that point and then exploit the hole. This
> plan differs from "Pin and Punch" in that the screen is not necessarily
> there to fix the opponents attention so much as it is there to slow down
> the enemy long enough for your attack to succeed (or die miserably, but we
> dont talk about those battles! <<grin>>). Please note the "necessarily"
> in the previous sentence. Sometimes your "screen" troops are also
> intended to fight. When I play Vikings I force march Bondi across the
> center of the board and put them in the enemy's face. They are there
> to both hold up the enemy and fight him in HTH. I have had games
> where my reserves never got into combat, my Bondi won it for me all by
> themselves. However, any victories, local or otherwise, that your
> screen achieve is pure gravy. Remember, their job is to keep the enemy
> away from your strike troops. The difference between this plan and
> counterattack is that typically you are the one initiating the
> combat. Besides myself, Scott McDonald, Jon and Jaime Fish use
> this plan extensively. Vikings, Burmese, Byzantine and horse archer
> armies work well for this type of plan.
> Now that you have a plan, you have to think about how you are going
> to specifically go about implementing it. Mind you, I am still talking
> "grand tactics" here, how your army, as a whole, is going to
> fight. Warrior is a game of morale. You win a battle by breaking the
> opponent's units and having them fail morale tests. The more morale tests
> the enemy takes, the greater the likelyhood that you will win. Obviously,
> you want to minimize the number of morale tests that you take as much as
> practicable. This does not mean that you should never opt to take a
> morale test, just do not take one unnecessarily. If you choose to take a
> morale test, it should only be because it furthers your plan. Ideally,
> you should only choose to take a morale test when if you fail the test
> your opponent will not be able to exploit that failure and you can recover
> OR when if you do NOT take the test you are going to lose the game.
> Keep secure flanks. A unit's morale is effectively reduced and it is
> easier to rout when it does not have flank support.
> Use terrain judiciously. It can help you with flank support, delay
> the enemy and it can be a force multiplier for your troops, but, terrain
> by itself will not stop the enemy and it can slow you down. Most of my
> Auxilia never got into the fight during my last battle at Historicon
> because of Rob's skillfull use of terrain. And I did try to attack
> through it.
> Keep your attack concentrated. Mass your attack in space and
> time. Do not be tempted to "piecemeal" out your strike troops. You want
> to overwhelm your opponent, not have your troops overwhelmed. Your aim is
> to defat the enemy unit swiftly and still have troops to exploit. Hit him
> with repeated hammer blows. For this you need a reserve. Keep your
> troops in control as much as possible. Get your pursuers out of contact
> with his routers as quickly as you can so that you can place them in
> reserve, ready to throw them into new combats.
> Take and keep the initiative. Make your enemy react to you. If
> you get the matchups you want, you should win. If your opponent gets
> the matchups they want, you will probably lose. In a related vein, never
> reinforce defeat. Carefully weigh the advantage to your plan of using a
> unit or units from your reserve to plug a hole in your line, especially if
> it is a unit intended for your attack. You may well find that your unit is
> of more value causing morale test for him than keeping you from taking
> some.
> Finally, and most important, NEVER give up! I learned that lesson my
> very first NICT. Those of you who have already heard/read the story of my
> game versus our very own "Rules Ho" Jon can skip this paragraph... OK, the
> setting is Jon is playing Han Chinese, I am playing Book 3 Teutonic
> Knights. I have the list organized with every LC that you can buy and
> EHK. Jon has the usual mixed bag of Han troops but no Pike armed troops
> as far as I can recall. Jon and I both force march all of our skirmishers
> to the center of the board and thus start 240 paces apart. We both march
> our reserves to the center of the table. On the first bound every single
> one of my LC units is caught by Jon's LC as I either evade short of Jon
> pursues long. So, at the end of the FIRST FREAKING BOUND I have six LC
> units in rout!!! I do not recall the status of my two LI units. So, at
> that point I had no flanks, the situation looked pretty dang hopeless to
> me and I considered resigning right then and there. However, I said to
> myself, "You came here to play and you might get some points." so I kept
> playing. On the second and subsequent bounds I threw every unit that I
> had at Jon's troops and never let the pressure up. His LC chased mine to
> my rear zone or off the board and were so far away from my troops that
> they did not have a legal approach. Jon could not prompt them to march
> because his general's were dead or fighting for their lives against my
> troops. In a way, I wound up winning that game because, not in spite of,
> Jon routed my screen. BTW, that was the game that I spilled coffee on
> Jon's ground cloth in my excitement and he's never let me forget it
> since. <<grin>>
> That's it for the first email. In the next one I will start my
> discussion of tactics. (Subtitled, why almost everyone except for me plays
> this dang game wrong!) <<huge honking grin>>
>
> --
> Chris Damour
>
>
>
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