100 Bandits - a short Ancient Art of War AAR
My usual sparring partner Ahab from the Data Driven Gamer has recently started (and ended) to cover the Ancient Art of War.
We did a bit of a program exchange - I sent him two homemade scenarios, and he sent me one of his.
So this is the AAR for his scenario : 100 Bandits.
The default settings are :
- Villages produce food, forts don't,
- Forts train men often,
- Difficult terrain (forest, mountains and water) are not SO difficult after all,
- The quality of my units is decent. Not great, not terrible.
The default opponent(s) is/are "Gengis Khan and Subotai". They almost ignore terrain and move fast, but in my experience play loose with their own supplies.
The article about the custom maps can be found here.
You can find the map there.
The map opens on a surprisingly solid situation :
- I only need to defend from one, maximum 2 directions, given the village is at the bottom of the map and that the South-East corner is safe at the moment,
- The "hastily constructed fortifications" are actually 2 forts blocking the two bridges leading to the village, forts that will produce new troops "often". The bandits have a maximum of one fort (South-West corner), and that fort does not have food anyway so it cannot be used as a viable recruiting ground,
- Outside of the fortified village, the bandits have only access to 3 food-producing villages fairly distant from one another. If I occupy these, they will quite simply starve !
- Finally, with 5 flags, I am unlikely to lose by surprise - the enemy needs to take all my flags at the same time to force my surrender.
I start with 7 armies (thematic !). My opponents start more numerous (100 of them vs 64 soldiers on my side) but "hungry". If I strike first and seize the villages, they may remain so until the end of the battle !
My first order is therefore to take the two villages at range at double speed. With those villages under my control, the bandits will be left with only one in the North, and will have to do a long, tiring trek to attack me, a trek from which they will emerge hungry and exhausted !
The villages are soon occupied without combat. Meanwhile, 2 enemy spies seize my Northern flags by surprise, but I capture the spies and retake my flags effortlessly. Once I feel I have a strong defensive position, I detach a spy to inspect that South-Western fort in the mountain.
Meanwhile, I see the first real enemy army. It attacks the Eastern village, but it is dispatched without much effort :
Alas, a second group soon follows, and as I am busy checking the map I forget the lead the battle personally. The automatic resolution does its thing, and my army is destroyed and - worse - the Eastern village is under bandit control ! That's a setback !
Fortunately, the enemy army does not stop to resupply, and pushes its luck trying to immediately attack the main village. Meanwhile, my spy reports that the South-Western fort is empty. It gives me the confidence to send the armies currently defending the main village to retake the Eastern village.
A sortie with units useless in defence (no one has a bow in that group), which should have wiped out the wretched, tired masses huddling on the bridge in front of my fort, ends in a surprising upset !
Still, I know that the enemy army, or what's left of it, does not have a chance against a fort. I wait confidently. More enemy armies appear, never stopping in the Eastern village for Rest & Repair.
Eventually, I retake control of the Eastern village without combat. Meanwhile, my fort defenders, now split into two groups to spread out combat fatigue, slay the attacking enemies with ease. 
In the Eastern village, my unit resists vigorous assaults with an elastic defense :
Still, that army is eventually destroyed, but not before demolishing 2 enemy armies and crippling another. 7 men killed more than 25 !
At this point, I am informed that I have more men than the enemy: 54 (thanks to recruitment in the fort) against 44, maybe 10 of them isolated remains of former large armies, poised to die at the bottom of my ramparts. My soldiers have a strong defensive position and are well-fed, I should win this.
I have not used the 3 armies in the Western village so far, except to recapture the flags from time to time. I allocate one army to the Eastern village, and another one to the Northern village :
It turns out that the Northern village is defended by a powerful army of well-fed bandits. The largest battle of the campaign starts !
It is defeat, but a defeat I can afford. Every soldier I lose can be replaced, every soldier the bandits lose is lost forever - and they lost 11 of them ! With the losses they sustained in the South, the bandits are down to less than 25 men !
I crush one last large but exhausted army attacking my fort, and pursue it as it retreats :
And that's it ! The few remaining bandits surrender :
Only 10 bandits survived. The village is saved.
I found the scenario fun and thematic, but on the easy side. Most of the enemy just crashed against the walls of the fortified village. I wonder if the scenario could be won by just stacking everyone in the fort ? Possibly.
Still, thanks to Ahab for creating a scenario just for me, and for playing my own scenarios ! That was unexpected !
I thought this one would be harder. My strategy had been to attack them in the mountains, then retreat to cover, but during my final playtest, they surprised me by parking multiple units on the hills, and resting up! If multiple units attack a fort at once, they'll bypass the walls and you lose the defense advantage, and this happened to me during an earlier playtest. I still won, but I had to sneak some guys out the backdoor to take the villages back first to cut off their supply.
My first attempt at the Deluge was a miserable failure as I tried to win by cutting out the forts' supplies of krupnik and pierogies. This spread my armies out way too thin, and took too long to get results, subjecting them to attack and overrun by Russia. Then when I actually listened to the advice in the scenario briefing and went aggressive I won, though apparently still not as aggressively as Scribe intended!