Aethelmearc War Practice Field Battles: Motivating the Press

Just got back from the Aethelmearc War Practice and wanted to write about what I saw in the field battles.  I didn't get the official numbers, but if I had to guess, we had close to 100 per side.  I fought with the Tuchux and a smaller contingent from, I believe, the Midrealm.  Across from us was the Aethelmearc army.  I had the fortune of being in a reserve unit which allowed me to watch every battle unfold.

For the most part, I thought the ability levels on both sides seemed fairly well matched.  Aethelmearc certainly had a greater number of top end fighters (knights) from an individual skill standpoint, but the Tuchux even that out with the fact that they are very well trained and skilled at melee combat.

The point being, since both sides were relatively matched at skill level, winning or losing the battles came down to battlefield tactics.  In fact, for the most part, even the strategies were fairly evenly matched.  i.e. I never really felt that either side left a glaring weakness or strength from the start of the battle.


Motivating the Press

The biggest weakness I saw on the field was needless stalling.  There's a time to stall, and there's a time to press.  In short, you stall when you don't have the numbers or the skill to win, and you press when you do.  Too often I saw units that faced a weak opponent who were too willing to just stand there and let the spears poke at each other.  While this is happening, there is likely action occurring somewhere else on the field where your side is losing.

Consider the following example from one of the battles I remember from yesterday:

Shown above is roughly the left half of the field.  The green team has a clear numbers advantage, which means that red had a numbers advantage on the right side of the field.  In fact, I remember looking to my right and seeing that red was in the process of collapsing our right flank.

Take a second to think about what options green has at this point.  Green's reserve unit (where I was) is completely unengaged and out of the fight.  Red is about the roll the left flank of the main green unit in the center of the field (right side of diagram), and we know that red is about to roll the right flank of the main green unit on the right side of the field (not pictured) and eventually win that fight and move toward the center of the field.

Now the green reserve unit could mobilize and move to the right side of the field to stop the collapse of their flank, but its going to take a long time to get there.  The obvious move for this unit is to move straight forward and engage the right flank of the main red unit.

There's still a problem, however.  By the time they get through this unit, they are still going to have too many fighters on the left side of the field held up by a smaller unit, which means they may still have a numbers disadvantage once they meet up with the red unit on the right side of the field.  Also, it may take a while to get through this center red unit, and in order to roll the flank, green will have to potentially expose their backs to the red unit on the left side of the field which, at a minimum, slows the progress.

I felt the key to this battle was motivating the press on the left side of the field.  As our reserve unit pressed forward toward the middle red unit, I actually left the reserve unit to go and yell at the left unit (Midrealm) to press the attack.  Now when I say "yell," that was exactly what I did, but not because they were necessarily doing anything wrong.  They just were not in a position to see the importance of expediency at this point.  By running over and yelling, "we need to kill these guys right now," I'm letting all of the fighters and their commanders know what job needs to be done and that it needs to be done quickly.

After these two presses resolved themselves, the red unit on the left was killed off pretty quickly, allowing the left green unit to move right and continue to roll red's main unit's right flank while killing them.  By the time green meets red's unit that is on the other side of the field, they will be strong and all moving in the right direction toward the fight.

Think about how much weaker this attack would have been had green's left unit continued to stall and spear duel while making little progress.

On an additional note, green's left most skirmisher's who were protecting the flank needed to do very little in this fight.  Since they had an even matchup with the red skirmishers, there was no need to engage.  They only needed to keep them out of the fight.


Find Someone to Hit

So the first tactical key was to motivate the press when you have the advantage.  I use the term "motivate," because its not simply enough to know that a press is required.  You need to be able to motivate those around you to join in on the press.  That is a skill that shall be left for another day to discuss.  =)

The next tactical key is what I call finding someone to hit.  I blogged about this earlier, but that one was focussed more on an individual within an engagement.  I'm now talking about this in terms of large groups of people who are unengaged.  What this means is, if you are in a battle and you are not actively engaged (not necessarily attacking, but involved in someway in the fight), then you need to find someone to hit. And if you don't see anyone, you need to look really hard.  If the battle is not over, your job is not over.

Lets consider the above scenario after the left green unit defeats the smaller red unit.

One of the keys to winning this battle is how quickly the now unengaged green fighters can find a way to get themselves back into the fight.  In this case, the obvious move is to turn right and join the main green unit to help finish off the main red unit.  The more quickly it is done, the more effective it will be.

One of the things that absolutely kills a lot of units is waiting for a commander and reforming the unit before moving.  This takes way to long.  The fighters need to individually start moving to where they can make an impact and gradually reform as they move in that direction.


Getting Reserves Involved Sooner than Later

It was my opinion that as the battles played themselves out, our side generally did better when our reserves engaged earlier rather than later.  This is similar to the concept above.  The side with the most fighters engaged tends to do better.  Having a reserve unit is a great idea, but I think it works best when it finds a tactical situation to exploit, and then quickly moves in to take advantage of the situation.


Spears, Take the Horse Blinders Off

I was playing nice yesterday, but I saw a lot of good spear fighters that were so focussed on the fighters directly in front of them that they never saw me coming from the oblique.


Don't Engage in an 8 on 2 Fight

In one of the battles, one of the Tuchux (Tobar) and I ended up dragging 8 fighters all the way to the edge of the battlefield before I finally yielded.  As this was happening, their other units were dying because they were undermanned.

If you ever end up in an 8 on 2 scenario, either charge them immediately to kill them quickly, or have 5-7 of your fighters leave them to go and get engaged in the fight somewhere else.

Anyway, those were my thoughts on the day.  Overall, I thought everyone did pretty well.  I saw almost no "fish in a barrel" scenarios, so Aethelmearc and the Tuchux seem to be doing a great job of training themselves up!

Guarding or Attacking a Hut & Other Thoughts from the Weekend

I had a busy weekend, fighting in a Markland war on Saturday and a regional melee practice on Sunday.  One thing I can say from the experience is that I'm a much better analyst than I am as a field tactician.

I actually think field command is very difficult for anyone, which is why I prefer an approach that focuses on training up fighters to act as independently as they can on the battlefield.  Once the initial impact happens, everyone is going to be in a situation where they have to decide what the best decision to make is.

One experience that we had on Sunday was a bit amusing.  We came up with a plan of attack, but we never decided who was going to make the calls.  Out of our unit of 6 guys, we had 3 who were all used to making decisions on the field.  Fortunately, we were also good at working together that when a call was not being made, someone spoke up.  If a call was made, we all reacted.


Method of the Practice

I wanted to mention up front that I really prefer the practice method that we used.  It was pretty simple.  You split up to two sides, each side works out a battle plan on their own taking a reasonably short amount of time to do so, and then lay on.  After the battle resolves itself, both sides do the same thing.  They talk about what went well and what didn't, make adjustments, and then lay on again.

This accomplishes two things.  1)  It gets in as much active fighting as possible because of the limited amount of talking and 2) it gets all the fighters involved in discussing and thinking about what happened during the fights.

I find this to be much more productive than to have a commander simply dictate to everyone what they are going to do, or to spend too much time talking about it.  That's what the internet is for =)


Attacking / Defending a Hut

Seamus wanted to spend some time doing this because we encounter these kinds of battles a lot, yet don't practice them very often.  We did practice this some at the last army practice, and everyone seemed a little disjointed.

What makes a hut different than a bridge is that there is usually a door to get through, a side that is defending the hut, and a side that is attacking.  As we fought these, I found a couple of key pieces to attacking/defending.

There seems to be two basic defenses.  Form a wall at the entrance, or form a kill pocket inside the hut.  When attacking,  you either charge into the hut with a shield wall, or you pick the defenses apart with spears.  If the scenario is timed, then you have to find the proper balance of spear fighting and charging.  Charging is always the best option provided that you can actually break the defenders and make it into the hut.  Sometimes its beneficial to weaken the defense with spears before the charge.

During the practice, my team probably had the most difficult time transitioning between a shield wall defense and creating a kill pocket.  In fact, we never created a kill pocket because we didn't think of it at the time.  We had a team of people who like to be aggressive, myself included, and when the other side came forward with their spears, our response was to also try to come forward.

I think we had more of a bridge battle "take more ground" mentality rather than a "hold the hut" mentality.  When we presented a wall, they'd answer with spears.  Though we had excellent spears to counter them, we had a hard time bringing them out.

Two other thoughts on attacking and defending the huts.  The left side of the door is a key spot to defend.  If it is weak, a lone right handed shield man can sink into the hut on that side, while protecting his entire left side with his shield.  We had a hole there at one point and Sir Thorson charged through and killed one of our spears (me) with little problem.

Simple Plans Seemed to Work Better

We tried a lot of different things, but mainly for the sake of trying them and seeing how they'd work out.  What worked out best for us in these 6 on 7 hut attacks was simply to charge right into the hut.  What worked out worst for us was trying something cute and tricky only to have them do something that we didn't expect.  I remember getting killed twice because it put me into a mindset where I had to think about how to alter the plan and how to communicate it to our team, or to wait and see if someone else is going to call out a plan, etc. which caused me to let my guard down.

Of course, this is why we practice.  In hindsight, I think out best plans of attack would have been to either decide ahead of time that we are going to charge, or fight with spears.  Beyond that, we should follow through with the plan and make adjustments as the scenario presents itself.


Don't Fight One on One Unless You Have a Clear Advantage

This is unrelated to the hut fighting, but was a theme I noticed a couple of times on the field.

There were two moments that stuck out in my mind.  One was when we were down to two spears and a shield against a knight with a shield.  Our shield man had gone aggressively on the attack by himself against the knight.  I called him back, but at that point we determined that they were both in the water anyway and ended the battle.

The problem we had was that he was taking the knight on one on one, with a less than 50% chance of killing him.  Had he died, the knight would have had a good chance running down the two spears.

In this scenario, the better plan would be to back off and let the two spears do all of the work with the shield defending against any charges, or looking for a cheap and easy kill.

There was another moment in the day where a shield got legged (me) and the teammate ran in and attacked the opponent one on one, taking the fight away from the legged shield, and then getting killed.  Again, working together with the legged shield would have had a much higher chance of success.

Getting Yourself Involved in the Fight

After watching a bunch of videos from some recent practices, I noticed one key element that separated the most effective fighters from the less effective fighters.  The most effective fighters were always engaged in the fight.  If they had the advantage, they were hitting and pressing the attack.  If they had the disadvantage, they were holding off their opponents.

There is a very important nuance that is hard to grasp.  Most fighters go through two stages of fighting, with the first being a matter of standing around, being too tentative and unengaged.  These are the fighters who will stand there and let spears poke at them until they die.  We do our best to teach these fighters how to be aggressive, which gets them to stage two:  they charge into any fray without consideration for how they integrate with their team, or whether or not where they are charging is tactically the best decision.

So having said that, even without mastering the nuance of swift, but smart and controlled aggression, at the very least I think I can safely say that one should always be actively involved in the fight.  ie You have a purpose and you are serving your purpose, not just waiting for someone to come to you.


The Battle

Here's an example of the way one of the battles played out.  I'd like to say up front that the losing side had a mix of knights and newer fighters while the winning side had all experienced unbelt fighters.  The losing side learned from this battle and made adjustments such that they won the last few battles they fought.

The fight was 17 on 18, both sides starting out in a single line before they started to split off into units.

Green's plan was to have a group covering each flank with a core unit in the middle, see what red presents, and react.  Red had their core group on their right with a plan to do a right hook, with a bunch of fighters dropping off the back to account for the green flankers.  Its hard to say if they had more to their plan than that as I was not within hearing distance before the fight.

Red moved out really hard to the right with a mass of 8 guys.  The other side of red had a small unit move to stop the flankers, with a second small unit that reacted once they saw the flankers expose their side.

At this point I thought for certain that red was going to win the battle.  I thought their core unit of 8 fighters were going to roll right over the small green flanking unit and then on into the flank of green's core unit who were standing their unengaged.

Next comes a two part lesson.


Green Fighters Move to Engage while Red Fighters Disengage

At this point the core green unit realizes that red is splitting in two.  They pick one side and move in to fight while a couple of their fighters peal off to defend their potentially exposed back door.  This was a great decision and they acted on it quickly.

Red, on the other hand, had half of their core unit drop out of the fight.  They mobilized for a right hook, but the lagging half of the unit seemed unable to find people to attack.

Battle Results

Green overwhelmingly won this battle.  Was it because of this one particular field decision?  No.  But it was one of the many small differences that added to the overall result of the battle.  Green reacted just a little quicker than red did, which has the same effect in melee as it does in singles.

Ultimately, green just out fought red on their left flank.  The 3 green fighters in the middle of the field made a good move against a disorganized red unit by enveloping them and picking them apart quickly.  On the right side of the field, green's right flankers were moving into a disorganized unit of red that had an unfavorable weapons balance (only one shield) and the middle right green unit had a more aggressive position on the red fighters than red did on green's far flank.

Having said that, throughout the day I noticed several times certain fighters that were always actively engaged versus other fighters that took a while to find someone to hit.  This is important not just an a unit level, but on an individual level as well.

The ultimate lesson is to figure out a way to get involved in the fight (assuming that there is not a limited front that prevents everyone from getting involved.  Or, in other words, DON'T crowd the spears!  =)   )


Follow Up on the 4on2 Discussion

My last blog post addressed a 4on2 scenario involving poles and shields.  Sir Thorson and I had an interesting conversation about that today where he pointed out that some areas feel its the shields' job to lead, and the poles to follow what they do, and that in other areas its reversed.

My thought regarding that is that clearly there is no single method that is best.  It largely depends on the quality of fighters you have, their specific skills (size, height, mobility, technical skill, etc.), and what they are used to.  I do think, however, that when the fighters get together, there needs to be communication as the engagement is happening, and all fighters need to behave in ways that allow the other fighters to read what they are going to do.

As an example, I like to fight in front of the shields with my pole to get attacks in before their shields are in range.  In order to ensure that my shields understand that that is what I am doing, I make a very aggressive move forward before the engagement.  If two shields want to form a small wall and charge in first, they need to jog a few steps ahead of me to let me know that that is what they are going to do.

Anyway, those were my fighting thoughts today.  Hope you enjoyed.