Fyrd Formations: The Gap Tooth Grin

Good morning gamers,

Over the past year, I've been playing with a bunch of different armies, ranging from men from Rohan and Gondor to many, MANY lists featuring huge rabbles of Orcs and Uruk-Hai from Mordor and Angmar (and some Isengard). For many of the lists I've been toying with for the Winter Whirlwind tournament, this year's TMAT Grand Tournament, and the recent TMAT THRO tournament, I've looked at lists that can run (and often do run) your traditional shieldwall formations - a line of guys in the front (usually with shields) backed up by a line of spears/pikes to increase their damage. Most factions in MESBG function this way.

But some don't - in fact, whether it's by choice or necessity, there are several excellent factions that don't end up having spears once you've fleshed everything out. For these factions, you have to get a bit creative when you want to tackle a list that sports a traditional shieldwall formation. For new players, doing this can feel like running at a sliding glass door - hitting the enemy line as hard as you can and hoping it breaks before you do. In general, this isn't a recipe for success - and it can discourage players from using certain factions or Legendary Legions because "it's just better to have a shieldwall."

Well, I disagree - strongly. Very strongly. In today's formation post, we're exploring a simple formation that you can use when you're fielding a list that doesn't have spears - let's dig into it!

The Gap Tooth Grin: Beating Shieldwalls By Not Playing Their Games

Here's the dirty little secret about shieldwall armies: shieldwalls want to fight other shieldwalls. They do - they just do. Any time you rank up your army in a nice two-rank line with spears in the back and shields in the front, you dare your opponent to run on you . . . and ideally, he ranks up in two nice lines as well and you see who has the better wall. Some armies are better at this than others, but lots of armies play this way. Here's an example of a very functional shieldwall:

This shieldwall can be brutal to fight - it's got spearmen with F4 "on a stick" and D7 across both lines of the formation. If you're a S3 army (or even a S4 army), you've got to be wondering how you're going to crack through this - especially without spears. Well, the answer is simple: you don't fight it with a shieldwall - you fight it with archery . . . and by spreading out.

To illustrate how this works at the macro-scale, my go-to is Khazad-Dum (well, the Kingdom of Moria to be a bit more precise) - my bearded fellows are one of the first armies I invested in and I love going back to them and giving them a whirl. During the past 13 years of playing this game, I've lost tons of Dwarves (though far less than I should have) to desperate charges against shieldwalls and I've come to prefer Kingdom of Moria/Khazad-Dum armies that get close to 50% shooting (33% from bows of a mixed variety, the rest from throwing axes) and this kind of formation works really well. Below is an extract of a 1000 point army I've considered running at our upcoming THRO 2023 event (more on this next week):

This is an extract of three warbands from a Kingdom of Moria list and we have tons of guys (the maximum 45 models). We've got "just Dwarf Warriors and Dwarf Rangers," but that includes 14 bows (7 of each kind), 6 throwing axes, and 20 shield bros to stand in the front and take a beating. Our firepower is excellent and our throwing axes give us incredible movement flexibility if we need to chase objectives. When we prepare to receive a charge, our generally high Defense means we're not that worried about our archers being shot out from behind our shield guys and we can defend by shielding (probably wounded on 6s) if our front line gets charged. If our bows have to engage, we're more than ready to throw them into the action.

Because of the spacing we've given (slightly more than 1"), our models in our second rank can join the combat of whoever's in front of us if we're reacting, but we're also covering a LOT of ground. As we talked about in an article earlier in this series about reforming shieldwalls, spreading out forces our opponent to thin his own line, degrading the effectiveness of his own shieldwall. As the enemy approaches, wrapping around the enemy isn't hard at all, and with the numbers being almost even, getting into 1-on-1 combats gets us into a position to trade models evenly with our opponent - something we probably wouldn't do if we just threw ourselves at the enemy shieldwall. If we were able to shoot any of the models on the approach, we may even get 2-on-1 combats favoring us - and traps on models when we're able to wrap around the enemy and engage their spearmen!

When I run this list, I usually run Balin backed by a Herald (carrying that banner) within 4" of the King's Champion (backed by the other Herald) so that I can get a good 12" or more of banner support, which makes chopping through our Dwarves very difficult. Floi's warband is probably deployed away from the banners, but he'll be fine. with an expected 2.33-3.5 hits each turn with the S3 Dwarf bows and an expected 3.5-4.67 hits each turn with the S2 bows, we can expect to deal a few wounds each turn against the vast majority of foes. If those shots are concentrated, we can make approaching our lines slower as the enemy reforms, which is always good for us. If you wanted to upgrade this list to 700pts (+15pts), the easiest change would be to upgrade some of the Dwarf Warriors with shields to Khazad Guards or to upgrade a few of the Rangers to Iron Guards - since we've maxed out our model count, we can't add anyone new (we might be able to get one additional model by swapping out Floi for a Dwarf King with no extra gear, but that's it).

This is actually a variant of the Geartooth formation that Centaur talked about earlier in the year, but that formation had spears as an integral part of the formation. This time, we want some space between our models so that we can have good firing lanes (we're unlikely to block any meaningful targets from our archers) and some room for our bowmen to either engage models that charge into our ranks or to allow them to pop through our ranks if we get to charge first. This extra space can allow our opponent to double-charge the front guy, but this is actually unlikely since our 8" move across our army will enable us to charge if we move first OR do our own charges/counter-charge if we move second.

You can do this with a lot of other factions that can't get spears and lean hard into shooting, like Lurtz's Scouts, the Rangers of Mirkwood Legendary Legion, or Centaur's beloved Shire - it's not hard to form up these armies to take advantage of this formation and force enemy shieldwalls to spread out!

Conclusion

Bottom line: don't feel like you have to make a shieldwall to win. Yes, when shieldwalls are allowed to play the game they want to, they can win. And yes, it's relatively easy to learn how to move/use a shieldwall. But you can also force shieldwalls to be less effective by NOT meeting a shieldwall with a shieldwall of your own - and if you can't take spears (either at all or easily), definitely don't play the way they want you to play! If you have thoughts on this (or have additional tactics that can help non-shieldwalls fight against shieldwalls), let us know in the comments below. Until next time, happy hobbying!