TTS AAR: The Arab Conquest of Siam!
/A practice game for the forthcoming To The Smallest tournament saw my Arab Conquest army taking on Rob’s Siamese.
With at least half of my troops being mounted infantry, things were going to move fast in this game!
Looking at the picture above, you’ll see that Rob has deployed all his elephants (and they were legion!) in one command on my right flank. Now Nellies, as anyone who plays TTS knows, are anaethema to cavalry, and I had a brigade of cavalry facing them, so the first thing to do was to effect ‘the ol’ switcheroo’ and move that brigade to the other side of the field as soon as possible.
This proved a good move, as my left flank cavalry brigade had failed to smash through the enemy cavalry there, so needed reinforcement: ably provided by the switched cavaly who helped in to punch through the enemy line.
Meanwhile, the two main lines had clashed, and a fierce but initially inconclusive melee broke out:
A slight distraction was caused by my Arab lance-armed camelry, who manged to sneak through the Siamese battle line and take one of the Thai camps.
This forced Rob to drop back some of his men to defend the camps (the initial Aces causing much hilarity!) and the Arabs were soon evicted and sent fleeing. Although only a fleeting success, this did cause Rob to hold back some of his men to deal with the camelry, so taking some of the pressure off my line.
This was a very relevant factor, as the elephants on my right had pushed the fanatical Arab infantry back…but their mahouts were having difficulty then turning the beasts into the centre towards the rest of my troops, and some light infantry to exploit the situation could have really helped the Thai cause, especially this also meant I had the freedom to move another unit of Arab fanatics forward onto the flank of the advancing pachyderms without having to worry about turnign my flank towards the enemy.
Meanwhile, and after a bit of effort, the Jund cavalry on the other side of the table had finally managed to deal with most of the Siamese horse and had now manoeuvered into a position to roll up the enemy line.
Four times the “blue” unit of Jund cavalry you can see in the right hand picture above tried to charge the Siamese flank: and four times they either failed to move at all, or failed to break the raw archers they had already disordered: a disgraceful performance that almost cost the Arabs the victory!
Things were now cricical for both sides as the advantage in the combat in the main battle lines swung backwards and forwards. Despite my initial successes, the game was very much still in the balance.
Finally, however, the Arab infantry on the right hand side of the field managed to break first one then another enemy unit of elephants, undoubtedly helped by the fact that the units were both deep and fanatical.
This, combined with the initial success of the cavalry on the left, and the one-for-one losses in the centre (which should have been a devastating roll up for the blue unit of Jund cavalry!) gave me the coins I needed to break the Siamese morale, and victory was mine!
Well that had been a very close run thing indeed!
What had looked like a battle-winning success on the left petered out into nothing as the Arab lights were ejected from the camp that they had taken and the Jund cavalry failed to roll up the enemy line as expected. The centre proved a hard fight, with veteran infantry on both sides going at it hammer and tongs, and it was only the fact that the deep fanatics on the right were so hard to kill that gave me the win.
Another great game of TTS!
