TTS AAR: Khurasanians versus Siamese (Thai)
/Time to give the Khurasanians another test, this time against Rob’s Thai army with all its anti-cavalry elephants.
The Khurasanians won the scouting, and set up in a position to sweep down and around the Thai’s left flank. There were a lot of those elephants in the centre of the battlefield, but as just about every Khurasanian carries a bow, I was confident that I could shoot them all down before we got into contact.
As soon as the battle began, I therefore shot forward along the right hand side of the battlefield, hanging back on the left where I was aided by some extreme hesitation by the Thai infantry there.
My Turkomen horse-archers were soon within range, and a volley of arrows towards the lumbering Nellies, but all to no effect.
I had got around the Thai left flank with one command of cavalry, but their infantry there had turned to face my lancers to force a stalemate that I would usually have broken by hitting their other flank from the centre…but unfortunately my horse-archers were still trying to deal with the elephants there, who remained impervious to arrow-fire.
Worse, the rest of the Thai infantry had got moving and, although mostly not very good troops, quantity has its own quality and there were an awful lot of them!
By using the elephants to hold the centre, Rob had now managed to carry out his plan, which was to swing the battlefield around so we were fighting lengthways up and down the table rather than across.
His troops on his right executed a neat 90° turn and suddenly it was me fighting to protect my flanks not him…and his elephants in the centre were still shrugging off arrows like they were made of paper!
Although my infantry were holding up the flank attack coming in from the left, there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop the Nellies advancing forward. More arrows headed their way: still no kills. Incidentally, after the battle ended, we calculated that the elephants had been shot at 24 times and just kept on advancing like big, grey, wrinkly space invaders, rather than the 3.6 kills (i.e. all of them) probability would suggest would happen.
The elephants got in amongst my heavy cavalry, and suddenly my centre began to collapse! Worse, my left flank also gave way under sheer weight of numbers, and Rob was even able to drop an elephant unit back to help defeat my flanking attack, which rapidly ran out of steam as even more arrows bounced off the Nellies.
Unbelievably, I was still only down six of my fourteen coins: it was the situation on the battlefield not casualties that was the problem.
The end can come very quickly in some games of To The Strongest, and it did so here. Ron took full advantage of his positional superiority and moved in quickly for the kill. Fittingly, it was the elphants that delivered the coup de grace: taking out two units of Ghilman veteran cavalry and their officer for a loss of six coins in one melee.
So a catastrophic 14-0 loss for the Khurasanians that I am firmly blaming on those pooping elephants!
How three one-hit units saving on 6+ can survive so many attempts to cut them down with bowfire I do not know. It was up to Rob to celebrate his victory by providing a fitting image to finish off this battle report…
