El Cid WAB Game

The Easter holidays and the absence of children (they're in France with their grandparents, not buried beneath the patio - at least that's what I told Social Services) means a surfeit of gaming and painting.
Some of the latter to show tomorrow, hopefully, but for now it's more pushing men around, rolling dice and cursing the gods of luck.

Once again we dug out the El Cid men and set to with my dour ascetic Almoravid warriors visiting jihad on their decadent co-religionists of Al-Andalus.
We'd not played for quite a while, so a pitched battle was in order, using the screen to give us hidden deployment. Very exciting I can tell you. We were using 2k point forces from the excellent El Cid supplement, not the rather bland Armies of Antiquity lists.

I took plenty of pictures and forgot most of the detail, so here we go:

 Berber cavalry screen Christian Mercenary knights

 The Andalusian battle line

 The core of the Almoravid line

 Mercenaries in the pay of Al-Andalus

 The peaceful Almoravid hamlet

 The battle lines close

 A clash of light horse

 Dirty slingers

 The Almoravid horse swoop down on Ibn Coldir's geese

 The flower of Christian chivalry find themselves in a spot of bother

 Still dirty, still slinging

 Hang on, we're supposed to do all the charging!

 Surrounded and shot up

 The Black Guard punch through, but begin to get surrounded

 Almoravids push home in the centre

 But on the flank the storm of pebbles and sharp sticks continues

 Fortunately these horse are actually fleeing

 And getting in the way of the ones that aren't

The decisive final combat

Once again WAB gave us a great see-saw game that was only decided at the end of turn eight.

At first it seemed all Andalus, especially when a great round of shooting wiped out five of my Mercenary knights before they had a chance to charge. However the knights did a good job for me, tying up significant cavalry, and stopping it from descending unhindered on my spear blocks - I'm just always a bit disappointed that they never get to charge headlong into the enemy,scattering poor peons underfoot like they do in the movies.

Howver, over in the centre my Black Guard, boosted by the Berber unit enthused by Imran the Imam managed to crush the Andalusian spear underfoot, setting off panic and clearing the way. Though even then I nearly managed to blow it in a final combat where I caused only a single casualty to four in return and only a flank charge and the fact I'd previously killed the ASB meant I won the fight.

Meanwhile on the far side my remaining spear unit suffered the death by a thousand cuts fate so familiar to anyone who has played a WAB Andalusian army, surrounded by fast moving skirmishers and unable to respond they did well to only panic towrd the end of the game, and they subsequently rallied before close of play.

Overall I think I sneaked a win based on captured flags and killing the Andalusian general, but it could have gone either way, and only a couple of luck charge arcs meant it wasn't the opposite result.

The secret I think with Almoravids is to keep advancing and not get disheartened at the rain of fire coming in. That said it's not a favourite style of play for me, so I'm thinking I'll try and finish a Christian list to use at the event in October. That way it'll be all about the charges, baby!