another tactical lesson

[Kaegan]

based loosely on a fight at chaos wars.

your team (red) starts at the lower left hand corner of the field, pressed against the edge of the world. one massive group teams up with a smaller one and charges you, while the two other teams fight each other.


What do you tell your team to do?

by the way, despite the harsh odds, red team won. and only lost like 5 people.

[V-Hil]

Gee, was the red team EBF and some Numenoreans?

I would run away and pick my fights, continuously running away and picking my fights, stringing them out one-by-one and killing them. All the teams are fighting as mobs and therefore by the red teams terms (except for the small one in a line who is severely outnumbered)

Anyway, unit battles hardly tell a true classical tactical victory. Maybe of the classic Belegarth tactical victory of avoiding combat until all the big units kill each other. The very nature of unit battles is flawed (at least in who truly wins) in the sense that you are either constantly attacked from all sides, spend the whole time running away from combat or you stand and wait to see what all the other groups do.

In these scenarios with 5-15 teams, the group with the high individual experience typically win because it's a bunch of one-on-one fighting with the skirmisher tactics of envelopement. If a large group is formed, all the little teams will gang up on the big team and then once the big threat is gone, they go after each other. If a large line unit is in the games, it has to corner these groups and then pick them apart or run them over. Hell, most the times when charged (in my experience) the experienced team will * about headshots and leave the field. Even then, the field will attack the line unit, especially if it is huge.

Anyway, your scenario has way too many variables in it to be a true tactical discussion.

[Kaegan]

You sure told me...

I hope you feel better about yourself now.

[V-Hil]

Well, at least you took it like a champ

[Angmarth]

The answer for the red team (which I was on) was that we ran. It is much easier for a small team, especiall vets, to split up and run ... fight a couple of one on ones ... and then regroup when necessary. Holding a large force together is much more difficult. When you are a large force you simply HAVE to fight. Our victory was a testiment to the "strategic retreat", because we did not engage any force that was remotely a threat until it had been whittled down. We used to do "knights & knaves" in Numenor 7-8 years ago with the same results. The "knights", or experienced players, would simply string out the lesser experienced group until we could fight them one on one rather than as a team. The tactic works VERY well against large groups of inexperienced to medium experienced people. Once a group becomes cohesive, the advantage is lost and you will get destroyed. I wouldn't necessarily consider it a tactical exercise as much as a tried and true method for veteran skirmishers to win large battles with multiple groups on the field.

[xiao]

Well said Angmarth.