Orcs and Goblins

This is a post that I've been holding onto for quite a while that I somewhat affectionately wanted to call "Simon's Command."  It's based off of a series of small field battles that we had at an EK Southern Army practice last Spring.

I ended up changing the title to "Orcs and Goblins" because I think this often describes the mix of fighters that we have to work with.  This isn't to say that certain fighters are big, beastly orcs and others are puny little goblins, but rather that any group is going to consist of a variety of ability levels and that one of the better tactical approaches is to be able to adjust your strategy to the array of talents that you have.


The Setup

We fought a handful of open field battles with roughly 15-16 people per side.  The other team did exactly what was expected, because its what everyone does.  They lined up with a big shield wall and put their pole arms in the back.  Simon was put in charge of our side and decided to go with a "hammer and anvil" strategy.  By this, I simply mean that we had a strong unit take the shield wall head on, with a second group of people to wrap around on the flank.

As he started picking up people on his team, he began putting them into positions that suited their talents well.  He built up a shield wall of about 6 veteran fighters, put a veteran left handed pole arm on the left side of the wall, a right handed pole arm on the right side of the wall (that was me), three mobile melee savvy knights off to our right, and then filled in the back of the shield wall with a few remaining poles.

The plan was to hit the middle of their wall with our wall while a small group of elite troops swung around the right flank.  The result was pretty successful.  The shield wall stayed in tact and our left pole arm was able to stave off or slow down any attempts to get around our left flank.  I moved into the gap between our shield wall in order to secure our right side, while our knights rolled around the flank and into the back field.  We won our first two battles very decisively.

A point to reiterate throughout this blog:  controlling the flanks is a main key to winning melee battles.

Above is the initial lineup with the "key melee veterans" circled (three knights and two unbelt melee champions).

The red team stayed together and moved to hit green's left flank.

Green protected their left flank while sending 4 skirmishers around the right flank.  Three knights went fast and wide picking apart whatever was in their path while I (the 4th fighter in) filled the gap in order to hold off a potential breakthrough on our right flank.

Our side one decisively with this plan twice in a row.  One of the knights on our side thought it was a bad plan and that a better plan would be for all of us to stick together and move in the same direction rather than to divide our forces.  I disagree (though admittedly, I was not savvy enough to pick up on the strength of Simon's strategy at the time).


Pro's and Con's of a Shield Wall

A shield wall is effective for essentially four purposes:

1)  Taking an objective that is directly in front on them (like capturing a flag, breaking through a gate, etc.)

2)  Defending an objective that is directly behind them.

3)  Quickly killing a loose collection of troops who don't know how fight in an open field without being in a wall.

4)  Giving your troops a simple structure to keep them from becoming a loose collection of troops who don't know how to fight in an open field.

The downsides to shield walls is that they maneuver very slowly making them easy to get out flanked (they are also easy to avoid frontal engagement with), and they limit the effectiveness of high end melee fighters by limiting their ability to out position the opponent.

In the scenario above, Simon took the best of both worlds.  Those who fought better in a wall were put in the wall.  Those who were more effective skirmishing out on the flank were put out on the flank.  In each battle, green's wall hit red's wall.  If this was a game of rock, paper, scissors, both sides through rock, giving neither the advantage.  While red had all of its fighters tied up in the same spot, waiting for the walls to break down, green had five of its most effective fighters freed up to wrap around the flanks.


The Third Battle

Taking the advice of the knight, Simon changed the plan to everyone sticking together and moving left.  We lost with about 8 red fighters still alive.  The comment was that we "did better" because we "stuck together."  Though I agree that for novice fighters, sticking together might be the more important goal, I think that often times SCA groups limit their effectiveness by not recognizing some of the potential that they have within their units to fight outside of the shield wall paradigm.  A shield wall is the best way to fight for some fighters, but I don't think it should be the end goal for most fighters.

Good Melee Drills and Breaking SCA Paradigms

Last night I went to the local University to fight with a handful of relatively new fighters.  In total there were 8 of us ranging in heavy melee experience from 1 practice to 3 full years of experience (myself being the exception, having started in 1993).  We started off with a bear pit, then did a bunch of 8 man melee fights, and ended with some melee drills.

Overall I was really impressed with the melee instincts that this group had.  I mean REALLY impressed.  The least experienced fighters out there picked up on what to do pretty quickly.  The most experienced fighter and myself discussed how rare this was, and I pondered on it since yesterday, and have come to the following conclusion.

These guys had good instincts because they did NOT learn standard SCA tactics.  Instead, they've had to figure it out on their own by doing lots and lots of foam weapon fighting with no instruction, with the final result being that they learned how to fight, rather than how to be told where to stand, how to follow instructions, and how to be part of a wall that protects the veteran fighters.  


The Standard SCA Approach
I'm a huge fan of letting fighters figure out melee fighting mostly on their own.  Much like the best basketball players in the world started on the playground, I think its best for melee fighters to begin with unstructured team play.  I

I've found that the SCA takes a much different approach which is centered more around developing a basic system, and then cramming everyone through that system.  The cultural structure of the SCA reinforces this "do what I say" approach.  In education, we call these the "sage on the stage vs the guide on the side" approaches.  I find the sage on the stage more effective for singles, much like one would prefer to learn to play the piano this way.  For melee, however, I prefer the guide on the side approach.  Let them fight, see what went right and reinforce it, and see what goes wrong and offer suggestions to fix it.

I mean, I understand why the SCA often trains their fighters to work in shield walls.  In many case, they only get a few practices in before a big war and its the best that they can really hope for a bunch of inexperienced melee fighters to be able to accomplish, but I think it has become a flawed paradigm of how to fight.  I want my fighters to become bishops and rooks, not pawns.


Those Rebellious Spearmen

I thought this historical example could offer a little perspective.  My group, Anglesey, along with our sister celtic clan, The Concusare, did a lot of Markland fighting in the late 80s and early 90s.  Unlike the SCA, Markland allowed face thrusts, which greatly improved the effectiveness of spears when approaching shield walls.  While in the SCA a solid shield wall was almost impenetrable, in a Markland battle, it was only a matter of time before the shields got picked apart.  This created an environment for a completely different set of tactics.

Sometime in the mid 90s, the SCA started allowing face thrusts in their battles, and as you can imagine, we were well ahead of the game tactically speaking.  Us, along with Calontir, were among the small minority of groups that would bring their spears out in front of the battle lines to face off against the other side, and were very effective with it.

One day, not long after this shift in rules happened, a friend and I drove 45 minutes to an SCA practice that he had heard about.  I was in my mid 20s at the time, and had a horrible looking set of gear.  We brought our greatswords and our pole arms and our spears, and sat in on the practice.  At one point in the practice, I faced off against one of their commanders with a little spear duel.  After beating him a few times, he proceeded to tell me everything that I was doing wrong, and that I wouldn't be able to do those things standing behind a shield wall.  When I told him that I do them from in front of the shields he told me, once again, that I was wrong and that if I did that, the shields will just run me down and kill me.

Anyway, life moved one, a few years later I dropped out of fighting only to return after a decade off.  In my first event back I joined in on a bridge battle, and what do I hear?  The commanders on both sides yell, "Okay everyone, lets bring our spears to the front."

The point here is that if you constantly restrict your fighters to sticking to paradigms that you are used to, and to only follow commands, they are never going to learn how to fight, and your unit will always be behind the curve on melee fighting tactics.  Here I was, ahead of the curve and being very effective, and yet the commander was trying to break me of what he considered to be bad form, simply because he was not open to a new approach to fighting.


Practice Scenarios

We tried something new, which I thought went over very well.  When doing a 4 on 4, its common to match up the teams by spreading out the teams as evenly as possible.  We tried something different.  We put the 4 most experienced fighters onto one team and the 4 least experienced fighters on the other.  The result was, as you could imagine, the experienced team won rather easily.

The way this scenario works is that the team that wins gives up one fighter to the other side (the least experienced if the more experienced team wins, and the most experienced if the less experienced team wins).  So after the first battle we fought 3 on 5.  The 5 won, but barely.  In the next battle the more experienced team won, but it was a closer fight, and then the 5 won again, but more definitively than before. We went back forth like this for several rounds.

The reason why we did this was to create a completely different dynamic than what we're used to.  When teams are evenly matched, the strategies are often the same.  The better guys end up facing off, and the newer guys face off.  Or, sometimes the better guys on each team roll over the newer guys, hoping to do it faster than their opponents do.

This offered a different dynamic.  As I told two of our newer fighters recently, "I don't need you to be able to beat a good fighter.  I need two of you to be able to beat a good fighter, and I need you to know how to adjust your tactics so that you can make that happen."  Likewise, our better fighters don't need to be able to kill new fighters.  They need to be able to kill multiple new fighters.

Being on the veteran team, it really pushed us to work to figure out how to fight when outnumbered.  The newer guys, on the other hand, eventually learned to merely attempt to survive when in a one on one situation, and how to overwhelm their opponents when they had a numbers advantage.  In the battle that they won by the largest margin, they left one fighter to occupy two of us, while the other 4 attacked our 3rd fighter.


Don't "Bruce Lee" the Single Fighter

I've now seen this happen several times.  The fighters will be in a 3 on 1 situation, and they start charging at the single fighter one at a time.  It literally looks like Enter the Dragon.  One guy runs in, the single fighter side steps and kills him, then the next guy, side step and kill, and then the 3rd guy.  The phrase I started yelling out that seemed to have the best effect when we had a numbers advantage was, "Be smart!"  Be smart means, stop, think, and work together.  When you have a numbers advantage, you are totally set up to win.  Slow down and think about who needs to go where.


2 on 1s

If you get nothing else out of these blogs, remember the following two pieces of advice.  1)  Practice your spears and 2) practice your 2 on 1 drills at every practice you can.

For these I sat out and went into "basketball coach" mode.  It was really simple.  They'd do a 2 on 1 fight and I'd watch.  When they finished, I would point out one thing that someone did poorly, or I praised one person for doing something very well, and then we'd move quickly to the next group to fight.  More often than not, the mistake that they'd make is that one person from the pair would run at the single fighter, cut off his own man, and fight him by himself.

Remember, in a 2 on 1, one person needs to commit to staying to the left half of his opponent, and one needs to commit to staying to the right.

One thing I noticed is that the newer fighters like to charge at their opponents at full speed, and they aim for the center of their opponent.  This is why the single fighter is able to side step like Bruce Lee.  This also sets them up such that their momentum takes them past the fighter, and places them directly in front of their partner.

One thing that helped at practice during this drill is before every fight I would say, "Okay, who's on the left and who's on the right?"


2 on 2 on 2 Free for all Resurrection Battles 

I learned this from a Tuchux a couple of years ago and find it to be an incredible drill.  Normally we do it with 5 fighters, but this time we did it with 6.  You pair up and fight.  First person dead goes to the resurrection point.  The second person dead goes to the resurrection point and you have a brand new team of two fighters come in, immediately!  You keep doing this until people are exhausted.

This drill gives you a constant mix of different 2 on1 and 2 on 2 situations that that you have to think very quickly on.  I've found this to be, hands down, the best drill you can do to teach people how to work together and react quickly within a melee situation.


Final Thought on Spear Fighting

On a side note, I find that the spear is still a very misunderstood weapon.  I just watched a video where an SCA commander was giving a class and pointed out that there are some "spear gods" that will walk out front with their spears and their giant egos and rack up 50 kills.  When someone in the class asked, "why do we let them do that," she replied, "well, no one can stop them.  They don't listen and just do their own thing."

Shouldn't the answer have been, "because they kill 50 people when they do that?"  I mean, is the point of the battle to follow a plan that someone drew up 30 years ago?  Or is it to kill lots of people and win the battle?