Mound Builders vs The World

We had a DBA session last night, with four of us playing each other for a total of three games apiece. It was a bit of a practice session for the forthcoming tournament at MOAB; there's no HOTT this year, sadly, so we have switched our allegiance to DBA 3.0 instead.

Although I can now field both Maya and Aztecs for DBA, by repurposing my HOTT armies, I wanted to use my one, dedicated DBA army, the Mound Builders - a majority of bows, supported by some blades and hordes and featuring a litter as the general. Here they are set up for the first game, against Caesar's Wars of the Roses English. The pyramid isn't really a Mound Builder thing, but looks too nice not to use.

Caesar's artillery broke up the hordes which, requiring extra PIPs to move, floundered around on the flank for a bit. But some archers sent into the temple complex on my left threatened the Europeans' gun.

Meanwhile the rest of the armies exchanged archers, and elements were lost on both sides.

After a tough fight, the Mound Builders overran the gun, to pick up a 4-3 win.

In a second game I faced Dave, who was using a Late Achmaenid Persian army; Greek mercenary spears supported by various mounted troops and some light infantry. Dave went for a classic headlong charge approach.

The stinkard hordes took on the Persian cavalry. They died in droves, of course, but took a long time doing it, which held that particular flank.

The Greek spears attacked in the centre, but couldn't kill the vulnerable bows so that they could threaten the tougher noble blades and command litter.

On the other flank the Persian's noble cavalry failed to ride down the Mound Builder archers.

The Persian attack slowly broke up ...

... and the Mound Builders picked up another 4-3 win.

We all had enough time for a third game. Caesar fought the Persians this time. After seeing how useful my pyramid built-up area was in our first game, he placed a windmill as part of his terrain.

The Persians gazed on it in awe, before wiping the English out.

Meanwhile I played against Peter, who was using Alexander's Macedonians.

His initial PIPs were terrible, and he ended up advancing the main block of his army without being able to bring up his light troops to support his right.

This allowed me to swing unengaged archers around that flank.

On the other flank the stinkards died horribly to the Macedonian cavalry, just as they had when fighting the Persians. But, once again, they didn't die quickly.

The Macedonian pikes were slowly surrounded and outflanked, although this one fought back to destroy its opponent.

Eventually one of the pike-blocks was destroyed by the nobles and a supporting element of archers, for another 4-3 win.

In each game the Mound Builders scraped a victory from the edge of defeat, with the archers being very mobile, but very vulnerable to enemy heavy foot. The litter is an interesting challenge, in that it can't attack enemy troops, but is hard to kill if they attack it. And the hordes are great fun, of course, being annoyingly hard to kill. Whilst I'm not sure how I'm going to cope in the heady world of competitive DBA, I think this army will be fun and attractive to use.