A Short Drill on Training Up Your Spears (with video)

 Hey all,

Here's a short video on a 3V3 spear practice that we did twice recently.  I'll keep my comments here short, but in a nutshell, units with well trained spears tend to be very deadly units in most scenarios.  Any chance you get to fight 3v3 with only spears is a great opportunity to improve your game.  The biggest complaint I have with spear fighters is that the vast majority of them only fight with a spear at war.

Anyway, enjoy!

P.S.  If interested in doing more with a spear, see my SCA Spear Tutorial playlist on Youtube LINK

Fighting When You've Lost a Limb

Hey all,

It's been a while.  I've been working out and doing my pell work, but no practices nor melees during the pandemic, so not much to blog about.  However, I recently read a few melee documents from various sources and one thing jumped out at me that I wanted to comment on.

I recently read a suggestion that said if you lose your sword arm to attempt to block shots for other fighters.

Okay.......where to begin?  This is kind of a complicated topic because it isn't so much about what the correct strategy is, but rather about a larger philosophy about what it means to be a melee fighter.

If you view fighters, in general.......no, strike that.  If you view fighters, even the ones who have taken the time to read large text documents and watch videos on how to fight in a melee as nothing more than fodder for commanders to push in a given direction while keeping them motivated enough to pass their morale check, then sure, tell them that they can still be useful fighters once they've lost an arm by blocking shots targeted at other fighters.  That will keep them in the front line a little bit longer, and then once they die they'll feel like they were useful in some manner.

It's my opinion, however, that if a fighter is taking the time to read a document about melee fighting, then they are actually looking for information that will help them graduate past the fodder stage (at least that's always been the intention of my blog posts).

With that said, if I have people in the back ranks with swords, the last thing I want is a weaponless fighter hogging a spot on the front line (exceptions, of course, given to fighters that are so good that they are more useful without a weapon than your typical non-wounded fighter is with a weapon).

So what should you do if you lose an arm?

- Get out of the way of someone who is more useful than you.  If you are in a spot where a killer can kill, then let the killer have your spot.

- You can stay in the back and stay alive.  Large units are intimidating.  The enemy doesn't need to know that you can't kill them.  Be another body on the field.  Who knows, you might be the last person alive at the end of the fight.  Or maybe you were just one person too many for the other team to decide to charge at the flag.

- Be a distraction.  If there is some space in an open field, make yourself bait.  Make people think about coming after you to attack instead of killing your archers or spears.

- Be an extra pair of eyes and a voice on the flanks or in the back.  Watch and make sure the enemy isn't getting into your backfield.  If they are, announce it to your troops and your commanders.  Worst case scenario, you get some useful experience learning how troops move and what constitutes a weakness.

- Be an obstacle or a body shield provided you aren't getting into an ally's way.  Don't try to "block a shot" aimed at your friend.  Slam into the person who is throwing the shot and knock them off balance.

- Lead a charge.  Most charges result in lots of chargers dying.  Volunteer to be in the front of this charge.  You may not be able to swing a weapon, but you can throw your body at the enemy, and if the enemy is going to respond by hacking apart all of the people deep in their ranks, better they attack you than an un-wounded friend.

- Sacrifice yourself by throwing your body at another fighter, making both of you fly over a straw bale and off the side of a bridge.

One of my most useful moments after losing an arm was in a fight in a corn maze.  We were getting picked apart by archers and spears.  I lost an arm as did my buddy.  We looked at each other and said, "are you ready?  Lets do this."  We both yelled, "Charge!!!" and the two of us were the first people into the fray.  He threw his body into two shieldmen and pushed them into the corn.  I cut off two spears and held one in the corn.  We both died, but our un-wounded fighters wiped out the rest of the enemy.

All of those options are better than "blocking shots aimed at a friend."  More often than not, you are just getting in their way.  Yes, there are times when this works, but those tend to be rare.

Hey, I get it, sometimes the best strategy is to just send a large mass of untrained troops at the enemy, and everyone needs to do their job.  But lets be honest and tell the adults that have signed up to fight with you that that is what they are doing to help our side win, while also giving them the tools to graduate toward more effective roles in the army.

My two cents, your milage may vary.  Can't wait to hit someone soon!!!





Bari of Anglesey is a tool who only craves attention, but he doesn't take himself too seriously and sometimes has something useful to say, so he's not so bad.

Estrella Bridge Battle - Integrating Different Weapon Types into a Static Line

Hi all,

I came across a video that I thought was the perfect illustration of what is commonly seen in static line battles.  I'm going under the assumption that it would be okay to use this video as it was made public on social media, and my apologies if I assumed incorrectly.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=300333730939038

Note:  sometimes parts of this video get fuzzy when I watch it, but usually the entire video is pretty clear.

What Can You Learn From a Video of a Battle You Didn't Witness?

Not a whole lot, actually. 

There are a lot of things that can happen in a battle that determine how the tactics play out.  Is the commander dead or alive?  What is the objective?  Are you there merely to serve as a distraction?  Are you taking it easy on the other side because they haven't won a battle yet?  Are you letting ineffective fighters on the front line because they need to have fun as well?  Is it hot?  Are you using a cohesive unit of well trained fighters, or is it the rabble that was left over from the attrition?  Etc.


Then Why Talk About the Video?

Even though we don't really know what is going on, we can still use the video to illustrate some hypotheticals.  Use it as a thought experiment for what you would do in similar situations and what kinds of decisions you would make.  You might even draw different conclusions than I would, and that's perfectly okay.  No one has all of the answers, but we can all work toward more informed decision making.


Initial Impressions

Let's begin with a screen shot.

So there are a few things I noticed, not just from this screenshot, but from the footage of the video. 

- People seem to care about winning the battle based on the yelling I hear and the intensity of the fighting

- It appears to be a single death battle based on the fact that the lines look like they are thinned out and the fact that calibration seems to be above average.  There are also a lot of people standing around on the perimeter who are not fighting, so I assume they have been killed.

- It appears to be late in the battle as the lines look thin, there are lots of dead people on the sides, and there seems to be a below average level of unit cohesion.


Weapons Mix

The front line of the unit on the left appears to have 7 spears, 2 shields, and one pole axe.  It looks like at this point in the battle that they have thinned out enough that they don't have much choice in what they are fighting with as the second rank looks fairly sparse.  If they wanted to, for example, set up a shield wall on the front line, I don't think they'd have enough shields to do so.

The unit on the right appears to have a couple more shields in the front line and maybe one or two fewer spears.  They also seem to have enough fighters in the second and third ranks to fight with whatever they'd like.

There does not appear to be any archery, throwing weapons, or artillery.


Do You Want More or Less Shields on the Front Line?

Answer:  That entirely depends....

So in a nutshell, all else being equal, the more spears you have on the front line, the better you are going to fight a static battle.  The more shields you have on the front line, the more prepared you will be at executing a charge and repelling a charge.  A line with more shields will also be better at a slow advance as a line with more spears needs to maintain a gap of 10-11 feet, so every step forward from the former results in a step back from the latter.

In this example, it actually looks like the unit on the right is more interested in taking ground than killing, so they have a few more shields in the mix and are pushing toward the end of the bridge.  If they can break through the end of the bridge, they can possibly wipe out this thin line with their higher numbers and get into the backfield of another bridge, giving their side a big advantage on that bridge.

The unit on the left, by contrast, has little choice but to try to kill more fighters on the opposing side to try to nullify the numbers advantage. 

In battles like these, I used to be a huge advocate for having only spears on the front line.  A few things have happened in the last decade or so in the East and Atlantian kingdoms that has changed my mind.  One is that they have moved away from a front of mostly shields to more of a mix, which gives them a good balance of charging power while also fending off spears.  The other is that a lot of the bridge battles have moved toward timed control point battles rather than attrition battles, which takes some of the advantages away of a front line full of spears.  The reason being that a line full of spears may kill more, especially if adept in collapsing into a kill pocket when absorbing a charge, but they are not very good at holding or gaining ground.


Weaknesses in the Line

Another screen shot later in the battle:




At this point in the battle, it appears the left unit had realized that they were not strong enough to hold their position on the bridge, so they pulled back off the end of the bridge.  This is often what we call "capping the bridge."  Essentially that means to create an arc from one corner to the other on the end of the bridge, forcing the other side to fight in a kill pocket where the left unit can get more spears into the fight with better angles of attack. 

This is not the prettiest of kill pockets, again probably because it is a collection of whatever fighters were still alive near the end of this battle, but they do appear to have the most critical pieces covered.

The blue arrow at the top points to the most critical potential weakness in a capped bridge.  The smallest of gaps in that position can allow a line of right handed shields push through the gap and into the back field.  Placing a shieldman in this spot (like they have) shores up that critical corner.  A spear or a pole can also stand in that position, giving them a good angle to stab into the open side of a charging shield, but they must be backed up by a strong shieldman so that they don't get run over.

The blue arrow on the bottom of the picture shows the next most critical weakness.  In this case they have a spearman in that position, which can be dangerous if the right team wishes to punch through, but the left team has that spot solidly backed up by at least two shields.

The middle blue arrow shows the third most critical spot, which is a potential weakness in the middle of the line.  The key here is to make sure that after you've shored up both corners, that you don't leave the middle so thin and without shields and poles backing it up, that a group of shields can punch right through it and into the backfield.


Why Were There No Shield Charges?

From the perspective of the unit on the left, they didn't really have the shields to spare.  Keep in mind, a charge doesn't win the engagement, rather it resolves the engagement more quickly.  Sometimes the resolution is to the advantage of the unit that initiates the charge, but sometimes it isn't.  It is possible that the unit on the left could have quickly brought all of its shields to the front and mounted a charge.  It's even possible that due to the greater proportion of spears in the front rank of the unit on the right (once the left brings its shields up) that the left would have killed more fighters than they would have taken in casualties, but it is my belief that the casualties that they would have taken would have left them with too few fighters to hold the bridge, thereby leading to a fallen bridge more quickly.

From the perspective of the unit on the right, they may have been able to mount a charge and might even have been in a good position to do so.  There are a few factors that may have prevented it:

- No single coordinated unit to pull it off
- They are tired
- There is a risk that it won't work
- They look to be winning the bridge anyway, so why take a risk
- No one thought it was a good enough idea to take the initiative to call the charge knowing that they could be responsible for a failed charge and the loss of the bridge
- A lack of leadership (maybe the commanders were dead)


Final Thoughts

The whole goal of this post was not to give tactical answers to a situation on a bridge, but rather to understand why bridge battles often play out the way that they do.  I find that often times commanders and tacticians in the SCA view fighters like they view miniatures in a table top game.  By that I mean that they imagine that they can send a command down to the fighters, and that the fighters will all implement the command as intended. 

In reality, fighters are going to have natural tendencies that they'll follow, and as a commander one needs to understand what those tendencies are and how much those tendencies can be overcome.  Truth be told, a lot of what I wrote above only applied to a portion of the fighters in the video.  There were likely a number of fighters who did what they did purely because they wanted to fight and managed to work their way to the front line, regardless of whether or not taking a spot on that line was to the benefit of their side.

Black Lance Melee Practice - Some Thoughts...

We had a great melee practice in NJ this weekend hosted by Sir Klaus and his house, Carpathia.  We did a lot of drills on the day that helped build aggression and quick decision making on the field, which I'll list below, but I wanted to speak specifically to how the tactics played out in out 10v10 field battles and some of the benefits of the scattered fighters battles.

Drills/Scenarios on the Day

- Marching in a block and following basic commands
- 10v10 single death field battles
- 5v5 single death field battles with pairs of units joining into the fights at random times
- Hold the objective unlimited rez battle (warnings called at 30s and at 5s)
- Single death field battles with scattered fighters

Field Battles

We split up into our normal units and fought five 10v10 (plus or minus) single death field battles.  One side contained a more typical mix of fighters which was, I believe, fairly shield heavy, while our side contained four shields, four spears, and two poles.  We won all five battles pretty decisively.  (Note, I got my butt kicked a lot that day, but we did well in these battles).

I had asked all of the knights who watched the battles what they thought the deciding factors were, and their answers bogged down to simply our side had more experience and were more decisive in our movements.

So what does that mean?

Well, for starters, I would never want to go into a field battle of this size with only four shields.  In general, the smaller the battle and the more quickly it resolves, the more and more shields have an advantage.  The larger the battle and the longer it takes to resolve, the more and more spears have an advantage.  Spears also tend to have an advantage in static battles, where shields have the advantage in mobile battles.  Now this doesn't mean that you should ever have only shields in one situation and only spears in another, but that the mix of weapons will move in one direction or another.  So having said that, I think we won the battles despite having what would generally be considered an inferior weapons mix.

What did the spear team do?

Fan out, move quickly, and attack with ferocity.  A team full of shields in this context is a hammer looking for a nail to hit.  A unit full of spears isn't even a nail.  Its a grape, easily splattered by a hammer of just about any ability level.  So the spear team needs to move fast and lose, and use their feet to avoid getting run over by shields.  The battle can only be won if multiple fighters team up on smaller groups of fighters, get a quick kill, and then move on to the next fighter.

The best play that the shield team probably had would have been to pick a collection of fighters and commit to running right through them.  I believe they did this on the fifth battle, and it was their best showing.  Its certainly not the only way to win with shields, but given the experience levels of both sides, it would likely give them their best chance.

On an interesting note, 6 of us on the winning team were in very similar situations just a few years ago where we were on the losing team and lost in similar fashion.  The biggest piece, in my opinion, is less tactical and more about gaining good experience to be able to make decisions quickly on the field.

Scattered Fighters Battles

This was a drill that was put together by Sir Ryu of Ironskies.  These were fun, and I think an excellent way to train fighters to win battles like shown above.  We had two teams and were individually scattered around the field in a giant circle facing outward.  When lay on was called, we had to figure out how to join up with our teammates and win the battle.





The key to these battles was finding teammates quickly, finding advantages quickly, finding people to hit quickly, and getting out of bad situations quickly.  I really liked this drill and I think it teaches all of the right melee instincts that I think get lost in a lot of kingdom practices.

I do want to incorporate this into some of the practices that we run.  However, I think we accomplish a lot of the same goals with two other scenarios that we consistently run:

Limited rez broken field battles - this allows people to make the same kinds of decisions, but at a slower pace which allows some of the newer fighters to wrap their heads around the kinds of tactical decisions that they are making.

2v2 endless rez battle - We do these when we have 5-6 fighters.  We begin with a 2v2 and a person waiting at the rez point.  As soon as someone dies, they go to the rez point and form a new team of 2 and immediately enter the battle.  This continues continuously until people are too tired to fight.  It teaches you to work with another person, think quickly, and fight tired.

Anyway, that's all.  Looking forward to the next fight!