The Art of Feign Flight

I'll be trying to restart up my Weekly tactics lessons on Warhammer.

I recently had a person tell me they just did not understand how diverting worked.

Diverting units comes in many forms. Eagles are good at it. Small units of skirmishers. But nobody can beat the fast cav unit at pulling it off.

In my example I have a unit of 5 glade riders standing off a unit of 14 Swordmasters in a 7x2 formation.

After the SM's move up, I run a unit of 5 glade riders in front of them. Lets just assume for now my riders are shooting at some other target. But if they were targeting the Sword Masters it would be dwindling their numbers quickly.

Here is the starting setup:



The setup is very important. You must be close enough so that with a straight wheel, the enemy unit cannot get past you. But far enough to one flank so that if he charges you, he will have a large wheel to come after you giving you the best chance to escape.

If he can wheel past you, then there is a chance he will charge a different unit behind you. If there is no one nearby for him to charge, then you can be further back, as he cannot come within 1" of you while moving, unless he is charging.

If he does not wish to charge, he must turn, move sideways and then turn again. Gaining very little in the way of distance to his intended target.
And since he did not charge you, you will be free to move the cav right back into the same place. After 3-4 turns of him moving a total of 8" across the board, he might decide its best to charge you.

So now he decides to charge. The correct response is flee. This is also assuming he has no other units that can charge you.



In the new 7th edition rules, fleeing is much different and IMO, much cleaner than before. You pick the center point in each unit. Designated in this picture with red dots. Then draw a line between these points. This is the path of flight.



Next, you spin your unit to face in that direction and roll your dice. In my case I rolled an 8 on 3d6 and moved my unit 8". He has to wheel to align the unit with the direction of flight. This took him 3.5" and so only has 6.5" left to catch me. So he fails and only moves up 1.5".

Even a cavalry unit can be made to fail this way, you just have to get closer and more to the side. Forcing them to wheel a huge amount of distance.

The next step in the feigned flight is the rally. This is where units like skirmishers and eagles fall short. Fast Cav have the special rule that if they flee a charge and then rally on the next turn, they may move normally, including marching if no one is within 8" and even shoot.

The wood elf glade riders are Leadership of 8, so with the musician, they rally on a 9. I rolled an 8 and they are good to turn around. With a leadership of 9 to rally you have a good 83% chance to succeed and if your general is nearby, or in the case of a wood elfs, if a noble is in the unit, then you are rallying on a 10 and have a good 92% chance for success.

Here I have rallied, and moved right back into position in front of the SM's again.



And from this vantage point I am free to shoot them or again, shoot at another target. Maybe one I have not slowed down, and can concentrate fire on.

The best the SM's can do at this point is continue to pointlessly chase around this band of fleeing horse riders or to try and turn back towards their original target.

So they pull this move:



So this got them a few inches closer to their target, but then the glade riders once again move in front of them, continuing the onslaught of arrows and frustration.
And since they don't want to go further to the right, their only move would again be to charge the glade riders.

In this case a 126 point fast cav unit diverted and delayed the 220 point Sword master unit that would have torn up almost anything I could have thrown at it. This allowed me to:
1. Deal with his other units first before dealing with him.
2. Pepper him with arrows till I felt I could deal with him in hand to hand.
3. Avoid him for the entire battle if I wished.
4. Setup a nice flank charge on him after he was forced to wheel to come after me.

This works really well against other normal cavalry and ranked infantry. This does not work against:
1. Skirmishers
2. Fast Cavalry
3. Monsters
4. Flyers
5. chariots

It does not work on them for 2 reasons.
1. They can move around your blockade with no effort at all, barely slowing them down.
2. If they do charge you, they do not have to wheel. So your average flee distance of 9"-12" usually will not get you away from one of these units. Though it can be used to draw a chariot or monster off in one direction to either delay them, or open up a flank charge. But if that is your mission, I'd advise using cheaper units like small skirmishers and eagles as compared to expensive fast cav.

I hope this tactics page has been somewhat helpful to you.

Until next time...