A.T.T.A.C.K.! Assaulting Thoughtfully: Tactical Advice for Charging with Knights.  

These articles are an attempt to give beginners and intermediate players some tools with which they can improve their playing skills, in the form of basic principles and maneuvers you can use with your cavalry.There is a ton of advice on the net about how to write army lists, and on which units to use against which opponents, but very little of it shows you how to do that, so I decided to make some diagrams. 

Some of it is more for competitive games, some of it is more general. If there are longer bits of theory, I will put the conclusions in big text so you can just skim over the text and still get the basic point.  

Hopefully this will be the beginning of a series (if life doesn't get in the way as usual).

Where to start? 

Alright, I got myself some kick#ss knight units with invincible heroes, while across the table are mainly inferior troops. All I need to do is run at them and wipe the field clean of this evil, right?  

NOT!! 

Well, unless your opponent just stands there waiting for you to give the killing blow, but most of them are not that friendly...

What could happen?

If you just storm straight forward, chances are he'll:    

-put small units in the way    

-flee with the unit you were targeting and countercharge with another    

-use movement spells to get the upper hand,     

etc, etc...most of these will result in your knights getting charged and in big trouble!

What could also happen is that you do get into combat, but the misguided fools are too stupid to recognize our obvious combat superiority, and pass their break test. Bye bye masterplan...

So what to do?

We’ll start from the most important tool a knight army has: the combats. You need to figure out: 

Step 1: What kind of combats you need to get into 

Step 2: How to set up your units to get into those favorable combats, and how to prevent your opponent from disrupting your setups and creating his own. 

Step 3: The overall strategy. How your army functions as a whole, how to counter the opponent's strategy and how to use the tools of step 1 and 2 to reliably win your games! 

Well, since I'm not nearly smart enough to give a proper overview of step 3 (a huge and dynamic subject), this series will mainly go into steps 1 and 2. To compensate, it will have some pretty pictures! 

I will start with a general piece about combat, then Step 2 should get a few articles, like movement basics for different units, coordination in armies and maybe dealing with Stubborn or similar units. Possibly a rundown of Bret units, but that’s been done before often so I’ll see if it contributes anything.