Bruttian vs Alaric's early Visigoth
Once you have a Carthaginian army, with some more elements this can be upgraded to the Bruttians that fought Rome in the second punic war. The army is based on a large number of RAxS, supported by CvO, LhO, SpO and psiloi. It is large, and interesting to use. It is mobile, it has low aggressivity to setup the battlefield, and is very large thanks to IPsI and IHdO.
My opponent fielded a barbarian horde with some benefits. Alaric is regular, so can use switch his pips with nearbt irregular subgenerals, and has regular baggage and LhO.
I attacked, and this was the battlefield and set up.
I placed two 1FE woods to break the linear enemy formation and have a pivotal feature. The terrain let me try a wide outflank manouver on the enemy army right flank. I positioned all my troops out of the way from enemy shock elements, to let me use my superior manouvering to hit the Visigoth with a tactical advantage. My scouting revealed an IKnF ambush in the wood on the left.
I refused to fight a frontal attritional battle, and planned to send all my troop on the right flank, to roll the enemy army. The Baggage is made by Inferior elements facing right. The plan was to move them out of the way. Bruttian opening moves was to advance light troops to brush away enemy skirmishers and expose warband flanks, while the rest of the army manouvered. Visigoth immediately reacted switching the cavalry command commitment from left to right.
Bruttians attacked the enemy skirmisher screen, that accepted the combat to slow down the enemy advance. The RCvO advanced fast to turn 90° and cover the AxS attack toward the BuA.
The attack developed well, and the Visigoth lost the initiative. The gothic PsO survived several attacks and this slowed me down. Here imho the Goths made a little mistake, delaying for a couple of turns to commit their IKnF toward the right.
Finally Bruttians were in positon for a coordinated push. The Visigoth sent as fast as possible its cavalry reserve to save the day.
The gothic infantry corps sallied from the Bua to resist the flank attack, but in the end the Ps and Wb losses were too high, and it broke.
While the gothic routed, both the armies reorganized and redressed the lines for second phase in the battle. Alaric mounted corps positioned to attack against both the winning bruttian commands, to save the main infantry corps that had the flank and the rear exposed. The Bruttians charged first with the IknF not yet properly deployed.
In a couple of turns of combat the Visigoth cavalry had not much success, losing several elements and risking to be broken as well. When time was called, the battle ended with a 15-10 score for the Bruttians.
A difficult game for the barbarians, forced to manouver and protect the flanks against nimble foes. After the game we discussed about the tactic, and the gothic player thought it would be much better to delay the CiC corps to engage Bruttians manouvering wing and save the foot corps deployed in the BuA. It would be probably a wise decision, considering that Beuttians deployed second. By the way this game showed the importance to have a mobile reserve in a rigid army. Without it, the gothic foot would have been rolled and destroyed.