Fyrd Formations: Reforming Shieldwalls

Good morning gamers,

In some of the recent formations articles (fighting on the ground and how to fight against shieldwalls), we've looked at shieldwall formations and how to both use them unexpectedly and how to fight against them. Today, we look at how to evolve your shieldwall formation to gain an advantage against an enemy shieldwall formation (or how to use a smaller shieldwall to take on a larger shieldwall). While we'll be using Minas Tirith and Mordor armies to illustrate, any armies that have warriors with spears and shields can do what we're going to do here.

Note: many of the principles we're going to cover here have already been brought up by Rythbyrt almost two years ago in one of his posts on spears and shield formations - check it out here. We're going to take some of the thoughts Rythbyrt brought up way back when he wrote that article and apply it using the principles that were used historically with the Fyrds in Saxon England.

What Were Fyrds?

A "fyrd" was basically a militia force of farmers that were trained by a local lord in Saxon/Mercian England. The Anglo-Saxons trained their local militias to fight in blocks with shields held tightly together and spears to thrust outwards at anyone who tried to break the shieldwall. The fyrd system worked really well against Scots/Picts, Irish, Welsh, and Danes - but didn't work particularly well against the Normans (something we'll actually be looking at next month).

In England during the first millennium, the usual modus operandi of military forces (be they Anglo-Saxon, Dane, or otherwise) was to form a shieldwall and ram up against the other guy's wall. You then strove with them all day, hoping to break a hole in it. If you managed that, then you could attack the men who were shoving with all their might against your fellows and kill them without them being able to put up a fight. If your wall broke, you were probably dead before you knew the wall had been breached. While there were formations designed to break through shieldwalls (like the Svinfilking), as a general rule, you just shoved our shieldwall against your opponent's.

Most of the time, shieldwalls succeeded or failed based on their length or depth - have either factor out of proportion to your opponent and your line could end up breaking quickly. If you had a short shieldwall and your opponent had a longer shieldwall that had the same depth as yours, your opponent would start to wrap around your men and kill you from the sides (bad day). If the shieldwalls of two armies were the same length but one was deeper than the other, the mass and strength of the deeper rank might break through the thinner wall. Either way, it pays to have numbers.

This principle (longer battle lines or larger numbers) actually does translate into victory in MESBG - but it is possible for a smaller force to defeat a larger one if it positions its troops well. To understand how that works, let's look at three different ways you can form up a shieldwall and why they might be useful depending on the size of the shieldwall your opponent brings to the table.

The Basic Shieldwall: What's Wrong With It?

To illustrate the shieldwalls we're going to talk about today, let's use the following forces (feel free to follow along at home with your own forces if you have them handy) - each is under 200pts:

• Forces of Good: 16 models, 188pts:
• Denethor, Steward of Gondor
• 7 Warriors of Minas Tirith with shields
• 7 Warriors of Minas Tirith with shields and spears
• 1 Warrior of Minas Tirith with shield, spear, and banner
• Forces of Evil: 13 models, 188pts:
• Gorbag, Orc Captain with shield
• 5 Morannon Orcs with shields
  
• 6 Morannon Orcs with shields and spears
• 1 Morannon Orc with shield, spear, and banner
  

If you're a new player to MESBG, you've probably learned that a single spear-armed model can lend 1 Attack to a friendly model (of the same/smaller base size) by standing in base contact with him. This means that you can concentrate a lot of dice in a single place by putting your front-line troops shoulder-to-shoulder with spear-armed models standing shoulder-to-shoulder right behind them.

If you play a few games with one, you'll also learn that tightly-packed shieldwalls benefit greatly from banners - and if you want to see some of the math for that, you should check out our previous post on breaking shieldwalls with pike blocks. Both shieldwalls in our post today feature banners and if arrayed as shown above, the Mordor force presents a slightly smaller line. The Minas Tirith line will be slightly longer, but with a stronger hero on the Mordor side, how well each side uses their shieldwall will probably determine which side wins the day. Let's see what happens when they clash, with Mordor getting to choose the matchups:

Since Gorbag gets an extra Attack and Fight Value if he's outnumbered in a fight, the Mordor player charges him into two guys (Denethor and a friend, each with a spear-support). Because Gorbag's army doesn't have a spearman for everyone, Gorbag chooses to solo these guys, trusting to Heroic Strike, a banner reroll, and 2 extra Might points to carry the day. Should he fail to get the 6, though, he does stand to be in a bit of trouble. Here's how the fighting works out:

Well, let's break down what happened: Gorbag got a bad roll (Heroic Strike up to F10, Feint down to F7, got a 4-high) and had to burn all of his Might to win the fight. He then had the choice of wounding the Warrior of Minas Tirith on 6s or Denethor on 5s, so he tried to wound Denethor and scored 1 Wound (got a 5, 4, and 3 - no 1s to reroll, no Might to promote the 4). The other fights ended up with . . . no one dying.  

At the end of this exchange, while Mordor was the only side to actually deal damage, it might look like they're "winning." But since they're outnumbered, that tactic won't work for long. This strategy did, on the whole, work out pretty well for Mordor. But let's turn the tables now and say that Minas Tirith got to make the charge - here's how the match-ups would have looked:

As you can see here, the Minas Tirith troops had a longer battle line and since they were able to dictate the charges, they not only engaged Gorbag with someone who wasn't Denethor (making Gorbag F4/2A instead of F5/3A - and with no VPs on the line if they lose), but they also were able to wrap around the flanks of the Mordor line and have trapped one of the Orcs while engaging the spearman behind him. This goes . . . better than you'd imagine:

This time, Gorbag forewent his spear-support so the rest of his line could do better and had to spend a Might point to win his fight (and didn't deal any wounds because his opponent was D7 in shieldwall and he didn't want to spend ANOTHER Might point to kill him). Denethor killed his guy, while one Warrior of Minas Tirith and one Morannon Orc died in the grunt fights.

With a 16:13 ratio turning into a 15:11 fight,inas Tirith still has the advantage of numbers in future fights (and a slightly better advantage), as well as the wrap-around positioning. So what can the Mordor battle line do to improve their positioning since they have the smaller force? Well, they can extend their battle line without losing much of its effectiveness by not spear-supporting everyone.

The Extended "Triangle" Shieldwall

Here are the same two battle lines, but this time, the Mordor line has chosen to spear-support every two models with a friendly model, increasing their frontal coverage from roughly 7" to roughly 9":

You can see here the new battle lines arrayed - and despite having the smaller numbers, the Mordor battle line is actually longer than the Minas Tirith one (and only the 3 Morannons on the far right are outside of banner range). If Minas Tirith charges first, they'll need to either a) leave a Mordor model (with nearby spear-support) unengaged OR b) charge into two models with one of their guys OR c) not spear support in two fights. Either way, the Mordor army will have a slight advantage somewhere in the battle line. Depending on the match-ups, the Mordor force can then choose where the spear-supports will be used (moving them to support a particular model if the Orcs haven't moved yet - and potentially charging more models into the flanking combats).

"But," I hear you say, "some of those Orcs won't be supported from behind - won't they be at a disadvantage in their fights?" Well, not really actually - because all of these Orcs have shields on them. And if they have shields, we can do something that shieldwalls are renowned for: staying alive by not going anywhere.

Each Orc that isn't spear-supported will choose to "defend by shielding," doubling its dice for the dueling roll in trade for not being able to roll To Wound should they win. Shielding won't win you a game that depends on you killing things (like Lords of Battle or To The Death), but it can slow your opponent down from getting somewhere OR hold a portion of the enemy's forces at bay while the rest of your army smashes the rest of the enemy force to bits. In our example here, the Orcs are just trying to hold out long enough for Gorbag to slay a bunch of guys and even the odds (hopefully he can do that by out-killing Denethor - or just killing Denethor, I guess).

Now, of course, Minas Tirith can do the same thing - if they see the Mordor battle line go for length over depth, they can avoid charging and do the same thing - in which case, they can get a 10" battle line compared to the Mordor force's 9" line:

Looks like Mordor's on the backfoot again and could be wrapped on one side - well, let's see if we can reform the Mordor battle line one more time to try to get an even longer line . . .

The Thin, Long Shieldwall

At this point, we've decided that we can't focus on depth - we need to prevent our army from getting trapped around the flanks and getting trapped/routed. So, we're going to spread our 13 models in such a long line, that we have literally 2 models that are in the rear rank. This means, however, that we have 11 models in the front rank for (once again) a longer battle line than our opponent:

Our banner is in the middle and we want spearmen touching it so they can pick it up. In this formation we're not relying on shielding in the center of our battleline - remember: we can't win by shielding with everyone. Yes, it might slow down the enemy for a bit, but if we're not able to kill things and our opponent is, we could be in huge trouble. Instead, anyone in range of the banner strikes normally, rerolling their die only if they would lose the fight. Since both armies are F3, our ability to win fights is going to be slightly lower than the opposing army, but not THAT much lower. Instead, we give ourselves the opportunity to do damage and only marginally lower our probabilities of winning the fight.

Now I should note that there is a chance that our shieldwall will break - and unlike the last formation, we don't have reserves to fill holes that arise in our lines. What we've traded our long-term resiliency for is the assurance that wrapping our battleline will either be difficult or impossible. Our enemy could charge us, but doing so will require some of our troops to be in a pretty good position - and if that's the case, we may gain a longer-term advantage by deploying longer instead of deeper. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but it actually does work.

You can also run this formation with armies that have shields but don't have spear-supports (like Khazad-Dum armies that don't run Vault Warden Teams en masse or Rohan infantry armies that don't have allies with spears and aren't from a Legendary Legion where spear-supporting is allowed). If you don't have the option to use either of the other two formations effectively, spreading your troops out could mean the center breaking - or it could mean that you have the ability to wrap around your foe or distribute his forces as well.

Speaking of which, the Minas Tirith army can do this too - their formation can get to 12" long with 4 models supporting (instead of our 11" line with 2 models supporting). They do have the bigger numbers, but the more they spread out, the less effective that banner is for them overall (more models out of range = more models that have to shield to get 2 dice). This maneuver could work in Minas Tirith's favor, but a bad round in the center could lead to their whole wall breaking - which is what we really want.

Of course, Minas Tirith could go with a different approach: consolidating into a tight shieldwall again and concentrate their force in the center (like we talked about last time). This may work better if they get to dictate the charges and are moving second - if they have to move first, they're asking for a beating if they huddle their forces together in a tight block. This was the approach used in our last post, by the way - focus your strength in one place, instead of spread across a large area.

Conclusion

So is fighting in a block a bad idea? Is it better to just wrap around? Not really - the basic shieldwall is still quite useful because it concentrates your mass in a small area. If you're fighting an army that doesn't have spears (like I do with Moria against Khazad-Dum), ranking up your spears can give you an edge in the dice count, giving you a better chance of winning a duel and having the opportunity to wound things. Spreading out could see the greater mass of an opponent come stomping on your center, leaving your armies split in two (which means most banners will need to help one branch and not the other, assuming they're still alive). Extending your battle line has its benefits, but sometimes you need to concentrate your force to get results - so be flexible with your battle lines and adapt to what you need.

Next month, we'll be looking at how to tackle shieldwalls . . . without a shieldwall of your own. Sometimes the factions you run can't take spearmen and you may be wondering how to handle shieldwalls that are trying to apply force in a concentrated area (as we just talked about). Tune in next time for some strategies to do just that, taking a very famous piece of cloth as an instruction point. Until next time, happy hobbying!