I have started a longer and more in depth account of my experiences in the Cold Wars tournament that I wanted to submit to SAGA, however that project has lost some momentum. So in the mean time and as a way to ensure I get something done, I put together this account. I hope you enjoy it.

I have been building an Arab army for some time and was looking for a list that combined the Arab Long spear and javelin armed foot with Turkish HC with Lance and Bow. After much thought I settled on the Fatimid list which seemed to have a nice mix of what I was looking for.

The army was made up of 10 stands of HC, 16 stands of SC and 18 stands of close order foot.

I had fought a Sassanid army using this list and while my opponent rolled so poorly that it was difficult to take credit for the win I felt confident that the army would be successful against any army it faced.

Before the tournament if you had told me that I would be facing the Vikings and Scots Highlanders I would have been even more confident.

And I would have been wrong.

Let me just add for those who have not been able to make a MW tournament, while I am talking about winning and losing the tournaments are fun and good natured.

Shan Palmatier volunteered to be a wing Commander for the Fatimids and we prepared to face our first opponent, the Tony's Vikings.

The battlefield was mostly open with several groups of woods across the center of the battlefield and two rough areas slightly on our side of the table. Knowing that the Vikings would more than likely have plenty of ambushers in the woods we decided to try and trigger the ambushers and defeat them before the rest of the Vikings could enter the battle. Not brilliant, but I felt once we could lure the

Vikings out we could defeat them with either the long spear Infantry or the HC.

The plan went according to plan at first. Several ambushes were trigger and overwhelmed. To be fair several terrible moral rolls caused several Viking units to leave the battle early, I can't take credit for that. We also were able to kill an enemy General who was leading one of the ambushing units. The down side was that a couple of the ambushers turned out to be harder to beat that I expected and one Heavy cavalry unit was destroyed by a group of berserkers. More on that later.

After three turns or so things were looking pretty good. A few Viking units had been destroyed and he was down to two generals so orders were pretty tight for him. Then we got over confident and rather then continuing to attempt to isolate and destroy the Viking units we decided to charge his main battle line. The Cavalry went in and despite initial success we didn't cause enough moral checks to prevent the Vikings from swinging around our flanks and getting all kinds of flank charges. We tried to give these units retreat orders, but there was no way they were going to get away so we lost several units who were either routed or destroyed on the spot. Finally it got to be too much and despite causing much damage to the Vikings we hit our break point and the battle was lost right at the end.

When we added up points it was a 5-5 victory for the Vikings and in hindsight we should have been a bit more conservative and we could have won, but it was still a fun game and Tony battled bravely back to win after the battle was looking pretty bleak for him.

I was impressed with the ability for cheap LAI with Various to stand up and even beat my charging cavalry. I gave my cavalry advance orders towards an expected ambush knowing that I could convert their order to a charge. However, most of my experience against infantry has been when they are not charging. I had not factored in how much tougher they were going to be with both the frenzied and charging bonuses. I lost a unit of HC to a berserker unit this way and the ambush certainly evened the tables for the Vikings.

The most important thing learned, was even thought I knew they weren't going to be as good, I had no idea how crappy trained cavalry are. Paying to train cavalry is a waste of points and is not recommended.

Let me explain briefly. Trained troops cost one point more than their irregular counterparts and have two advantages. They can perform two actions (some of which irregulars can not do) with a deploy order and if they retreat less than half their move they do not pick up a disorder. The downside, they cannot roll to go frenzied unless they are charging with a general.

The problem is that most of the options of a deploy order do not apply to cavalry. So while they can perform two actions they are limited in what actions those are. This hardly makes up for lack of the frenzied roll. My veteran and elite cavalry would have would have had an 80 or 90% chance to get a plus three the first round and a plus 2 each following round. This may not seem like much, but can be quite important when trying to get that all-important stand loss.

True I did make good use of the retreat without disorder rule, but only because I was getting beat so often.

With these lessons we headed into our second game. Technically we were still in the hunt as we had grabbed 5 points in the loss, but I was more worried about how I was going to handle the Scots Highlands army I now faced. It was pretty much the exact copy of the Viking army with slightly more units.

I should have know how the battle was going to go when the terrain rolls created a table that had only about 12 inches of free access from one side of the board to the other. Our opponent had placed huge area of woods across the board in the center and on the left of the table as well as a wall and village on the right. There were only three small gaps that would allow units to go back and forth and these could be easily defended.

That said we tried to come up with a plan and come to grips with the heathens. Unfortunately we couldn't. The wall turned into a bit of a stand off where neither side would cross, but as my units were mostly unarmored, I was fairing far worse in the exchange of missile fire. Despite one rather lucky victory the cavalry on my flank were limited to absorbing missile fire as very expensive targets. My foot were slowly being carved up and even though I actually lost only one unit, several were at the breaking point.

To attempt and relieve my flank and because the day was looking lost anyway, Shan lead several unsuccessful charges of his cavalry that were quickly surrounded and defeated. The terrain doubly hindered us, as our retreating units crashed into each other and the heavy woods and were easy pickings for the axe wielding Scots. Pretty quickly we hit our breaking point and it was a 5-1 loss. Credit goes to Ian for executing a perfect anti-cavalry plan and he deserved to win.

So what went wrong?

Well, clearly I would have preferred a more open battlefield without the wall or village. However, with the dense terrain there are a few things I may have done differently.

Most of my foot units had a third rank of archers that in hindsight I should have placed in a single unit to concentrate fire. Because they were spread out across my units they really did minimal damage, maybe a figure here or there. Massed archers even if they do not cause many casualties force the opponent to react to them. This may have forced the Scots out of their cover. I doubt it, but maybe.

One risky tactic would have been to place some of my cavalry in the woods and give them orders on the first turn. This would have gotten them on the opponent's side of the table and maybe have disrupted his plan. In effect this would have allowed me to deploy further on to the table, but that would have caused losses and would have meant my cavalry was disordered. I doubt they would have had time to recover, but it may have been worth a shot.

Overall it was a very difficult battle to win and my best bet may have been to load up all of my forces on one side of the table and attempt to shoot the Scots out of the village then try and turn the flank. Easier said then done.

The Fatimid army list is certainly one that seems very promising, but I done with wimpy trained cavalry. I am sure there are those out there that may disagree with me, but in my book they are not worth the cost. I still think the combination of Long Spear and Javelin can be deadly and my Arabs may make another appearance as some other army. Maybe Andalusian or something, but that is a question for another time as, I now have to concentrate on AW for Historicon. I hope to see you all there.