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