Pinner Wargames Club

First Battle for the Saxons

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Published on Friday, 13 July 2007 08:06

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First outing for my 25mm WAB Anglo Saxons and a bit of a disaster. 1500 point battle against Andy Madden's Carolignian. I took 3 large blocks of thegns/ceorls, each 40 strong in 5 ranks - 2 of thegns and 3 of ceorls, plus a unit of 16 vikings. Andy had a unit of mounted milites, a unit of milites on foot with archers, a small unit of vikings and a unit of Bretons.

Basically I was utterly out-manouvered by the mounted troops and forced to react to the archery of the milites. I couldn't sit back because my flanks were open but when I came forward I wasn't able to keep the cavalry pinned down (especially the Bretons). I threw away the vikings charging the foot milites who weren't scared of them. My eorl's shieldwall wiped out his vikings but were hit in the rear by the milites.

The only bright point was one of my shieldwalls that lasted for three turns with bretons in the flank and millites in the front, but it went down in the end.

So the main lesson is that the army needs to be more flexible and less one dimensional. I think a small unit of mounted thegns and some bow armed geburs are called for , and I think that I can get away with less thegns in the shieldwalls - maybe only 10 in 40 rather than 16 in 40.

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