Alp Arslan in Helsinki

No pictures I’m afraid – took my camera but I find that unlike DBM I’m so involved all the time that I forget to take any pictures; doh!

Although I booked for the IWF World Championships well in advance I only started thinking about which army to take when one of the other competitors submitted an army list for checking – I’d volunteered to do the FoG as well as the DBM list checking. Clearly it isn’t suitable for the list checker to choose their army when they have sight of their opponents lists so I had to hurriedly make my mind up.

With armies from the first 4 books available to choose from (Rise of Rome, Storm of Arrows, Immortal Fire and Swords & Scimitars) there are quite a few armies I can field, however, my real interest from those books is the Moslem armies and so a S&S army was on the cards. A couple of read throughs later I decided that a Seljuq army was the way to go, despite toying with Mamluke, as I could use a load of my nice Outpost figures. After a bit of playing around I finalised on the following (in order of march) which I dated at 1071 so it could be the army Alp Arslan led to victory over the Romans at Manziket:

Here for a PDF detailing the army.

Initiative of 4 and 14 BGs. Basic battle plan is to fight in the steppe, run around and shoot the enemy and then charge them when they are not happy. The Poor infantry are filler and should be kept away from the enemy most of the time. The biggest worry was facing an army with lots of troops you need 5 to hit when shooting as it makes it harder and the army has no real impact troops to worry the enemy meaning it really has to affect them with the bows – in practice at the competition this mean the 2 Roman armies and the Medieval Cypriot.

Those who know the Seljuq list will probably ask why I didn’t take either the Dailami or the Knights which are options, although you cannot get both together, or maybe even the elephants. I didn’t take the knights, or some other Lancers, as I just can’t get them to work (I had the same problem with Kn in DBM) and usually end up getting them destroyed for little gain. The Dailami were discarded as they would be the only MF in the army, and the only fighting foot, and I felt that in an open competition a single BG of MF is not a good idea. Elephants went for similar reasons.

I managed just one practice game with the army against a massive Later Ptolemaic where I lost the initiative and so didn’t fight on the steppe. A good learning experience but a draw.

The first round draw saw me facing George Pakos from Greece who was very new to FoG and more interested in playing against new people and learning the game than anything else – good attitude IMO. George was fielding one of the 3 Santa Hermandad Nueva Castilian armies in the competition and it was constructed as follows (not in march order):

PDF version here.

George won the initiative – ho hum – but decided that he wanted to fight in the steppe anyway as he hadn’t in any of his other games and he wanted to learn how his army fared there against a horse archer army. Again I can only salute his attitude as he knew it wasn’t ideal but felt he would learn more this way – and I agree with him, you only really learn when your army has its back against the wall IMO. The terrain ended up with a few pretty inconsequential pieces scattered around the table edge which had almost no effect on the game which was fought out in the open spaces.

I must confess that I don’t recall too much of this game, including initial set ups, as it was relatively quick and George and I spend a fair amount of time going through the mechanism and rules so that he understood them and learnt some new stuff. However, here is the gist of what happened.

I deployed with my skirmishers of all sorts as far in as possible, LF in the centre and LH on the wings with the majority of the LH on my left. The Cv were deployed as far in as they could go in a roughly central position but with the Ghilman mostly to the left as that is where the heavier part of George’s army was so I felt their Superior shooting and better manoeuvrability should go there – the Undrilled, Average Turcoman cavalry could deal with something easier.

Again George’s newness to FoG showed as he deployed his relatively small army on quite a wide front for its size – more DBM style really – and with significant gaps between BGs in places. His knights were to my left and the Spearmen were also more to that side of the table along with the crossbowmen. His Jinetes were up front, 15MU in, with 1 BG on my right and 2 on my left as I recall.

Moving first I was able to point my mounted towards George’s lights and with the advantage of numbers in all places. This meant that I was always going to have the advantage in any shooting as I was shooting further, apart from his crossbowmen, and with more bases. The Arquebusiers were soon caught in the open by a BG of Turcoman LH and George found out just how bad fighting with half as many dice when hit in the rear is (didn’t evade far enough) and they were soon heading for the rear with alacrity. My horse archers facing his 2 Jinete units, I had 2 BGs of 4 to his 2 of 6 so even numbers, got the better of the shooting disrupting both Jinete BGs and the subsequent charge swept them away thanks again to greater numbers of dice as we were in fact on a negative PoA at Impact and equal PoAs in melee – him Light Spear and Protected against my Swordsmen.

All the time the enemy Knights were advancing, charging but chasing shadows as my troops evaded out of the way – with nothing to tie down my cavalry he was going to have to get very lucky to catch even my Cv let alone any LH.

Now with gaps in his army I was able to start to gang up properly on some of the tougher Castilian BGs. The Crossbowmen were advancing nicely and are pretty good against a mounted army even in the open, however, with the Ghilman being Superior they were able to weather the shooting and charge into the Crossbowmen. The PoA for fighting MF in the open pretty much cancelled out the extra dice the Crossbowmen had and we drew at Impact, but come the Melee phase with a ++ PoA for heavier armour and Swordsmen the Crossbowmen were butchered mercilessly by the slave troops. This now left a BG of Spearmen sitting in the middle of the table with various horse archers on three sides, also close enough to them to prevent them from forming Orb and so having some chance of surviving, perhaps. Shot to Disrupted and then charged from 2 directions they also broke rapidly and thus the whole army was gone.

However, George had had some success. On my right the Bedouin had gone chasing the Jinetes over there who had evaded a couple of times and were then forced to stand and fight due to the table edge. Obviously now inspired by their lack of escape route (they’d clearly read their Sun Tzu) they proceeded to give the Bedouin a right good kicking, breaking them in 3 rounds of fighting. In their pursuit they then charged a BG of Cv Turcomans – might as well as they army was going down by this stage – they were well on their way to breaking them (OK, just Disrupted but it seemed fated) when the game finished.

So it finished 24-1 to the Seljuqs.

George, despite losing, appeared to have had a good time and he said he’d learnt a lot which had been his aim and this was good news to me.

Much to my surprise only 2 games reached a full conclusion in round 1 so I was matched up against the other winner, Dave Ruddock who was using Skythians. Dave’s army was pretty straight forward:

PDF version here.

As we both had Initiative of 4 it was going to be a random roll to see who won that and Dave did. However, as he also wanted steppe as the terrain type this wasn’t really an issue. In fact as both armies will pretty much deploy in a fairly obvious manner I though that having the first move may well actually be an advantage in this case so didn’t worry about losing this dice roll.

Terrain was pretty minimal as you’d expect with the pieces that impacted the game all being on Dave’s side of the table – a patch of broken ground on his right and some rough going including a gulley on his left. Dave placed 2 ambush markers in the gulley but I thought it highly unlikely that he would have any troops in there but I did think a flank march may be on the cards.

Dave deployed his hoplites in the middle with one of the BGs single ranked to extend the frontage but the other 2 more a more normal 2 ranks deep – I’m not sure why Dave tried this and I think he was undecided whether it was a good idea; from my point of view it made the BG a bigger target for shooting and blocked his LH from falling back. Otherwise he had a BG of the Armoured Cavalry on each wing and 6 of his LH up front mainly in the middle of the field – one BG and 1 general were absent and as I felt the ambush unlikely I assumed it was on a flank march but chose to basically ignore it until it appeared.

I deployed with the LF initially in the middle, expecting them to pull back ASAP, LH spread fairly evenly along the line on the wings and the Cv behind them with a single BG of Ghilman on the left and all the rest mostly towards my right with the Ghilman on the end of the line and the Turcoman Cv inside them. The basic plan was to get up close and personal with the Skythians ASAP as my army is heavier and very well equipped to beat Skythians thanks to having more Cv – in fact the Turcoman Cv was taken partly with other steppe type armies in mind.

The battle opened with a general advance by my cavalry all along the line taking advantage of the double moves to get as close as possible to the Skythians to cut down their manoeuvre possibilities. The Turcoman Cv were tasked with heading for the single ranked hoplites so as to get 8, or as near as 8, shooting dice on them which should force plenty of CTs and, on average, with 8 shooting they’ll actually be at -1 for getting 1Hp2B as well. As expected we quickly found that the ambush markers were dummies confirming the flank march.

Dave’s reaction to the general advance was to try and withdraw his LH and move them to the wings or, on my right, away from the overwhelming force bearing down on them. This is where the hoplite deployment worked against him as he essentially had to run the LH across the front of the hoplites to get round the ends and so prevented the hoplites from advancing, prevented his LH from doing much shooting and funnelled them towards my troops in places. However, his flank march plus general did roll to arrive on the second throw so he did get some troops behind my line – but I send a BG back to track his BG and they then spent a lot of the game playing tag to no great effect. I have to confess to being slightly lucky here in that if my (casual) placement of my camp was a few mm closer to the left table edge Dave would have sacked it, as it was it was just far enough in for my LH to get back and prevent this. As they say, don’t give me a good general give me a lucky one …

Pushing forward on my left, the flank I felt I was weakest on and so would be looking to lose slowly, a BG of Ghilman faced off a BG of the Skythian Armoured Cavalry around the edge of the broken ground, Dave having carefully placed his BG so that if I charged him I would be disordered but he would not be. Unfortunatley for Dave his plan was scuppered when with the shooting I disrupted him and he lost a base and so felt happy to charge in hoping the extra base would swing the fight. It certainly did and the Armoured Cavalry broke disgracefully with, IIRC, a double cohesion drop on impact. Only 1 BG gone but it changed the whole balance of play on the flank in my favour.

Elsewhere Dave was just about managing to extract his LH but they were getting the worse of the shooting and his left flank was under great pressure as I had stacked my Cv that side and he had a bit of a traffic jam with the number of BGs getting out of the way. Inevitably his camp was exposed and my Bedouin moved in and sacked it. With his left in full retreat mode the end of the hoplite line now came in for a bit of attention from rather a lot of horse archers and the BG that started single ranked soon took on the role of pincushion. The Greek general did his best to keep them happy but fairly soon they’d failed a couple of CTs and were charged by a Turcomen Cv BG and broke on the CT for being charged when Fragmented. Obviously this now added to Dave’s problems in extracting his left win as he had a Cv unit chasing a broken unit behind his lines. This led to the second unit of Skythian Armoured Cavalry being caught and beaten up.

The situation now was that my army was more or less rampaging all around Dave’s and whilst he was doing his best to wriggle away a noose was closing around his troops with grim inevitability. A second BG of hoplites, unable to get away as they were slower, was surrounded shot up and charged so that it broke in much the same was as the other BG had been. I think at this stage the Greek Javelinmen were also despatched as they had nowhere to hide.

Whilst all this was going on we had an amusing side show with Dave’s flank marched unit. In an attempt to chase it down one of my Turcoman Cv units basically pushed it into a corner from which it wasn’t going to escape. Somehow we both ended up as a 1 wide column shooting each other with 1 dice with a hit forcing a CT. We both kept hitting, however, my Turcomans failed each CT and after 3 shots were broken and ran away.

Despite this minor, and amusing, set back the writing was on the wall and I collected the extra attrition point to break the Shythians and win the game.

Another 24-1 to Alp Arslan’s boys leaving me on 48 out of 50 possible points and well ahead in the competition. However, with 4 more games to go anything could happen …

The dawn of day 2 (although how you tell when it doesn’t get dark is beyond me) pitched me up against David Fairhurst and his Alexandrians led by “Big Al” himself. Oddly despite our years on the GB competition circuit we couldn’t remember ever meeting in a singles game before – we’d had to travel to Helsinki to manage that!

Here for the PDF.

I won the initiative and so Big Al was stepping out onto the steppe to try and pin down the Turks. We ended up with little terrain that would affect the game, a piece of broken ground on David’s right was the most important really although a couple of pieces of rough ended up in my centre but nothing that was going to bother me. David’s camp was somewhat to his left of centre and I briefly toyed with doing a Ruddock and flank marching a BG, but decided against it. My deployment ended up with the LF in the centre as usual, expecting to be pulled back ASAP again as usual, 4 BGs of Turcomans on the left with the other and the Bedouin on the right; all the skirmishers the regulation 15MU in. I had a single BG of Ghilman on my left and all the rest of the Cv on the right with, as usual, the Ghilman on the extreme end of the line. David deployed his Iphikrateans and Hypaspists on the right to push round that flank quickly, the phalanx echeloned back with LF screening and the majority of his mounted and the nellies on his left. He also had the Thracian MF as a second line to give support – all looked quite like Gaugamela really.

The plans appeared to be that I was going to skirmish on the left and push with my major shooting power on the right, aiming for the enemy mounted whilst David was aiming to turn the table 90 degrees to then push me off table with a steady, if long, advance. I did wonder whether his Hypaspists next to the table edge may be a weakness as they would get -1 on any CT if I could shoot them up a bit, but they were Superior

The first few moves went pretty much as planned for both sides. My big cavalry wing marched steadily around the table whilst lighter units advanced to slow the Makedonians down to single moves to maximise my chances of gaining local superiority before David turned the battle. On my left I had some success with shooting at the Protected MF but with Al as an IC normality was soon restored, my one real success was that the Thracian LH had to retreat behind the MF as it couldn’t stand out against all my horsemen – watch this BG, it is important.

Eventually, of course, the Makedonian MF charge my left wing LH and Cv to drive them off and stop them shooting and here Nik tries to be clever, with unexpected results. The Iphikrateans charged my lone left wing Ghilman BG and I think that if instead of evading, after which my only real option would be to turn back 180 degrees, I stand to fight and, all being well, I should then break off which gives me more options in my move, although I could easily be disrupted and/or lose a base. It took me a short while to decide but stand I did. So the Iphikrateans contact and we draw the Impact phase, however, through lucky dice rolling I win the Melee phase by 2 hits and Dave, inevitably, rolls a double 1 which meant that despite Big Al sitting with them, they double dropped to Fragmented.

Being my move next David couldn’t move any of his other troops out of the way or out of testing range and so when the MF inevitably broke in the next melee phase we had a rather nasty situation for the Makedonians. The routing MF bust through the Thracian LH behind them (I told you to watch them) and when the Ghilman pursued the LH evade move took them through one of the supporting Thracian MF as they had to evade directly away from the charge, it being a flank or rear charge so an evade to their rear was not possible. It got worse when my Ghilman then hit the now Disrupted Thracian MF, broke them so that they went through the LH again so Fragmenting them and these then broke when the Ghilman pursue charged at them. Result for me with 1 Ghilman BG breaking 3 enemy BGs and ending up most of the way to the baggage!

In an attempt to do something about the rampaging Ghilman David was forced to bring his only useful reserve unit left to face them, the other Thracian MF, but bang, crash, wallop and they were also routing, this time across the back of his army so that the Ghilman were being drawn towards his left wing cavalry with my right wing bearing down on them from the front. During this rout the routers again burst through other troops disrupting them, it seemed to be the feature of the game – and again it had taken an unfortunate series of dice rolls in the VMDs for this to happen.

David now, correctly, realised that he had to push with his cavalry and elephants to try and get something out of the game as it was slipping away alarmingly quickly – much to my surprise. However, it turned out that my right wing Ghilman had “magic bows” and in 2 shots David failed 2 Death Rolls and the Companions were down to 2 bases – note stat watchers this meant I had hit with at least 3 shots each time on a 50% chance per dice; lucky, moi? However, they had to charge the Ghilman and so they did and at the same time we had the Makedonian Skythians fighting the Turcoman Cv despite the latter being Protected. Brave though they were the Makedonian cavalry succumbed fairly quickly and, almost inevitably, a routing unit burst through an already Disrupted BG to break David’s army.

So 25-0 to me much to my surprise and all arising from a single combat where I got lucky whilst trying to get a small advantage for my next move. I think this is the only FoG game I’ve played where a single combat round has had so much impact on the game.

After being rather lucky against David in the morning I found that I was to play Lynda Fairhurst in the afternoon, no doubt set for revenge for family honour – and more importantly to see if she could stay ahead of hubby in the placings :-0

Lynda used Bosporan and her army list was:

PDF here.

I won the initiative and, in a fit of unoriginality, chose the steppe. We ended up with a couple of pieces of rough going on Lynda’s left (why does it always end up on the other side?) and a piece of broken ground on my left – there were probably a couple of other bits but they made no difference and I’ve forgotten where they were.

My deployment was as unoriginal as my choice of terrain – lots of LH on the right, some on the left including the Bedouin, LF in the centre ready to run away and the cavalry 10MU in, mostly on the right but a BG of Ghilman and another of Turcomans on the left. Lynda had her Lancers dead centre and the LH split left and right. Her infantry clustered around the rough going with the Sindi MF positioned to support both BGs of the Militia – I didn’t like the look of them even more now, and that was before the threat of the Pink Dice was revealed :-0 :-0

Whilst Lynda’s Lancers started a long march over the table directly towards my camp, which I wasn’t going to oppose frontally, I swung my LH around her flanks to put pressure on her less numerous LH with the aim of catching them all, the camp and, hopefully, some LF so as to be able to win the game without having to fight any of the dangerous stuff.

Things started off fairly well with Lynda deciding to stand with a LH BG when charged by 2 of mine and despite stiff resistance they inevitably broke and soon left the field. This then left the way to the camp open and one of the victorious Turcoman BGs walked in and sacked it. As a bonus on the other flank the Bedouins rather rudely rolled a 6 to Lynda’s 1 on the VMD to catch an evading LH BG in the rear. However, despite rapidly being reduced to Fragmented the Horse Archers then refused to drop another cohesion level for 3 further rounds of melee before finally breaking in rout – this was an omen of what was to come in this game …

That said at this point I was 6 attrition points up to nil and feeling fairly confident that I was in control of the game and should be able to get a good result from it even if it wasn’t another total victory.

Lynda quite rightly had other ideas, of course.

She started the fight back by peeling off one of her Lancer groups which assisted by a LH group, and a failed CMT on my part despite Alp Arslan being with the BG, then sandwiched my left flank Turcoman Cv BG in a charge from front and rear – being Cv in a single rank doesn’t help you if there is no where to evade to! The only saving grace was that as I was facing the Lancers I didn’t drop a cohesion level for being hit in the rear and managed to only lose one level in the combats that round. This allowed me to move my nearest BGs away so they would not have to test when the inevitable happened and to also move the IC away so that he couldn’t be killed – although with the Turcomans I had not committed him to what was clearly a doomed fight. I must also note that Lynda also deployed the Pink Dice at this point and on their first roll got 4 hits out of 4 dice rolled :-

I sensed a turning of the tide …

However, onwards and upwards as they say and after successfully testing to stop looting the Bosporan camp my LH charged a BG of LF Javelinmen who pretty much had to stand or risk annihilation if I caught them in the rear. Once again the Pink Dice, although a different shade this time, worked their magic, mainly by intimidating my dice so I rolled next to no hits and the combats were drawn - or at least there were no lost bases and no drops of cohesion levels which amounts to the same thing. So the LH had to break off … Well, actually we both forgot until the middle of Lynda’s turn that they should have broken off, giving the LF a chance to leg it, but I remembered in time and we were able to back track somewhat so that Lynda could make the sensible moves after my LH pulled back. As Lynda was now advancing her Militia towards my Cv, whose shooting was woeful, all the soft squidgy targets were vanishing before my eyes to be replaced by tough troops.

With victory slipping away from me, or rather Lynda was taking it from me, I now had to commit the Ghilman rather piecemeal into combat with the Militia meaning basically an even fight all round with my Superiority being the only difference, which is a narrower margin that I had been planning on. By careful wheels at the appropriate time Lynda had made sure that I wasn’t going to get flank attacks in, although I did get a Turcoman Cv BG into overlap before the end. The fighting here was a grinding affair with neither side giving an inch until one of the Militia BGs failed a cohesion test and, with the overlap arriving, I almost had my breakthrough.

Meanwhile time was ticking away and the end of the round was fast approaching. With nothing to lose Lynda charged everything in range with whatever she had in range. Now it was my turn for bad VMD evade moves and nearly everything rolled down and I had both BGs of Javelinmen caught in the rear, one by Lancers and the other by better quality Javelinmen – this was going to hurt. And indeed it did with both BGs breaking ignominiously, if not unsurprisingly, and fleeing at top speed towards my camp! I had my one piece of luck for this bound when the pursuing Lancers failed to keep in contact with the routing Javelinmen, otherwise they’d have been pulled into my camp and so sacked it.

The last bound of the game saw me on 6 attrition points and Lynda on 7 – my advantage coming from a now Fragmented Militia BG (which had been so for a couple of rounds of fighting), however, my Ghilman fighting her steady Militia (bolstered in the last round) were Disrupted and so vulnerable. With a last push the Ghilman broke the Fragmented BG and the other Ghilman BG survived the combat without a further loss of cohesion and so I just scraped a narrow win by 8 attrition points to 6.

A final score of 11-9 to me and many congratulations to Lynda for pushing my army so hard – the toughest game they’d had so far.

So at the end of day 2 I was still in the lead and could now start thinking about pushing on for the overall victory. With the draw done before we packed up I found I was to face Ray Duggins’ Santa Hermanded Nueva Castilian on the morrow …

Ray was using the much fancied Santa Hermanded Nueva Castilian, however, I’m not keen on it at 800 points and think for a Spanish list the Crown of Aragon is a better bet. That said it was the SHNC I was facing and Ray had chosen, in march order:

Here for the PDF.

Initiative went as expected and Ray was pleased to hear the usual refrain of “Welcome to the steppe” Actually, as it was expected he’d had all night to come up with a cunning plan of how to deal with the Turks on the steppe so it remained to see if he could implement it.

Terrain was, of course, minimal and the pieces that impacted on the game were 2 small pieces of Brush (rough) that ended up in Rays centre 8 MU from his base edge. I thought this looked useful for him as it gave him something to pivot on and try and turn the game though 90 degrees, what I would consider a standard tactic to use against a steppe horse archer army – OK maybe predictable, but solid and effective if you use the right troops.

Expecting this sort of deployment I put just a single Turcoman LH BG on the left and then the 2 Turcoman Cv BGs deployed in a single rank as usual. The rest of the LH was deployed on the right to skirmish with the expected heavy troops, probably Knights and the Ghilman deployed roughly central to my deployment. Ray did indeed put his Knights and LH on his left as the speediest troops to swing round, with the pikemen to their left. The lighter infantry including the Almughavars deployed on the brush with both BGs of Spearmen on the right to stop me running around that side. I believe that this last was a mistake and only 1 BG of Spearmen was needed there and that the second lot of Armoured troops would be much more effective alongside the pikemen – FWIW afterwards Ray agreed. Additionally Ray did not support the Almughavars with the Crossbowmen to help deter my shooing cavalry which I also thought was a mistake. Interestingly Ray afterwards admitted that having the pieces of terrain had thrown him a bit as he had planned on a billiard table – perhaps a lesson that one needs to have a plan but have flexibility in that plan to accommodate terrain, etc.

The game began as expected with the Santa’s pushing the knights and Jinetes forward to force that wing and the pikemen inside them started to wheel round to aim diagonally across the field pivoting on the rough ground. I, of course, met this with an advance of my own LH to start shooting at Ray’s troops fully expecting to have to do this rather a lot, especially on the Heavily Armoured knights. However, we started well and through 2 dire CT tests one of Ray’s Knight BGs was Fragmented, despite the general in attendance – fortunately for him this happened in my bound and so he was (just) able to bolster them up to Disrupted before I had the chance to charge them to force a test for being Fragmented when charged. I think it is fair to say that this early set back affected Ray’s own morale if not that of his army.

On the other wing I saw that getting through the Armoured Spearmen was going to be tough, even though they were within 6 MU of the table edge, and so thought my best bet was to have a go at the Almughavars with all 8 of my Cv Turcomans as these appeared to be the weak spot in Ray’s right wing. Although they were ensconced in terrain and my Cv would have to risk entering it (just) to shoot them I though it well worth the risk as it would effectively mean that the Almughavars would either have to stand and be shot at or charge the Cv to chase them off temporarily which would then draw the MF out of the rough going. This part of the plan worked rather well with both Turcoman BGs successfully evading the Almughavar charge and the Almughavars rolling up enough on the VMD to bring their front edge out of the terrain. Thus I was able to charge the Turcomans into the Almughavars in the open and with one of my BGs led by a general I had a good chance of winning here – did I mention I had Disrupted the enemy with shooting first In reality the Almughavars proved resilient and hung on for a long time but in the end they succumbed and broke.

Meanwhile on the right we had a bit of LH drama. With my Turcoman LH falling back and shooting the oncoming Knights I found my Bedouin LH faced by 2 BGs of 4 Jinetes who had come up close to throw their javelins but who had failed to cause any cohesion loss. So I decided to be bold and charge the Jinetes with the hope that if they stood my Lancer PoA would be enough to cause problems or that if they evaded I might get lucky and catch one – the down side was that Ray had another Jinete BG coming this way and I may just end up in trouble. Rays first reaction was to stand, which I thought brave and said so upon which he decided to evade instead – which I confess is what I would have done given the support arriving in a couple of moves, i.e. try and draw me on to my doom. At this point Ray’s legendry bad luck kicked in and both BGs rolled a 1 on the VMD and I rolled enough to catch one and, thanks to stepping forward, catch the second as well! (I needed the step forward due to the second BG being at an angle) There followed a short and bloody massacre of the Jinetes who both broke in the melee phase only out running my Bedouin in the JAP meaning I had gotten a long way to Rays base edge and within a couple of moves of his camp which had nothing to defend it.

As all this was going on the central pike BGs had come under the attention of my Ghilman with the Hermanded BG having 2 BGs shooting at them. With 7 superior shooting dice each bound it was inevitable that the pikemen would suffer and the dropped to Disrupted in short order. In an attempt to alleviate the pain Ray charged the Ghilman BG to the immediate front and these, despite being in 1 rank, I decide to fight with. The decision was partly because in order to maximise frontage and to some extend resistance to shooting, Ray had deployed the pike BGs 3 bases wide which mean that his PoAs were reduced – and the Hermanded BG had lost a base to boot. Generals were committed by both sides but this was of little help to the pikemen who were chewed up and spat out by the rampant Ghilman falling to Fragmented at Impact and breaking in the Melee phase. To add insult Ray’s general was killed.

The Ghilman now turned onto the Swiss who were next in line for their attention. History pretty much repeated itself here with the pikemen going disrupted and then collapsing in melee, breaking in short order; although they lasted a little longer than the Hermanded ones did. With the 2 routing units running for the table edge a LF BG got caught up in the mess and also decided that it was time to go home.

So I now had 12 attrition points of the 14 I needed and the Bedouin LH 1 move from the baggage so Ray called the game to a close as there was nothing he had any chance of even Fragmenting and so could not cause me any attrition point loss. This gave me my second “perfect score” of 25-0 for the competition and left me well in the lead going into the final round.

In the sixth game I face Neil Hammond’s Late Republican Roman - PDF here.

Neil has covered this - with the addition of photos - on the FoG Forum there seems little point in me repeating what he said. Instead I'll just post a couple of reflections on the game from my point of view and some thoughts on the Seljuq Turks as an army.

As I mentioned in Neil’s forum thread the game was, from my side, dominated by the need not to lose as by doing so I was guaranteed the overall competition win. I'm glad Neil still found the game enjoyable but I must confess that I think it would have been even more so if I'd have had to go for it a bit more as we'd have had more combats that could have affected the overall outcome.

One interesting thing I noticed about my play in this game was that as I was now playing in a different mind set and style I actually made far more mistakes than I had in any of the other games and, ironically, despite pretty much wanting to avoid combat I found myself in more, and less favourable, combats than I probably would have otherwise I think the lesson there is play your natural game as it will be your best chance whatever the circumstances - unless, that is, you are more strong minded about your game than I am.

So what about the army. Overall I found it really suits my gaming style and it is a very effective army. The initiative modifier of +4 helps as it usually means you are on the steppe with enough open space to operate the fluid horse archer tactics - and if anything beats you on initiative it usually means it is the sort of army that will also want reasonable amounts of open space so all is not lost there. Of course occasionally you'll end up in the wrong sort of terrain, however, the Seljuq is still pretty hard to beat unless it is very very crowded indeed.

However, despite the success I've now tried the version Terry Shaw used - Sultanate of Rum with the 4 base knight BG to give the army a bit of punch and something to keep things like legionarii honest. To get these I dropped a TC, cut the LF down to 2 BGs - and 8 of Bow and an 8 of Javelin, Light Spear - and dropped the Bedouin LH, all of which allowed me the points to get the knights as 4 Kn, Superior, Undrilled, Heavily Armoured, Lancers Swordsmen. This army, which is of course led by Kilij Arslan II and dated 1176AD so as to be for the battle of Myriokephalon as opposed to Manzikert (and is another Roman defeat), has now had a run out at Rampage and pleasingly won that competition It did this by beating Latin Greek and Wars of the Roses armies, getting the better of a Crown of Aragon army and drawing against a second Crown of Aragon army.

Of course with all this success for the Seljuqs it is now time to look for a different army.