Tamil Indian vs Patrician Roman

Having bought on ebay a Ganesh statue to be used for my Indian armies, it was logical ti immediately organize an elephant army to use it.

Play indian armies is always interesting, some tough decisions must be taken making the list. In this case, I wanted a second period army with 12 elephants in four corps, with enough infantry to cover and support them. After the usual tinkering, I decided to not use the Classical Indian, but instead choose Tamil.

Tamil has basically Elephants, BdF, PsO and BwO. The bw would be used as screen for the nellies, while the BdF would be shock troops together with the elephants. The composition resulted quite interesting, with CiC at 24ME and three more corps with 18ME, for a total of 86ME.

CiC IElO, 2 IElO, 3 IBwO, 6 IBdF, 9 IPsO, 3 IAxI - 24ME

SG IElO, 2 IElO, 3 IBwO, 4 IBdF, 2 IPsO - 18ME

AG IElO, 2 IElO, 3 IBwO, 4 IBdF, 2 IPsO - 18ME

SG IElO, 2 IElO, 3 IBwO, 4 IBdF, 2 IPsO - 18ME

8 IBgI - 8ME

With Ag0 Tamil can usually set up a well suited terrain. In this game, I tried to cover the flanks to attack frontally the opponent, a patrician roman.

I made a mistake, because the wood in the central position resulted in an hamper. I could have set it up touching the enemy baseline, and this would have given me more free room to attack and less shelter to the enemy. Instead, with that difficult base jump point, I let the patricians to outflank me avoiding the contact in the center.

The roman advance in the difficult areas took a lot of time, but finally the enemies emerged when the flank march entered. Tamil had enough time to send a reserve corps on the right to support the exposed CiC command.

Tamil sacrificed the psiloi screen to gain time and let heavy troops to arrive in the flank sector.

Tamil IBdF were very successful in the fight against roman auxilia, and the enemy was soon one element away from being disheartend.

The Romans fought back hard and survived four decisive combats, with hot dice for both. In the end patricians were able to dishearten the Tamil CiC corps. When time was called, the score was 11-14.

A nice teaching game. My mistake in the terrain set up was a bad one. Tamil fought with just 6 elephants and this wasn't good. With an army like that I need more practice, I didn't play well this battle.

The Roman outflank manouver was a minimal risk attack, and it took too long to really threaten to roll the whole tamil army, ending bootled up in a small area that denied roman mobility. In the end I risked too to smash the enemy, that survived several extreme odd attacks. By the way the result is ok, it was a balanced game.