Terrain Tactics

[Chris Brantley]

In another thread, David Kuijt talks about using terrain to create opportunities for your opponent to make mistakes. Having suffered a lopsided 4-0 defeat with Sea People's to David's Ugarits at the recent DBV tournament, I was thinking back over that game in light of David's comments when the light bulb of understanding went off. Let me explain.

Both of us were littoral armies. David's Ugarits had Heavy Chariots, and I only had one Psiloi to stiffen my Sea People's Blades. When he put down littoral terrain, my first thought was to take advantage of that with a Sea People's landing force. This was my first mistake, as I was the attacker and had to move first against another littoral army.

David put down two steep hills straddling the deployment line parallel to the waterway. There was other terrain, but it didn't figure into the battle. Since I was enamoured of my army's littoral capabilities, I gave preference to one of the two edges giving littoral access. Because of the mirror deployment of the two steep hills, the odds were 4 in 6 I'd end up where I thought I wanted to be (and where David wanted me to be), and for once, my dice cooperated.

I put my Auxilia on the steep hill, with the bulk of my army and CnC in the open plain. I put a small two Blade blocking force to protect my flank against a Urgarit landing force. And I reserved two Blade elements as a landing force. The map looked something like this after deployments and landings in the first bound:



As I executed my first bound movement, it finally occurred to me that if I landed my littorals forward too aggressively, then they would be isolated and overwhelmed easily by David's littoral force. So I landed them in the narrow gap between the waterway and the steep hill, where I thought they would draw on potential support from my Auxilia, but where they started out of command and control. I could have landed them behind the hill nearer my base edge nad within command and control of the CnC, which might have been wiser in retrospect, but at the time dismissed this option since it would have put me entirely on the defensive, with half my Sea People's blades tied up defending a rear corner of the board.

David landed his littorals next to mine...and his Heavy Chariots immediately started to pound on my exposed Blades...which held up longer than should normally be expected under the circumstances.

At this point, I realized, that the hill effectively blocked the line of sight and the associated command/control of my CnC over the key point of conflict. If I moved my CnC in front of the hill, I was exposing him to Ugarit counterattack. If I moved my CnC behind the hill, I was effectively abandoning the rest of my army, which would also be out of Command and Control if it advanced due to the hill. It took me 2-3 bounds of pips to get things sorted out, during which time I was entirely on the defensive. And just when my command and control over the sea-side conflict was restored, the law of averages caught up with my Blades, who went down to the Urgarit Chariots, and my supporting Auxilia were chased back up into the Hills with losses. My blocking reserve of 2 blades was no match and the next loss saw me go down to a 0-4 defeat, having lost all four elements to the Urgarit littoral landing force.

On retrospect, the placement of the two steep hills perpendicular to the waterway, parallel to each other and centered along the line of deployment was a key determinate of the battle. The steep hills looked like a good home for my auxilia and a great way to close off my flank from Littoral attack. My mistake. Instead, it created a narrow space where David's littoral forces could defeat me in detail and my CnC's movement options to stabilize the situation were inhibited by the terrain.

In retrospect, I probably should have rolled for the edge opposite the waterway, but no doubt David calculated that I would be lured to the water with my Sea People's army. My overall point here, however, is that David placed terrain in a way that effectively limited my littoral options to bad and worse, which psychologically drew me toward certain (bad) tactical choices, and which also served to disrupt my command and control as I attempted to respond to his tactical plan of action with a pip penalty. And he mirrored that terrain on opposite sides of the board, increasing the chances that I would make the wrong choice.

I suspect David can explain the finer points of his terrain strategy and will leave it to him to do so, as I bind my wounds and plot my future revenge. And if any of you see this terrain set-up in the future, I hope this'll help you learn from my mistakes.

There are two things I do when playing an aggressive Littoral army vs. a defensive one: 1)Don't do a landing. As Chris illustrated-it's bad news. 2)Take the board edge farthest from the waterway. If I can't use it, then neither can he.

Originally Posted by Mike Porter

2)Take the board edge farthest from the waterway. If I can't use it, then neither can he.

MWUhahahahah! (evil laugh, patent pending) Can't use it, you say?

To be a little less obscure -- with similar terrain to what Chris describes (which isn't quite right, Chris, although it's correct on the important stuff -- the steep hill near your flank where all the fighting happened), Jack took the far side from the waterway. Good so far, right?

• I deployed my forces between the hills, with a littoral landing force of 3 mixed Aux/Ps and one LCh left off-map.
• Jack (who had no camp, the sneaky bastidge, since he had two WWg) deployed. His deployment made it clear where the crucial piece of BGo was going to be -- one of the two hills.
• I swapped my Bd to the side best suited for Bd.
• Jack moved.
• I landed my littoral force -- almost all BGo troops -- right at the base of the crucial hill. Close enough that they reached the hill crest before Jack's slower Bw, even though he started closer.

The point is that my littoral landing allowed me to redeploy half my army (six elements) after his deployment. Two swaps, and then four elements of a landing force. Without that littoral landing, that hill would have been Jack's. If Jack won that hill, he would probably have won that battle.

To Jack's credit, he looked at my littoral landing force of bad-going troops and saw my plan from the start -- that these troops were going to land on a hill-winning mission. He muttered something to that effect, or maybe that was a failed attempt at a dice-curse...

Originally Posted by David Kuijt

MWUhahahahah! (evil laugh, patent pending) Can't use it, you say?

Well David caught it! I'm surprised no one else did!

I've used that line and my opponent accepted it in a docile manner, simply thinking I gave up the initiative and set up as if there was no waterway to his rear-then a swarm of horsies with a piece of artillery shows up in the backfield.

Evil minds think alike.

I think you can pull this off because the other player is generally considering his advantages to using the waterway. Take that advantage away and it's out of sight, out of mind.

If you had a larger landing force though, could you have deployed forward and used the geometry of the hills against him instead? Could you have been in a place where his CnC and landing force were separated by a hill but yours were not? It may not have gone better for you, but I'm just trying to think through the possibilities in the situation.

[Chris Brantley]

Originally Posted by John Meunier

If you had a larger landing force though, could you have deployed forward and used the geometry of the hills against him instead? Could you have been in a place where his CnC and landing force were separated by a hill but yours were not? It may not have gone better for you, but I'm just trying to think through the possibilities in the situation.

If I had deployed my littoral force farther forward, even with 4 elements instead of 2, I fear I would have ended up sandwiched between his main force and his littoral force...with his Heavy Chariots isolated on my unsupported Blades. The rest of my army is mostly slow-moving Blade and would have had little chance to catch up to the battle, especially if the littoral battle was consuming my pips.

After selecting the wrong board edge, the next key mistake was in choosing to land a littoral force as attacker against a littoral defender...I was providing David a made-to-order opportunity to isolate and attack my littoral force with his. The placement of the hill just compounded this mistake by forcing me to spend valuable movement pips during the decisive bounds trying to regain command and control.

If I had realized my mistake in going littoral, I could have landed my two Blades in my rear behind the Hill. There, with the two elements of blocking Blades already deployed and the nearby Auxilia, all in a space constrained by the Hill, they would have been relatively safe. But it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get that 1/3 of my army back into battle if David elected to land his littoral force elsewhere.

I hesitate to comment since I also got clobbered by DK, but I'll have a go anyway. It's always easier to kibitz on someone else's game than figure out what to do in your own.

Chris, I think you're right that getting obsessed with the littoral landing was your undoing. Looking at these two armies, the first thing that jumps out at me is that the Ugaritics don't have a good answer toa solid wall of Blade, and especially Blade with Psiloi support. Now this is DK, so he's going to duck and weave and try to prevent you from coming to grips, but ultimately, if you can get stuck in and avoid giving up flanks, his army is going to collapse.

So to achieve that, I would probably start with a wall of 5 blade on the right-center part of the board, with the 2 auxilia and the light chariot general in support. This group needs to close with the main body of Ugarits and grind toward the camp. I'd use the other 3 blade with the psiloi to screen off the heavy chariots, wherever they land. I wouldn't use a littoral landing at all. This plan gives you just 2 missions, neither of which is very PIP intensive (at least until you get close to contact). And it creates problems for DK. The heavies need to either attack the blade and psiloi screen hoping to get lucky, or spend PIPs manuevering around it. And the mixed force in front of the camp needs to spend PIPs trying to find ways to attack the blade walls flanks. And not lose the camp.

The downside to this plan is that the blades are just plain old slow. If the main body of Ugarits doesn't move forward, you're talking about 6 bounds before you can even make contact. But that's part of the package with Sea Peoples. 8 blades doesn't make for a quick manuever army. But it sure can grind it out.

- Jack

[Chris Brantley]

Originally Posted by El' Jocko

So to achieve that, I would probably start with a wall of 5 blade on the right-center part of the board, with the 2 auxilia and the light chariot general in support. This group needs to close with the main body of Ugarits and grind toward the camp. I'd use the other 3 blade with the psiloi to screen off the heavy chariots, wherever they land. I wouldn't use a littoral landing at all.

This is no doubt a much better plan than what I actually attempted to execute. My only concern is that his Littoral Landing force would still likely overlap the 3xBd (with psiloi-support) flank force, and if he pressed it hard and successfully with his Heavy Chariots, he still had a good chance of pushing through to hit my flank. But it would have been a much more even contest for me, especially since I seem to recall there was a nice patch of woods on the right hand side of the Board, not shown on the map below, which would have provided an interesting avenue of attack for the SP's auxilia. Alas, the lure of the sea proved too strong for my Sea Peoples.

Originally Posted by Chris Brantley

This is no doubt a much better plan than what I actually attempted to execute. My only concern is that his Littoral Landing force would still likely overlap the 3xBd (with psiloi-support) flank force, and if he pressed it hard and successfully with his Heavy Chariots, he still had a good chance of pushing through to hit my flank. But it would have been a much more even contest for me, especially since I seem to recall there was a nice patch of woods on the right hand side of the Board, not shown on the map below, which would have provided an interesting avenue of attack for the SP's auxilia. Alas, the lure of the sea proved too strong for my Sea Peoples.

There was a big patch of woods on the right hand side, that's correct. But you shouldn't think of it as an "interesting avenue of attack" for your Auxilia -- it would be an interesting place for your Auxilia to die. My Ugaritic army had twice the Aux/Ps that your Peeps had. Although you could throw more Blade in there, then it would be hard for you to muster the pips for a bad-going attack with 4-5 elements as well as protect your flanks against my mobility and stop my Littoral Landing force from treating your hill as a highway to your camp.

But I sure do love the potential for EEEEvil with littoral landings.

Originally Posted by Chris Brantley

I suspect David can explain the finer points of his terrain strategy and will leave it to him to do so, as I bind my wounds and plot my future revenge. And if any of you see this terrain set-up in the future, I hope this'll help you learn from my mistakes.

The image below is from my battle with Jack the Butcher, two rounds later, but is essentially the same terrain. You can see the closer hill, and the woods. The two hills and the woods together make a broad circular arena of the center of the map, with gaps between them of maybe 5 base widths.



I don't believe anyone has a picture of the battle Chris and I had, but the terrain was very similar.

My underlying idea was to create a combined-arms battlefield. Not a battlefield where a pure BGo army could win -- that terrain often convinces enemies not to attack at all, and even when a fight results, it often takes too long to finish the game within tournament constraints. Instead, a battlefield where there will always be a crucial large piece of bad going, and where victory over that crucial piece will create dominance over the adjacent good-going area, where my 6 elements of non-BGo troops will usually be fighting. With an army exactly split between BGo troops and GGo troops, it seemed best to have a mix of terrain such that there would always be both GGo fights and BGo fights.

Which piece of bad going ends up being crucial depends upon side, deployment, and the consensus (willing or nay) of the two commanders. I placed terrain three times; each time I used essentially the terrain above. When I say "essentially," I didn't measure placement or anything, and I varied gaps and positioning a bit depending upon the opponent's troop mix.

The first battle was against Hittites, with 3xHCh, 1xLCh, 6x3Sp, 2x2Ps. A doughty foe. David McDonald got the side he picked, the far side from the bad going. His camp was in the open approximately where Jack's red dice is in the image above; mine was on the waterway in the cup. I knew he would deploy in front of his camp (he could do little else) so I didn't bother with a littoral landing. He pressed forward, but there was no way to clear the gap considering my dominance of the hill (the near one in the image) where my Aux were, and my two blades in the open against his spear wall.

The second time I won terrain was against Chris, and Chris has ably described that battle. His landing was doomed by my anti-landing landing, and his army too slow to move in support. Even with good pips, I was unable to get the rest of my army into charge range before my landing killed a fourth element.

The third battle was against Jack, and I've described that in this thread as well. The image above shows the endgame, just a few bounds before the final blows. I am only up 2-1 at this point, but Jack's WWg are stymied in the center, his pips occupied in trying to get them out of the way of his KnGen (who is locked in combat with my HChGen, but his retreat is blocked by a misaligned WWg if he fails two combat rolls in a row, and if he wins two combat rolls in a row he will end up flanked by one or two more of my elements currently hidden by my hand). Jack's far 6Kn element is visible on the near side, locked in combat with another of my HCh, with my Auxilia standing waiting on the flank. If Jack wins a combat now he will advance to being overlapped, and my next pip will flank the 6Kn with the Aux. The only thing Jack can try to save the situation is to withdraw, but even that will not answer well as he has no escape and I can reengage on my bound if I have a spare pip. In two or three bounds the 6Kn wins, advances, gets flanked, and dies, and at the same time a final Bw element dies to a +4:+1 on the far hill.