[Field of Glory] Santa's Tournament 2019 - Game 2, Part 2

..due to Christmas celebrations and preparations I was not able to finish the second part as fast as planned. I hope you all had a good time with your families and beloved ones so far and are now well enough rested to read on.

The first part of the series can be found here.

... so, lets have a look at the other side of the table:

My pikes were busy keeping the horseman to their front. After being close enough to charge, those horseman then had better insights concerning the stability of my ranks and two of them decided to charge, breaking through a unit of skirmishers.

breaking through their own skirmishers, these horseman had bad times coming

The result was, as expected, meagre. Both lost fragmentation and the unit on the right decided to loose a base as well during close-combat. In Field of Glory, mounted units which are fighting (more than 50%) steady foot troops have disengage during joint-action phase. But as the skirmishers which were broken trough during the impact phase where still in the way. Thus the disrupted unit had to stay in touch with my pikes and automatically lost another level of morale. I already considered these eaten.

After breakthrough with Dave's hand removing bases
His skirmishers are less than one inch away form the horseman's rear. Bad. 

Now, as my turn broke, my pike (pictured in the overview as the second from right)  decided to charge the skirmishers hindering Dave's horseman from retreating. This gave him some room he would need for the horseman to survive. Loosing another base in melee, he then was finally able to break free from my pike, fragmented and at 50% strength. 

In the next turns I was able to close in, while he did not rally his men. As my pike then went to charge the fragmented unit from a close distance, this meant for them to check whether the shaken men on the ground do not rather want to flee. They didn't, and as Dave toffee-nosed told my stunned self, they where not considered shock mounted anymore (due to being fragmented) and only one rank deep (due to loosing 50% of bases in combat), thus there was nothing hindering him from evading my charge. Well, they did not want to evade that fast (dicing a 1; =3 inch), while my pikeman where quite pissed for their brazen use of the rules and diced a 6 (=5 inch). Catching them in the rear sealed their fate and made Dave's quibbling on the exact use of the rules pointless.

Charged in Front&Flank: always rather bad for
pikeman

The most outbound pike had some different trouble during the meantime, as they were surrounded by horseman, lancers cavalry to the front and light horseman in the flank. This can be a rather sensible situation for the pikes, as they rely heavily on having 3rd and fourth rank facing forwards in order to gain their points of advantage (PoA's) while fighting.

As these tactics prooved to be not working against me or my dice, I learned jet another thing about FoG-Rules. As the pike is facing in two directions after the two mounted units did their break-off, it is not allowed to charge in my next turn. It is not allowed to charge while facing two directions. And as reforming to a normal formation happens at the start of the maneuver-phase, which is after the impact-phase, the pike can't charge in its next turn.  

As the center-field was cleared from horseman, I got a little bit overconfident with one of my light-foot units. As Dave did not rally the light foot unit which was broken through gaining 2 hits with shooting seemed a way to gain more attrition points from his army. This brought me in to close and was not secured by my pikes enough. So Dave maneuvered his skirmishers into a flanking position. As there was no way to evade the charge I had to take him fighting. Winning the impact against all odds, the idea seemed to work at first. But soon the unit broke, either by loosing 2 bases out of 6 or by cohesion levels. 

As the game continued, charging my units into front and side at the same time turned up no good for Dave. Even though he forced one pike into an orb formation, the results for him were just not existing. 

So after all, the right side was totally cleared form Dave's units and as he had lost two more on the left side, he offered me to leave it at that approx. 10 min. before the 3,5 hrs. of tournament-time were over. 

This left this game with a loss of 10 attrition (out of 16) on Dave's side, while I lost 6 attrition (out of 14). The end result was thus a 8.1 : 11.9 in my favor. The Bosporans lost a good ammount of their nobility, while my losses were rather insignificant for the persistence of my nation. A clear victory, and by no means a draw. If you'd like to know why Dave pointed out it's been a draw: read his report. 😜

After this thrilling and fascinating second game against a really good sport with comprehensive rule-knowledge, the total scoreboard was

Results of Round 2

Place	Player	Army	Points
1	Ferdi	Classical Indian	45,3
2	Phil	Umayyad Arab	39,1
3	Karol	Late Republican Roman	33,0
4	Andreas	Sassanid Persian	30,6
5	Sebastian	Later Seleucid	30,5
6	Frank	Early Successor	27,7
7	Dave	Bosporan	26,9
8	Paul	Early Achaemenid Persian	21,2
9	Tim	Late Republican Roman	18,8
10	Julian	Later Carthaginian	16,6
11	Richard	Mid-Republican Roman	13,8
12	Rob	Later Carthaginian	11,9
13	Erik	Late Republican Roman	8,8
14	Bodo	Sassanid Persian	5,8

This meant for me to face Frank in the upcoming game next morning, which gave me the chance for revenge concerning the not-so-big successes I had against him during the tournament in Yenifoca. But first of all, there was an evening program of great food and sustainable drinking to attend to.

The evening programme

The "Domaines" during summertime - with the owner's friendly permission

Ferdi, the host of the tournament, reserved a room in a great restaurant called the "Domaines" which is located close to the venue where we played. He had curated a menu of three dishes as well. For starters, we had a soup, followed by duck with red cabbage and dumplings. As a dessert a delicious crême bruée was served. After finishing up our meals, we went on to Ferdi's place to round off the evening with talks about the games we had, history in general and any further topics which go easy with good wine and company. 

A big thanks to Ferdi for hosting guests and providing us with such a great social programme.