Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Mark Stone]

Quoting WarriorRules@yahoogroups.com:

> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 22:47:57 EST
> From: scribblerjohn@...
> Subject: bleeding them white
>
> Am I reading the opinion of the learned group correctly that attrition is not
>
> a viable strategy in a tournament setting? I get the notion that there has to
>
> be some element of "strike hard, strike fast, show no mercy" in the army
> composition and tactics to win because of limited time frames.
>
> You can't grind them down or overwhelm them with numbers?
>

The most elegant attempt I've seen at an attrition-oriented strategy was
executed by Frank Gilson about 10 years ago. Frank's army of choice was one of
the NASAMW list early Chinese lists, like Chin Chinese or Shang Chinese or some
such.

Frank's shock troops were 2 horse light chariots with a crew of one with LTS,JLS
as I recall. Not exactly "strike hard, strike fast" kinda guys.

What made the list work was that Frank -- on 1600 points -- had something like
400 figures of bow armed foot.

He had a table-edge to table-edge line of Irr D LI with B, followed by another
line of Reg D LI with B, shields in the front, followed by another line of the
same. By the time you plowed through all of that you were looking at 96 figures
of Reg D LMI with B, shields in the front, and the light chariots sitting in the
gaps between the LMI units.

You were pretty much guaranteed to be tired and disordered by the time you got
through the light infantry. This made it easy to cause further disorder and
attendant waver tests with the shooting from the LMI, and anyone who was either
shaken or on the verge of exhaustion got charged by the light chariots.

To my knowledge, Frank never lost with that army. But the strategy did take a
while to unfold, even against an opponent with a Chris D'Amour level of
aggressiveness. And the strategy took even longer against an opponent who looked
out over the "sea of bows" and felt reluctant to engage. Frank won about 1/3 of
his games decisively, and about 2/3 resulted in either draws or marginal wins.
That's not good enough to be tournament competitive.

Things may actually be somewhat different yet. I don't think any of us yet fully
grasp the implications of Warrior's shooting arc rules, and how that makes dense
missile fire even more dangerous. We may have gotten a first glimpse of that
from Chris' success at the NICT. I do think that Frank's "attrition" strategy
would be more effective under Warrior than it was under TOG. I'm just not sure
if it would be effective enough.

We need to keep in mind that regardless of the nominal period in which we're
playing, the game mechanics of Warrior make the game very "Napoleonic". TOG, and
Warrior so far, has been dominated by "pin and punch" maneuver tactics combined
with effective skirmisher tactics that all have an early-Napoleon feel to them
(up to, say, Austerlitz). The Warrior shooting arc rule probably won't change
the underlying Napoleonic feel of the game mechanics, but may shift things
towards a later Napoleon (think Borodino) massed fire and attrition game.


-Mark Stone