Unexpected Military Formations: The Anti-Archery Shield

Good morning gamers,

Earlier this week, we looked at the Beornings Legendary Legion and I mentioned in passing that there was a specific formation you could use if you needed to advance against enemy archery and there is no terrain to hide behind. Today, we're going to look at that formation.

The Expected Formation: The Solid Wall of Bears

To exhibit this formation, let's look at the following 800pt army:

• Beorn [ARMY LEADER]
• 7 Beornings
• 3 Beornings with great bows 
• Grimbeorn
• 7 Beornings
• 3 Beornings with great bows

If you have two D8 models with 60mm bases, the strategy would appear to be simple: make a 120mm wall between you and your opponent with your bears:

Now this seems like a solid plan - we have D8 models with a 5+ save before they need to spend Fate protecting our D4 infantry. But, if we pit this against a shooting army, we run into a problem: we protect our models from a pretty narrow firing arc.

Because our bears are "leading the charge", we have given our opponent no reason to keep his archers (or anything else) in front of our formation. A smart opponent will not stand in front of you as you charge - he's going to move around the formation as best he can:

The more he moves, the further your bears are from the action. So how can we stop this from happening? Well, we change the placement of our bears to look like this . . .

The Unexpected Formation: Angled Deflection Shields 

What's changed? We still have our bears in front, but we haven't blocked all of the forward arc - instead, we've left a corridor for the enemy to direct his fire without in-the-ways. Why? Because only a few archers will likely be able to make that shot and that means our attrition rate down that alley will be low. By contrast, basically all of our flanks are guarded and we have discouraged our opponent from shooting out our Beornings by moving to the side.

As an added bonus, we know that every archer possible will want to be in one place: the corridor we've left open. Our bears can still advance towards the archers and those archers will just be saf about it, leading us to massacre the main body if they stand/scoot-and-shoot.

Conclusion

This kind of strategy may see some Beornings fall - but with our army together, our bears are right where we need them: amongst the Burly chaps who want that banner reroll. If this formation article was informative for you, let us know below! Until next time, happy hobbying!