The lesser known Wallachian invasion of Asia Minor

Vlad III Tepes, the Impaler, once again went on a rampage in foreign lands, travelling back in time to invade the territories of Seleukos in Asia Minor! 

 Battle Report

I won the attack role and chose to meet the Seleukeid army on the plains! McBeth selected a lot of terrain, aiming to constrain my light horses' ability to ride all over the shop, but the placement roles put it all in useful places for me and the one bit I suspect he wanted to fill with his ally command, I was able to remove.

To begin the battle, I pushed my light cavalry out in front of my army and, in particular, up the left flank, hoping to whip around the back of the Seleukeid phalanx:

McB promptly rolled enough pips for the phalanx to do some epic professional pikeman reployment and withdrew and reoriented to close the pathway I had to the back of the board. Very nicely done! We skirmished heavily on that flank before the phalanx separated to try and see off my light cavalry. After our light cavalry rode rings around each other, I eventually lost a pair of light horse in melee hat I definitely started with advantage:

We imagined that as the remnant of two of the LH units streamed away from combat, the last formed element retreated in some order while at the same time I managed to sneak a couple of light horse through the gap in the phalanx. You can imagine the picture in the 'Great Battles of History' book that would show this cunning manoeuver by Vlad Tepes to try and stop his left flank from collapsing! There were a lot of good stories in this game!

On the right flank, the Seleukeid and Wallachian bowmen exchanged fire basically across the course of the whole game. McBeth and I both pulled troops back from the brink on and off which just made the whole thing drag out. I learned that in this context, Pavise is a handy rule!

In the end, McBeth pushed some Thracians and an elephant past my line to swing them onto the end of the bow line (and I started to panic with nothing but a pair of light foot there to stop them) but see below for how I absolutely got away with this...

Around the same time McBeth threw his Heavy Cavalry into one of my two groups of mixed Heavy Cavalry and Knights with a view to denting them badly before I could get the second group in and....well...it didn't go well.

I won two of the combats by 4 and the other one drew which meant I was able to throw one of my extra cavalry into their flank and finish them off. I had enough scope to throw a couple of bases into the pike, knowing that'd be bad but it might just hold them for long enough to break the rest of the army. Could McB have unpicked this? Absolutely. But when his Strategos died in combat and he spent two turns rolling a 1 for pips, his large command, including those bits that were threatening to roll up my right, came to a grinding halt and gave me some breathing room.

That's broadly how it turned out in the end. The light horse on my right managed to escape and find their way into the rear of McB's Elephant / Thracian formation and with the help of some Curteni archers made an elephant very pin-cushiony (this is where I also learned you can't rally elephants) which, with the death of the Strategos, pushed the Seleukeids over the break limit.

 It was a great game. It's one of those matchups where I desperately want to keep the pike out of the game because I simply can't fight them, and hope to exploit the fact that the Seleukeid frontage must be narrower than mine to try and give my mounted the advantage. McBeth played some very cool and clever moves, especially with his pike, to try and give my Light Horse something to think about. 

At the end of the game, we went over the evade rules some more as they're still one of the more curly bits of ADLG and discovered one very big screwup. We missed the bit of the rules where the edge of the world is not an obstacle. I should definitely have lost at least two, if not three more light horse which made the final score much closer.

We also learned a little more about side-by-side conforming (which is actually really cool), when routs hurt things behind them and when they don't, why mixing impetuous troops with non-impetuous troops is a bad idea and I think we've finally nailed down what happens when a base is hit in the flank by light troops (and mostly what doesn't happen) so definitely feeling like I'm getting my head around this game.

Some thoughts about ADLG in 15mm

McBeth, Scotty, clubmate BB and I all enthused about ADLG at 15mm. It feels like a different game than at 28mm which I think is mostly a result of the base size:table size ratio but also some of the armies one might do in 15s, you'd never do in 28s. 

I really enjoyed running the army of light horse and even with the screwup about the edge of the world in evade moves, I felt like I had a lot of room to work with which is really appealing. The next time I run this army, it's going to have even more light cavalry. I've also made up a list with some chunkier infantry options too for a change. 

Playing McBeth's Selekeids has given me some pause on the makeup of my soon to be inbound Mycenaeans but I think I'll get that on the table and figure it out from there. 

Next Time

I've been hard at work on the Spanish so  expect the remainder of the Spanish cavalry and, hopefully, the Landsknecht Kiel. Playing 15mm ADLG has given me the oomph to get the Renaissance stuff done.