After some years away, I managed to attend Ribble Rumble at Manchester once again. The lure of the silk road was irresistible and I took a Tibetan army
Frankly I would have preferred the early Tibetans but the theme did allow only "Tibetan" so I went for it asI wanted to use my Tibetan army that was dormant for 18 month and got stuck with a difficult army full of tribal close cataphracts. Those guys are strong but even wheeling would need a yellow card ! A challenge.
To make things a bit simpler I also went for 3 allies, internal and external .
There is a slight mistake in the list as the internal Tibetan allied general should have had a second UG under his command, but it was discovered after the tournament. Also with a command range of 10 MU it would not have been a real problem .
I had had no time to practise with that heavy not so manoeuvrable army so expected the worst and wondered how to protect my flanks and make that swiss knife army work as a team.
My very first game would be vs the Khazar under the leadership of Ian Crosby
Ian was very focused on the game . he decided to defend and go for plains which suited me well enough
I was a bit slow taking pictures so here we are already manoeuvring
My Nepalese ally was a bit unreliable, and Ian faced them with some SUP lancers . I dreaded a full charge and wondered how to react .On the left side of the picture , the Khazar line is anchored by a guard AV LS TUG .
So first I decided to push towards his unprotected horse archers with my Khotanese protected guys
So I did sent a cataphract UG ( in the middle of the picture ) to support the khotanese as he had nothing to stop me there
The allied cataphract goes to support the no so reliable Nepalese ally and pushed some mounted bow away
The Khazar guards holds the center. They are LS after all
So what happens here ..the lancers are going for my unreliable ally who will suffer at impact but not that badly and suddenly decide to become reliable . My cataphracts are engaging the mounted bows or trying to as at impact I lost !
And to Ian's surprise I did charge the guard with my superior cats and as you can see it is quite a fight but now that his LS are only one rank deep, I am at +3 even +4 as I trhowed the general in to speed up things
Once again, the cats won during melee and broke the unprotected enemy cavalry . I will admit that I rolled well and shove did it's work . What was important is that it freed my TUG
Shooting exanche and it went rather well for me . My first 3 white dice there were 3 wounds which seemed to calm Ian's soldiers !
My ally survived the charge. The trick I used was to skirmish with one TUG but hold with the other who did survive . Ian had not so good dice.
Readying for the kill
Trying to shoot down the enemy lancers who are now also engaged frontaly by the cataphracts
The Khazar guard broke so now the very diminished cats go towards some unprotected, poor , combat shy bows. Impact and melee will kill them quickly but they nearly evaporated me as myTUG ended at 3 bases ...very near breaking
The Nepalese are near breaking but help is on it's way . A tribal cat TUG managed to turn 180* and is in charge range behind the Khazar lancers. That will be the end of them and surprisingly the Nepalese will survive as Ian's dice will not cooperate
The last desperate charges on both side . I will manage to break his TUG and he will break mine ! so the game ended 10-4 in my favour.
I was lucky , Ian's dice needed more training and I was discovering my army
A good game, nice opponent so a good morning