Samurai civil war, or who's troops are best in Bushido?

 This game was against Olivier Joucla. No pictures unfortunately. Basically the Loyalist Samurai (mine) opted to defend in Coastal terrain and won the PBS phase decisively. The only terrain, after a piece of rough was removed from the centre by me, was a maximum sized waterway.

I lost scouting by 30% overall. My deployment was 3 Spear units, 3 Bow Units and 3 more units of Spear, from left to right. I will describe the exact composition in a future blog post. Olivier deployed most of his army in reserve, save for 2 Cavalry units, a Bow unit and a Spear unit. All his Spears were in 6s and all mine were in 8s.

In the game, I was slightly over cautious, and too worried about my shooting failing against Olivier's Cavalry. So I didn't advance very much with the Archers on my first move, especially as 2 units were 4s of Loose Infantry. Secondly, I didn't take an opportunity to hit a couple of units in the flank.

My rationale was that, had my flank attack failed completely, I'd have been facing 3 full strength units with 1, 1 of those units hitting me in the flank. One could argue that I'd have tied up 3 units and a lot of points with just one. However, I believe there are, quite perversely, times not to do flank attacks, and this might be an example.

I was also unlucky however. I set up a flank charge against one of Olivier's Cavalry, where I wasn't at risk, and he fled through one of his units, causing a KAB test on both those units. On a green and a yellow dice, I rolled... 2 blanks! Ugh.

Also, I failed to kill a unit that was on half strength, despite generally having better dice against it some of the time. Still, dice can love you, but they can also hate you.

The end result was I only broke 1 unit while losing my entire army. The good news, both Competent allies were reliable from the start. Had I been more aggressive, I could have theoretically won, but overall it was a great game against a very tough opponent.


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