Battle Reports January 2005

Battle Reports January 2005

(Empire Humans vs Grey Mountain Dwarves)

Last Saturday we played a simple meeting engagement between a Human Empire Army and Dwarfs. 550 points each, using the points-modifications introduced by Paul Caspall.

The Empire army is owned by Peter Schulein and depicts the bureaucratic side of the Humans. The army is strictly organised in pre-determined blocks of infantry, cavalry and artillery. A complete army will be 2300 points and will consist of the elite block and several regular blocks. Due to the painting order the only block currently finished are the elite crossbows, extra heavy Knights, Flying heavy cavalry on eagles and part of the artillery and the pikeman. Roughly the elite block :-( )

The dwarfs are my own army and are somewhat of a rabble from the GreyMountain Collective. It consists of 3 infantry brigades supported by artillery. Two fairly heavy ones with crossbows and either heavy or extra heavy infantry and a brigade of light infantry socialist miners.

The Grey Mountain Dwarfs have a abysmal fighting record which they kept up in this battle. The combined assault by the eagle riding heavy cavalry and the knights hit the light-infantry, one of the heavy brigades and the artillery. The artillery held firm but the miners were no match for the cavalry. The manoeuvre to outflank the knights worked quite well. But this exposed the flanks to artillery fire which in short order destroyed most of the brigade. At the end of the battle the Dwarfs managed to rout one of the units of knights and one of the eagles. The humans also showed their ignorance of proper artillery safety procedure by blowing up one of their guns :-).

Overall it was a severe drubbing for the dwarfs who will now go back and re-design their army. Lessons learned: Dwarfs as infantry only cannot stand up to the combination of flyers, cavalry and artillery. Flyers are extremely difficult to beat due to their ability to pick a target anywhere in the enemy line. This will disrupt deployment and any plans you had prior to the attack. If the assault of the flyers is coordinated with something else it is devastating. Against other armies than the humans the dwarf artillery will give a slight edge but in this game the armies were matched in the number of guns. My own flyers must be painted up right quick now to stop these flying menaces from disrupting my plans for world domination ;-).

Dick Bax