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.