Game 2
In another change from Derby, we had decided to use the lunch break to not only drink lager, but also red wine and to eat some pasta. Nice. Which also accurately described my opponent, as he was from Nice too.
For some inexplicable reason I'd been expecting to see a European Skythian deployment, with allied hoplites - but instead they turned out to be bow-maniac Massegatae, and they were attacking. Never having defended with this army, I had also deployed as if I was attacking (doh!), and had expected my cataphracts to be riding down hoplites butted up against the RGo on my left, and my Kn (F) be be engaged in a swirling melee against lesser numbers of Kn (F) on my right, supported by my all LH command.
Instead I was facing a wall of bowmen on my right (yes, with Kn (F)), 2 blocks of knights held in reserve (like, erm, where mine should have been) and a nasty elephant.
Luckily
(ahem) the bowmen didn't score too many pips first off, allowing my Kn (F) block
to have a semi-half-hearted attempt to wheel past them - well, incredibly half
hearted really, as I also got poorish pips -
And to cap it all, on my left my ally was unreliable, rather limiting my advance with the cataphracts :-(
Should have stayed in the pub really...
Luckily the incompetence of my Kn(F) extended to their inability to kill sacrificial Skythian LH sent out to break their line, and soon they looked likely to beat up on the bowmen by pushing LH back into them... as well as charging to their doom frontally .. at least the command coudl take the losses as long as no-one else got caught up in the panic !
The cataphracts however were doing much better - giving the Skythian knights a real pasting and opening up an opportunity for the elephant to come tin can hunting. At this point the allies decided to come back on line, and soon 4 regular infantry were maneuvering behind my slowly advancing line to try and sneak into range of the smellie as well
It was definitely a game of two halves :
With nearly everyone dead among the Kn (F), the rest of my army was having none of it |
But in "Cataphract Success World", we were starting to run out of people to kill who didn't smell of "Eau de Elephant" |
Killing the last of my Kn (F), and with nothing to stop them the Scythians swept forwards on my right, forcing me to retreat ignominiously (or, I guess for a steppe army, perfectly reasonably and sensibly) towards the edge of the table. Meanwhile I was desperately attempting to kill off the last 2 Mountain Indians needed to win the game, as the elephant general whittles away my Kn (X).
Amazingly, the game had time called on us at bound 9 - neither of us could quite believe it, but maybe with combat from bound 2 we had just been doing too much? We then went onto a sudden death version of blitz moves - sudden death as we both only needed a couple of casualties.
I got closer to the edge of the world on my right, and threw more and more troops into the mountain Indians to nail the last 2.
In the end as I had nearly run out of table, I had 3 attempts to win the game - Kn X vs overlapped bow, LH vs overlapped Bw (back to back - a double kill) and a shot on the elephant general, who my CinC was preventing a recoil on - all 3 failed!
The Mountain Indian general then turned on my unlucky cataphract mounted boss, and squished him - and the Scythian bowmen, by now most of the way across the table, shot one of my LH away - 1-9 defeat! doh!
