Skirmish At Drachenhügel

I set up a game of Dragon Rampant this evening. It could have just as easily been a game of Lion Rampant, but I don't own those particular rules. I say that, because the two armies were basically free of any fantasy elements or traits.

I put together two forces using 15mm DBA/HOTT armies. On one side were the Swiss, with three lots of offensive heavy foot, a unit of light riders and some scouts. On the other side was the Dukedom of Ceidonia, fielding two lots of elite riders, two lots of heavy foot and some heavy missiles.

I played a scenario from One Hour Wargames - Take The High Ground. I made a couple of modifications. Firstly I added in some random terrain, and secondly extending the game length to 20 turns to allow for the effectively slower movement of Dragon Rampant forces (not every unit moves every turn). The defending reinforcements appeared on Turn 3 rather than Turn 2.

Units were on a 40mm frontage, I played on a 2' x 2' board and I converted distances directly from inches to cm.

The Ceidonians started defending the hill with 8 points of troops, whilst the whole Swiss force advanced against them. The remaining Ceidonians would appear in the far corner starting on Turn 3.

The Ceidonians put the spear-armed heavy foot on the hill immediately closing up ranks to form a fearsome wall of spears on their first turn. With the hill bonus this would give them a formidable Armour of 5 in close combat.

The Swiss advanced their deep foot columns towards the hill, and sent the scouts to the left, hoping to soften up the Ceidonian defenders before they launched their attack.

However they had to get a move on; the Ceidonian reinforcements soon appeared.

The Swiss commanders desperately wanted to attack, but most of his time was spent trying to convince his reluctant scouts to shoot at the enemy. They were distracted by the thoughts of plunder in the village in front of them. Whatever the reason, the Swiss force sat in front of the hill, whilst from time to time the scouts took the odd pot-shot to relieve the monotony.

On their right flank the mounted crossbows were more active, riding in to harass the Duke of Ceidonia as he advanced on his mighty charger.

And still the rest of the Swiss waited ...

The mounted crossbows got the attention of the Ceidonian knights, who charged them. The lighter Swiss horse evaded once, fired another volley and were then completely wrong-footed as the Duke kept charging. Caught completely off guard, and failing to evade, the Swiss horsemen were wiped out.

This inspired the main Swiss force to charge!

Actually it didn't. They just sat here. From time to time a crossbow twanged.

The Ceidonian knights galloped around the Swiss right. The Swiss watched.

Charge! The Duke of Ceidonia led his personal bodyguard into the nearest Swiss column.

The column fell back, then routed as the Duke pressed his advantage.

Another group of knights charged the next column.

It also fell back, but the Duke finished it off.

The Swiss leader finally decided that the hill wasn't going to capture itself, and charged the Ceidonian infantry in front of him. This group of Ceidonians was particularly loathed, after their sergeant had shouted something disrespectful about the Swiss leader's favourite cow. They had to die. And die they did, falling back from the attack, then routing after seeing their sergeant skewered on a pike.

Unfortunately that was really it for the Swiss attack. The knights charged (an incident not captured by the official war-artist), and as the Swiss recovered from that the other group of Ceidonian foot attacked them and they ran.

This left the Swiss scouts. They actually held their ground, mostly since there was really nowhere to run to. They fired off a few shots and eve felled a Ceidonian spearman.

But it was soon all over. The Swiss were wiped out.

The Ceidonians scored the arbitrary 5 Glory for holding the hill, and picked up another 5 Glory for completing quests - they destroyed more enemy units than they'd lost, and had never had more than one battered unit in play at a time. They lost a point of Glory because their captain of crossbows failed to fulfil his dream of reducing a Swiss unit to half strength by shooting alone; the knights killed everybody before he could get his men into position. So that was a total of 9 Glory for the Ceidonians. The Swiss scored two Glory for avenging the insult to their leader's cow, but lost 2 Glory for both failing to destroy half of the enemy's force and for having two Ceidonian units battered at the same time. So, Zero Glory for the Swiss, and a 9-0 win for Ceidonia.

Post Match Analysis: The Swiss had terrible activation rolls. And maybe they should have used the scouts to draw the Ceidonian knights into wood.