Pennsic 49 Belted/Unbelted Champions Battles

 For those not aware, the war point battles begin on Sunday with the unbelted champions battle, which is a selection of the best unbelted heavy fighters from the East vs those from the Midrealm.  Each year the format is slightly different, but it is always a single death field battle and it is always fast, hard hitting, and usually over in under a minute.  This year had 30 per side. 

The belted champions battle is often a similar format, but with knights instead of unbelts.  This year had 15 per side.  

And then many years they will allow the alternates (those chosen to be available to fill in a spot on the unbelted team if someone can't make it due to schedule or injury) fight an exhibition battle with ~10 on a side.

Additionally there is a rapier battle, a Heroic Champions tournament, and an Allied Champions battle.

For this post I want to talk about one key flaw with how the belted and unbelted champions often fight.  For the sake of showing proper respect to the people who fought that day, I won't say specifically who I saw make this mistake this year.  There were three battles, and two teams in each battle, so I could be talking about only one of the six teams involved.  Additionally, I could be misreading the videos of the fights, so it is entirely possible that no one made this mistake, but I do see it in these kinds of battles a lot so it is worth talking about at least in a hypothetical sense.


Throwing a Bigger Rock

I've been saying this for years.  There are two ways to win in a game of rock, paper, scissors if your opponent throws rock.  You either throw paper, or you throw a bigger rock.

Rock, in this case, is running fast, charging hard, plowing right into the enemy, and swinging as hard and as fast as you possibly can until either there are no bodies left, or you hit the ground.  

This will almost always work provided that your opponent does not do the same thing to you.  And if you are on either one of these teams, you are probably used to this kind of success fairly regularly.  

The problem with the champions battles is that your opponents have a similar skill level to your own. You aren't beating up on the rabble, but rather you are fighting other champions.

Getting Out of a Bad Situation

When identifying a local threat, you often have two tactical options; attack or deny.  Attacking is pretty straight forward, though there are nuances to exactly how you will attack.  You can charge left, charge right, charge the middle, envelop, use range weapons, etc.  When you deny, you essentially want to avoid the engagement while keeping the enemy occupied.  This might be done by simply moving slowly toward them so that the engagement doesn't happen until you get reinforcements from somewhere else on the field, yet fast enough so that they are still focussed on fighting you instead of moving to engage a different unit. 

I personally like to use the "dance and run" approach.  The best way to describe this is to think of a pack of dogs encountering a grizzly bear.  The dogs will get close enough to keep the bear's attention, but will run away when the bear comes at them while their pack mates come up from behind.  Then, when the bear turns, the pack mates run away while you come up from behind.  Etc.

What Does a Bad Situation Look Like?

A bad situation is usually any fight that your unit will lose.  Your best options in these situations are to either stall until you get reinforcements, keep the opponent occupied while refusing to engage, leaving the situation altogether, or dying slowly and away from the main fight (meaning that you try to position yourselves so that when you finally die, it took them as long as possible to kill you, and it will take them as long as possible to reform and get to the next fight).

Below is an example of what often happens in these kinds of battles.

In this hypothetical case, the yellow unit on the right had the goal to outflank the enemy.  The enemy, however, moved to the far border preventing the flanking maneuver.  They also have a larger unit, and were able to get their reserves to quickly assist the main unit.  If yellow charges, they'll be at an 8v13 disadvantage, and they will be hit on their front as well as their flank.

The best decision yellow can make, IMO, is to refuse the engagement, at least until they receive reinforcements.

Instead, what often happens, is that yellow will plow right into the enemy and hope for the best, which is usually a quick death. 

Is it Possible to Deny?

Never push on a rope.

This is an adage that has stuck with me for years.  What it means is that regardless of what you want people to do, there are many times when people are simply just not wired to do what you want them to do.  

I don't have enough experience with these teams to know if it is even possible to teach a unit to deny in these scenarios. They are often a collection of skilled, aggressive, athletic fighters who spend very little time actually practicing together as a unit.  To give them the task of denying might be asking them to do something that is simply not in their nature and will fail even worse than charging.

If that's the case,  then the best solution might be to keep this in consideration when drawing up a plan and understanding that once lay on is called, that the fighters are going to do what the fighters are going to do, and to put them in positions where chances of success are high, and failure is low.

I don't what that would look like, but it might be the best answer.  The other is, of course, to figure out how to train the fighters so that their instincts are different in these battles.

Hope you enjoyed reading!

Sir Bari of Anglesey - East Kingdom

Pennsic 49 Town Battle

 Post Pennsic, Post #2

Welcome back to the Tactical fighter!  Again, much like the field battle, I can only really give my observations from where I was standing.  I was with the East Kingdom Southern Army and Eldomere, on the very right flank of the town battle.  Across from us was Dark Moon and, I'm certain, a handful of other units.

The goal was to occupy a building (controlled with a red/blue flip stick) at 20, 40, and 60 minute check points.  The town looked like this, with my unit responsible for the far right flank:

If we zoom in on just that flank, it looked a little more like this:

There were some discussions leading into this battle about how it would play out. 

Scenario 1:

One side would just be bigger or better than the other side causing the battle front to naturally be beyond the building.  In this case, the winning side would not need to worry about keeping too many bodies inside of the building.

Scenario 2:

Sides are relatively evenly matched and whomever controls the building fills it full of people.  Based on some calculations as well as some small scale test battles, we guessed that whichever side fills the building was going to lose control of the battle front due to having fewer fighters available for the front.  Granted, if the building is full during the time check, then it's a win.  But the fear was that the opposing side would clear the building and take it right before the time check.

Scenario 3:

Sides are relatively evenly matched, but instead of filling the building, you use as many troops as you can to try to push the battle front off of the front of the building.  So, rather than fighting inside of the building, you'd fight in front of it.

Truth be told, we had no idea how this battle would play out, so we allowed ourselves a big degree of flexibility.  Ultimately I believe the battle was mostly scenarios 1 & 3.  Much of the time the East had a good handle of pushing the front line beyond the building, while there were significant moments where the Midrealm was able to make a play for the building.  I only remember one occasion where we were concerned enough to send large numbers of troops to fill the building.  

There were a couple of nuances/tactics to this battle that I found interesting and thought I'd like to share.


Dead Spears Left Big Holes in the Line

I noticed that whenever a good spear would die on our side, the other side would start to press.  It became clear that good spear fighters were very valuable at controlling the front.  I tried to impress upon them that they were more valuable staying alive than getting kills, but I didn't seem to be very convincing.

This is a skill that any spear will need to develop over the course of their SCA career.  

On this note, I'll say that I died in every single bridge battle and every single field battle, despite the fact that our side won 9 out of 10 of them.  By contrast, I died only a single time in the 90 minute woods battle (and I was being kind on that one).  I believe that if you are in a resurrection battle and you control the flag, then your goal should be focussed more on survival.  In single death attrition battles, more risk can be taken.


Organization is Needed to Fill the Right Holes in the Line

There were a couple of times when the battle front near the building would get a couple of holes in it, with no one to fill those holes.  I saw this, and our other Lt Commander, Danx, also happened to see it.  No one else in the line could see it because they were busy fighting the people across from them, and we can't rely on them to have super human peripheral vision to figure out that they need to move to more critical spots in the line.

At one point I started yelling, "Shift left!  Shift left!" to get fighters to move into those holes near the building.  That was not a bad short term fix.  Danx had the long term fix, which was to catch people coming back from the rez point and send them to the right holes to fill.


Pushing is Often Better than Killing

There were a few times when our opponents would make a big press to get into the building.  Our guys did a good job of running into them to stop the press, but they ended up getting focussed on swinging their swords when what they really needed was to push the enemy beyond the entrance of the building.

Again, the fix here is leadership since they are busy fighting.  I yelled, "Push them out of the way.  Go!  Go!  Go!" while I placed a pole across their backs to guide them (a technique I learned from His Majesty Ryouko'jin of the Iron Skies several years ago).

There were a couple times when our opponents would try to get a nice column charge lined up and run down the channel between the two lines.  Again, to stop these, we simply pushed them off line.  This could be done with just a handful of fighters determined to shove the group out of the way.

Hope you enjoyed reading.  More to come!


Sir Bari of Anglesey - East Kingdom

Pennsic 49 - Field Battle

 Hi all,

Hope you had fun and either avoided the plague or are recovering quickly from it.

I've got a few thoughts to share regarding the Pennsic field battles, all from the perspective of where I was fighting on the field each time.

Ultimately, there's always an overall strategy that is put together by the warlord and the general.  Most of us have little control over that, but what we can do is do our job in making good decisions on the field and hope that it helps our side win the overall fight.  The best thing you can do is to kill quickly, die slowly, and and reform and move.  All of this hinges on putting yourself in a good position on the field and making good decisions.

Field Battle 1:

I fought with a spear heavy East Kingdom unit.  We were actually fairly well balanced across the unit, but separated into houses, which left the part of the unit I was in very spear heavy.  What this generally means is that we should be able to move quickly as a mob and get a lot of kills, but are susceptible to charges from the enemy.  These charges can be survived, but not without giving ground.

We were on the East's extreme right flank and moved quickly.  Moving quickly allows a unit to get into the position that they want.  The danger, however, is that undisciplined units tend to plow into their opponents without proper support because they moved into position faster than their supporting troops.

In this case, we were able to gain a really good flanking advantage on Dark Moon by running hard to our right as they marched forward.

Note:  in all diagrams, I'm taking a guess as to what it looked like from memory.  The further away from my unit, the more I'm guessing.

Once we got into position, I saw that they really didn't have the capacity to keep us out of their backfield, so I yelled, "Shift right!  Shift right!" followed by, "Let's curl this line.  Keep curling this line!"  The only thing I would have done differently would have been to call for more aggression in order to finish the fight sooner so that we could move on to other targets.  

You can see below the advantageous position that we were in.

I died before the engagement was resolved, but I know our side won the battle and I'm pretty sure we won this engagement.  My apologies if I remember it incorrectly, but if we lost, it was either due to a difference in skill, or having another unit come to support.  Regardless, I was pretty happy with the position that we put ourselves in.

Field Battle 2:

We were instructed to do something very similar for the 2nd battle, but after our general left, we saw a unit shift to the flank.

 

I think this was a pretty smart move.  Personally, I think you should never give up a flank unless you have some grand plan that can compensate for it.  They effectively had their soldiers on the out of bounds line with no way for us to go around.

Despite our orders, we knew that we had a 0% chance of getting around the flank.  Furthermore, we knew that we were facing a unit who could just run us over.  Sir Klaus, Sir Donnan, and myself had a quick conversation and agreed that we needed to "deny" the flank in this fight, and hope that where ever that new flank unit came from was going to leave a hole somewhere else on the field that other troops on our side could exploit.  We told our unit, "your number 1 goal is to stay alive, even if that means to turn around and run away."

We kept moving backward to avoid the fight, while the opposing unit kept marching forward.  It was actually easy to avoid the fight because larger units tend to move slow in order to maintain unit cohesion.  Notice the spread out nature of the blue spear unit.  The faster, more confident fighters end up in the front because they know that they can easily run away.  The slower, less experienced, or more timid fighters stay in the back to give themselves more room and time to react.  

At some point reinforcements came up behind us and told us to engage, which we did as we then knew that we had the support that we needed for the fight.

Uncoordinated Charges

It's quite common at Pennsic to receive uncoordinated charges from the enemy.  Militia units simply don't have the time to train their troops and the commanders don't have the practice to know how to get a unit to work cohesively.  Uncoordinated charges into a unit of spears often does not end well for them.

Field Battles 2-5:

For the last three battles I moved over to the left flank to fight with Anglesey.  Our unit was of a similar makeup as the East Kingdom unit I fought with on the right flank, but a little bit more cohesive only because we have more experience together.  In each of the three battles we pretty much found ourselves in a gap between two large units where we had the option to turn on either flank.  We always chose to turn left as we'd like to clean up a flank at the top of the hill, and then move the survivors down the hill, coming from the outside and moving in, with an uphill advantage.

Because of our small size, the larger units tended to ignore us, allowing us to get to a flank.

I did make one significant mistake.  After cleaning up the left flank, I headed quickly back down the hill, but the next thing I knew, I was surrounded by our enemy.  I had apparently outrun my allies who were still on the top of the hill.  I had underestimated how long it would take them to reform and get back into the fight.  In the future I will need to really take my time and make sure that I can pull a large unit of fighters together before heading into the next fight.

Getting Out of a Bad Situation

In the 5th battle, a bunch of people switched sides, which gave the opponent a stronger army than they had in the first four battles.  At one point, we found ourselves getting surrounded by a large unit.

Ultimately this was an unwinnable situation, but it's still our goal to make the best of it and hope that someone on our team is doing better elsewhere on the field.

Two parts of our units made different decisions, both of which worked to our advantage to help slow the bleeding.  The fighters to the extreme left of our line were able to run around red's flank, while some of the fighters in the middle were able to punch through a weakness in red's line.

This got us into the backfield, but ultimately the fight was lost.

These were just a few insights from the field battle this year.  Look for more to be posted in the coming days.




Thanks for reading!

Sir Bari of Anglesey - East Kingdom