The Rus create an Atmosphere - 5 Madaxeman.com ADLG Reports

[madaxeman]

Hot on the heels of The BHGS Challenge comes Dogs of War, in the excellent Bristol Independent Gaming Centre.

This was a Dark Ages & Early Medieval themed L'Art de la Guerre event, and in keeping with my efforts to try and get as many of my long-forgotten armies on table as possible under ADLG I had elected to wheel out the Rus - with a Viking ally.



The "Wall of Spears" was a new thing for me to try in L'Art de la Guerre competition gaming, so the big question was whether that was because everyone else had missed the tactical potential of such an army, or because it was a bit pants and I hadn't worked that out yet.



See how the men from the Ukraine did in these 5 rather linear battle reports

[fred.]

Entertaining as always!

[Raider4]

Entertaining as always!

Well, the reports were. The games seemed . . . less so.

Stand in a line and lurch forward slowly? Actually, probably a fair representation of medieval warfare? So, 'yay' to realism!

Could have done without the 'crack of doom' shots . . .

Cheers, Martyn
--

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Top reports, bottom shots! 

[madaxeman]

Well, the reports were. The games seemed . . . less so.

Stand in a line and lurch forward slowly? Actually, probably a fair representation of medieval warfare? So, 'yay' to realism!

Could have done without the 'crack of doom' shots . . .

Yeah.... I'm very much a "try it and see" player, rather than a "read the rules and work it out from there" type of gamer, so thearmy list was a conscious effort to see how a one-dimensional army played on the table - as well as a chance to get some much-neglected but nice figures out too.

Would I use this sort of list again? Probably not - but then again that's probably because the three games I won were ones where the enemy got caught in the headlights and just tried to ride the Rus down (Teutons and Portuguese) or had a very bad matchup, exacerbated by terrain (the Welsh).

The 2 game I lost were much more interesting as I was trying to shuffle these sturdy but slow-moving Rus units around to plug gaps, and taking calculated risks as to whether their 4-hits resilience would allow them to stand up and absorb punishment whilst the reserves inched into place. That's a very different "feel" to playing with, say, the Sassanids or a Classical "toolkit" army - which is basically what I wanted to see if I could achieve. In that respect it was a success.

Next time around I'd still be tempted to take different allies and a different t composition though, just to keep changing it around. With the smaller army sizes of ADLG it's quite easy to mix things up, and because the games are shorter, even if you put together a dog of a list you aren't spending 3 hours getting thousands of painstaking,y painted figures ground into the dirt - it's a hundred or so in 2 hours!

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Thanks Tim.
Just bring a pack of pants too next time!!!