Freezing! Armies before 0AD at Avignon 2019
Sargonid Assyrian vs Alexander The Great
Game 1 Sargonid Assyrian vs Galatian
Game 2 Sargonid Assyrian vs Carthaginian
Game 3 Sargonid Assyrian vs Ugaritic
Game 4 Sargonid Assyrian vs Kushan
Game 5 Sargonid Assyrian vs Alexander The Great
With lunch safely tucked away and my body/cheese ratio back up to near-French numerical levels suddenly it was a make or break last round matchup against the army of Alexander (or more like Alexandre) the Great which stood between me, the trophy cabinet and managing to make the 50 minute drive back to Marseilles in time to catch my flight back to London.
Del Boy and airports
The lists for the Sargonid Assyrian and Alexander The Great from this game, as well as all the other lists from the games at Avignon can be seen here in the L'Art de la Guerre Wiki.
Alexander The Great's army is an effective mix of pikemen, Companions and a fairly usual Indian ally. This combination of high-priced troops can sometimes make the overall army rather tiny at 200 points if enough of the right (or wrong) toys are chosen, allowing more nimble opponents to overwhelm it on one or more flanks. The end result is waterways and rivers often feature in Alexanders battles.
Any hope of trying to outmanoeuvre what turned out to be a solid pike centre in the Alexandrian army was quickly dashed when an impenetrable swamp (Impassable terrain) landed on the Assyrian base edge, which in combination with a waterway down the right hand side of the table severely limited the Assyrians deployment options.
Considerations of dropping a command between the waters edge and the impassable marsh was quickly discounted as well, on that basis that the high Aggression Alexandrians were moving first and could potentially pin down the Assyrians before they reconstituted their force.
The end result was a deployment and a strategy of weighting the Assyrian left and aiming to shift even further in that direction once the army started wheeling itself forward.
This would mean taking on and defeating Alexander's max-strength Companion contingent and then, hopefully, wheeling inwards with infantry and chariots to chew through the flanks of the elephantry and get into the pike block in its vulnerable flanks.
Assyrian stuff someone nicked and kept in the British Museum
Deciding that being fully committed to this plan was much better than faffing around half-heartedly the Assyrians hurled command pips at their chariotry.
The sound of creaking axels rang out across the tabletop, but this was not yet another Guns n'Roses world tour but instead the noise that accompanied the wheeling of a block of battle carts from the centre of the army round behind blocks of shooting and anti-elephant infantry out to face the Companions.
This ended up quickly stacking all 4 of the Chariots into an extreme left position the like of which even Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may have considered perhaps being a little bit too socialist.
Over there! The route to victory lies in the centre ground
Didn't you learn anything from Tony Blair?
The Right Wing Companions of Alexander Pfeffell The Self-declared Great were having none of this nonsense.
Turning sharply to the left they feinted behind their protective phalangites and galloped across the battlefield to find a new position.
Elephants looked behind them as the high powered horsemen steamed at speed away from the massing Chariotry, who now started to consider what they might do against almost no opposition.
What's Going on Here Then?
Pinned into a narrow frontage by impassable terrain in their deplyment area the Assyrians are struggling to use their mobility to wrongfoot the slow-moving enemy Pikemen and instead are being pinned back in their own deplyment area by an enemy advance
Keen to take on the Companions, Assyria's Chariots have swung out to the left to match them and draw them into a decisive combat of both forces Elite mounted troops. Alexander however doesn't fancy this option, and as soon as the Chariots are committed the Companions have gallpped across the back of their Phalanx to pile the pressue point into the much-thinned centre of the Assyrian army.
The very tempting and almost obligatory Indian allied command had also raced forward, and as expected had pinned the Assyrians back behind the Impassable Marsh.
More surprisingly however the Indian command was utterly lacking in elephantry, with a line of mixed bow/sword shooters and it's general riding astride a sub-par war wagon.
This would look like easy pickings for most of the Assyrian army, but sadly most of the Assyrian army was otherwise occupied on the opposite flank against the evaporating Companions, leaving only a couple of HF Swordsmen and a mixed shooter unit to oppose the wider Indian command.
The Companions had now almost completely disappeared from view, leaving an open field for the fast-moving Assyrian infantry to swing around and pressurize the right flank of Alexanders Phalanx.
The most potent components of the Assyrian army, the Chariotry, were suddenly marooned in open space far from the presumably decisive places in the battlefield.
It appeared that their greedy acquisition of all of the command and control capacities of two full commands of the Assyrian army had been not only for naught, instead it had just taken them away from where they might do most good.
Faking speaking French (or..what I was actually doing...)
The end of the Alexandrian line was now the focus of everyone's attention. Hoping yet again to use their Superiority the Elite Assyrian infantry raced forward, their line extended by mixed shooting formations who furiously targeted the Alexandrian elephantry and their protective skirmish screen as they closed..
The Chariots had realised that their army had enough troops here already, and that instead they needed to return to the centre - they turned about and prepared to copy the Companions and themselves race back behind their own wall of advancing foot fighters
No, I said "foot" fighters... sigh...
Like an ancient version of the 7th Cavalry (but aligned to the natives this time) the Companions suddenly galloped into view straight down the centre of Alexander's army to plug the gap between the Phalanx and the Indians.
The handful of Assyrian infantry who had been left behind in their army's mad rush to the left flank suddenly realised that far from being an irrelevance in this game, they now formed the focal point of the entire Alexandrian attack - and that they also were the only thing between their opponents and their own baggage.
That Man Alexander
