Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Mark Stone]

--- On August 26 Jon Cleaves said: ---

> Quite often I see a guy with tons of lights thinking he will use them to
control
> the game because he feels he can delay with them long enough to win somewhere
> else. That's what I thought in that game with Dave and others before it where
I
> used to play with a lot of light troops. Over time I have worked out ways to
> kill lights and take advantage of his evades without having to engage in a
> 'light war'.

Jon makes a tremendously important point here, and one that harks back to my
"Skirmisher Doctrine" article that was the -- perhaps unfortunate -- instigator
of this thread.

There is a huge difference between using lights not to lose, and using lights to
win. I'm a firm believer in the extensive use of light troops, but I also firmly
believe that if you are using your lights primarily to "delay and win somewhere
else" then you are doomed to failure more often than not. Lights can be used to
delay successfully, and everybody needs to delay somewhere, but lights are not
necessarily better at delay than other troops, and indeed often worse. On the
other hand, there are aggressive tactics that only lights can employ.

To me the whole point of using lights is to put the other guy on the defensive,
and to dictate where and when the critical engagements will occur. As part of
the process I am going to have to take his lights out of the battle, or at
least neutralize them. But that's really just a means to an end, not a goal in
itself. A happy side effect of that means is that sometimes you can win a
battle outright just by winning the interaction between lights, but that's
_never_ the aim directly. Control tempo; control space; control timing; that's
what an advantage in light troops enables you to do.

I'll give a couple of examples, both of which I came up on the short end of.

First: in preparation for playing in the Historicon Theme Tournament (which I
never got to do as it turns out), Lenney Hermann and I played about 4 games of
his Sassanid Persians and my Romano British. In every game Lenney had
substantially more scouting points than I had, and substantially more mounted
troops than I had. However, I'm much more experienced in the use of light
troops than he is. In every game we'd get to about bound 3 and I'd have the
initiative: battle lines were forming where I wanted them to on the table,
Lenney was feeling cramped for space and facing traffic control problems as his
light units were recalling or sometimes routing into his rear. In terms of
formation of the battle lines, and in terms of momentum, everything was all set
up for me to deliver the decisive blow. The problem is, in that matchup I have
nothing with which to deliver the decisive blow. My best shock troop type --
Irr B/C HI/MI HTW,JLS,Sh -- starts out at a rout against his very abundant
shock troop type -- Irr B EHC L,B,Sh. My lights did everything they could to
put me in an aggressive stance and put Lenney in a defensive stance. I just
lacked the firepower to follow through.

Second: my partner Bill Chamis and I, playing Later Paleologan Byzantines, ran
up against Jon and his partner playing Medieval Spanish in the first game at
Cold Wars. I _love_ LP Byzantines, both for the colorful history associated
with it and because no army with real shock troops has a better mix of light
troops. It was a close game, but going into the last bound Bill and I needed a
slight but definite advantage in combat die rolls to pull it out, and instead
got a slight but definite disadvantage in die rolls. We lost to a better game
plan. Afterwards, I had to think hard about how Jon had approached my light
screen more aggressively than I had planned for, and how he had integrated
loose and open order troops into his skirmish line to gain an advantage.

The "Skirmisher Doctrine" article sat, unfinished and untouched, for two months
after Cold Wars while I thought about what had happened. As often happens in
Warrior, the answers -- to the extent that I have them -- came down to combined
arms. The whole "Combined Arms Tactics" section of the article, and specifically
the subsections "Using other shooters on the skirmish line" and "Using other
foot on the skirmish line" came from my reflections on Cold Wars.

Lights are meant to be used aggressively. Using lights exclusively on the
skirmish line, however, does open you up to certain counter measures. The ideal
skirmisher game uses lights extensively, but does not rely on them exclusively.
And no, it is not a way to win battles -- it is a way to set up the matchups
that will win battles.


-Mark Stone