In general, when army-scale maneuvers are discussed, the field battle is what’s envisioned. Limited fronts preclude maneuvers, woods and towns tend to disrupt orderly movement and, often, create vulnerabilities even in well-organized lines.
“Field awareness” becomes supremely important now: Not that it isn’t in a Woods Battle, but on a field you can see the entire scope of a battle, all your vulnerabilities and all your opportunities.
Pennsic Field Battle ’05
Sitting around with some of the mid-to-senior fighters, you may sometimes hear the phrase “W for the Win”, with hands formed in a W, accompanied by laughter that may not immediately seem appropriate to the concept of defeating the enemy. There is a reason. W is not The Win. W is The Fail.
This was my first Pennsic, my first melee outside of a few 3-on-3s. Alejandro was Provost General, and he passed on the orders to us: “Atlantia would form up on the right. At ‘Lay On’ we would swing left. At the same time, the left wing would, too, while the center pushed out in a V.” The result: A giant W. And somewhere between the flanks swinging in and the point pushing forward, the enemy would be crushed.
As it turned out, the enemy was crushed, but not because of superior tactics. We outnumbered them 3 to 1. The maneuver was stupid: the point of the W and the ends of the arms, if thrown at an equal enemy, would have been easily overwhelmed and annihilated, at which point the flanks could be munched and a huge gap would have been opened in the lines, while the rest of the W was in no place to reinforce.
You can maneuver too much, or to borrow from Nelson: “Never mind about maneuvers, go straight at them.” He may excessively simplify (considering he was revolutionizing naval maneuver at the time), but focusing on the goal of destroying your opponent, rather than fancy maneuvers, yields a much better result. I believe Dominyk said something similar to that just a month or so ago.
In the last of the field battles, the East’s small army did not advance across the field. Instead, they tucked into a corner and formed an arc between the hay bales to face our lines. While the Flying W had been looking to be the worst mistake made that day, this leaped ahead and took the brass (or was it Bronze?) ring. The response, forming a line along their arc, turned the Mid/Atlantian lines into a killing cup, with the East trapped in the center, not even able to retreat.
Pennsic Field Battle ’08
At Pennsic ’08, we were allied with the Kingdom of the East, the same people who’d been outnumbered 3 to 1 in ’05. Now we were just outnumbered 2 to 1. Well, maybe 3 to 1. How does the East manage this?
Atlantia was again on the right flank. The plan this time was simple (The East does simple plans): Form a line, and Atlantia was going to hit hard on our end. This we can do. This is easy. This, despite numerical disadvantage, would at least be fun!
At ‘Lay on’ Atlantia advanced across the field in a well ordered line. At about mid-field we stopped. From here I, commanding the left flank of Atlantia, looked over to see what the East’s center and left wings were doing. It is often said that “the plan does not survive past first contact with the enemy.” As has been mentioned, this statement is wrong. However in this case the plan had not survived ‘Lay on’. The center and left wing were moving forward as blobs. There was a hole one hundred feet wide between the end of Atlantia’s left flank, and the first Eastern fighter. I looked at the hole. I looked across at the enemy. There, a bunch of Middies in cassocks trimmed in pretty little hearts were looking back at me and my hundred foot gap. “Fuck,” says I, and then they were running towards us, around our flank defense, and stomping me like a frog under a car wheel.
This happened about 3 times, at the end of which I was ready to march over and drill sergeant the East into a line myself.
The lesson: an exposed, weak flank on the field will get you killed. Refuse the flank, reinforce the flank, or stretch the flank to the edge of the field.
Defending the Gate ‘07
Usually the win condition in field battles is “Kill Them All”. As win conditions go, it’s a good one. Occasionally, though, you get a “capture the flag” scenario, in which case you’ll also get resurrections.
At Defending the Gate ’08, there was a “team fortress” style capture the flag: Two flags, at each end of the field, to be grabbed and run back to rez point by the opposite team.
One team started mainlining “grabbers” to the enemy flag: One person would grab the flag, run it back, while another waited at the flag spot waiting for it to reappear (when the flag was run back, a hold would be called and the flag would be returned to its starting position) to grab it and run it again.
Variants on resurrection timing and location were tried, until immediate rez a few feet away from the flag was decided as the best option. This made camping the flag spot more difficult, and only one flag was grabbed in fifteen minutes under these rules.
The most effective formation on the field turned out to be a slight V, pushing the enemy up against the hay bales and opening the center to run through.
Crusades ‘07
At the last Crusades held, a similar field was used, this time with one static flag in the center. Here again the best tactic was to pin the bulk of the enemy against the hay bales and push a force through the center to defend the flag. The East obliged us by continuing to try to push our flanks, getting stacked up behind themselves and having no room to maneuver as we stood our ground and fought defensively on the flanks, and occasionally swept down the backs of their flanking units. You know, except for the location, the cost, and the enemy, I miss Crusades.
WotW Field Battles
There will be times when you find yourself unable to really do anything to protect your flank. At War of the Wings, the field is so frickin’ big and the rapier forces so small that you can’t really stretch a line from one side to the other, and refusing the flanks works only until you’re far enough out into the field to let somebody run around your refused flank and into your back field. So what do you do?
I usually just attack. Move your flanks forward as quickly as possible to attack their flanks and drive them back and in, hit their center hard so they get driven back onto their retreating flanks, surround the whole and crush it. The efficacy of this method depends a whole lot on the relative strength of your flank units, so I find this to be a great time for a weak center. But it’s a simple enough plan that, once your units are in place on your line, the order is “charge”. Or “Kill them all”.
Smaller Field Battles
In smaller settings, like 5 man melee tourneys, the individual attributes of each fighter begin to dictate the best strategy. If your fighters are new, or don’t move quickly, you’re going to need to keep a tighter formation than if your fighters are more experienced and can take care of themselves when operating away from a friend.
I’m currently going back and forth between attacking with a plan (i.e. “run the right”) in such situations, or playing chess (i.e. “You take the tall guy, you stall the provost, and you crunch that newb”). Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I’ve yet to figure out which I prefer.
Lines vs. Columns
Owing, I believe, to an overabundance of trying to meld rapier melee with period or heavy tactics, columns get a lot of press. In general, a column has one attack available to it: Charge. I’ve seen column charges break through killing cups. I’ve more often seen them fail to do so.
It’s my personal opinion that columns have almost no place on a Field Battle. There can be an argument that, when running a flank, you’re shifting from a line to a column one person wide, but that’s still a line. A column two or more people wide, moving at a line, looks for the weakest point and charges at it. And therein lies the problem: fencers don’t handle charges well. We train and we train to do these charges, almost every time I’ve been in a melee class, and we never use them on the field because fencers, on average, don’t like to charge. They don’t want to get hurt, or be the first one to die, or something.
What’s more, the natural instinct of the recipient of the charge, to back up, actually is the right response: By backing up, they delay the charge and let it into a pocket where it now has opponents on its flanks. A line that bends backward in front of a charge rather than trying to face it forms a killing cup, and the charge is then screwed.
And again, if a column charge is so difficult that it takes constant training and an above average skill level to execute, and you have an army with neither of those attributes on average, there is a better option. Go find it.
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