Kampfgruppe Engel: DBA AAR. Kwarizmians vs Feudal French

Last Tuesday we had a little DBA day. Well me and Peter at least, besides painting some brushstrokes on our new armies we did manage to do two battles.

I used my Kwarizmians and Peter borrowed my Feudal French. The setting was to be the Crusades. After the Mongol conquest of the Kwarizmians many of their former warriors went westwards towards the Holy land and this is what happened here. I opted to not choose the Elephant options because to my knowledge the Crusaders didn´t fight against any.

The First battle didn’t start to well; my first casualty was my General… As I had already destroyed one of his element the battle was still not decided but with double pip cost and bad dice roll there was little I could do to turn the tide. I really fought that three of my Cavalry men and led by my General would bring down this one stand of Frankish knight. But I had greatly under rested the fighting power of the French noblemen. First my General was driven backwards by the fury of his knight, being pursued by the hot-blooded Frenchy and not managed to close the gap I was in trouble when his other knights closed in…

Game two, payback time. Or so I thought.
The plan was to play a delaying game with some Light Horse in front of his massive knight formation and hit him in the side or rear with my fast moving Cavalry.
Things started all according to plan. His knights charging straight forward in to my trap…
Here I started to make mistakes. I wanted to include my Archers and my Warband in my flanking formation. They started rather good with making an ambush at the knights but the knight kept pushing forward. My Cavalry then tried to swing around and the biggest mistake was to include the infantry in this rotating line of warriors. This meant that the most outer cavalry men had to ride a very long way and this took more of my precious time. What I should have done was to skip the infantry all together in this plan.

The effect was that I was too late, my Light Horse couldn’t stand against twice almost their numbers with heavy clad knights and got slaughtered our pushed aside. This cost my army to many casualties.

But the game ended on the other side of the battlefield. Some horsemen that I had try to use to just tie down some of his armies with finally got caught up with the advancing infantry and one stand of cavalry fell to his crossbowmen. This was the last straw, the game ended with heavy casualties on my side.