Men of Iron

     Men of Iron  by GMT was the next wargame on our list.  After delving into Warriors of God I was ready for another challenge to my personal wargaming sensibilities.  Men of Iron did not disappoint.  The game started with the Flemish defending against the French.  Set-up was pre-determined by the scenario and it had a couple of small rules variation specific to the set-up, such as the French knights could be pulled down if taking a negative result while being in a ditch.  I wasn't really sure about what I was supposed to do so I ended up passing for the first couple of rounds waiting for the French to come into my troops. This was a big mistake that will be explained later.  

The beginning...

     The French finally gather the stones to come in on the Flemish.  My opponent does fairly well with his pikemen and crossbow troops and pops a hole in my defensive line.  This is the point where I should have had my reserve troops in position to plug the hole and repel the attackers.  Instead I reacted too late and then had traffic control problems in trying to bring my reserves to bear.  I also had the problem of boxing in some of my troops so that they could not move back in a retreat on negative combat results.  When you can't flee you are defeated!  Ouch!  That hurt and threatened the stability of my line.

It is the Towers fault!

     From there he tried to exploit my weakness, which he did readily and caused a lot of my troops to retire.  This has the effect of removing chits from the immediate battle and placing them next to the banner, which is in the backfield.  This effect means that the troops have to spend an activation getting back into order before they can be utilized by the commander.  I don't think that I really had a chance to rally my troops in this game so they where basically done.  As he broke through the line he shifted troops to fill in the gap and keep pressing the advantage.  It seemed like there was nothing I could do, especially since my dice rolling was horrible!  I blame it on the dice tower (along with my very poor luck.)  After that all that was left to do was exploit my turned back and weakened defense and it was all over.

The End is near!

     Thoughts: 1.) The activation of your units revolves around the leaders and their initiative value.  To activate leaders after the first requires a die roll of less than the commander's rating on a d10.  Before your opponent rolls for activation you can "seize" it my rolling under the commander's rating.  It seems like most of my "seized" initiative rolls failed, thus giving Paul a free activation with one leader.  This hurt big time as I kept on giving him initiative and a free activation from my failed seizures.  It allowed his troops to just continue to steamroller over mine.  2.) Troop placement and facing are also a big deal, allowing them to be attacked from the front, flank or rear.  When you lose the activation and someone gets a charge on your flank your dudes are going down quick!  3.) The other thing I neglected was pre-positioning my troops when I saw that he was going to make a push on one side.  I should have adjusted my troops way before he got to my line so that my reserves could be in position for a counter-attack.  This I couldn't foresee though because I wasn't sure how my troops would retreat or retire from the battle.  This is something to think about next time.  4.) The chits.  These things are small and are a little bit fiddly especially when they are under a shield wall marker.  I just couldn't remember which value troops where there so I might have neglected to get them into battle rather than a weaker complement of troops.
     This a fairly good game with a lot to think about tactic-wise.  At first, I didn't want to play again but that was just the tears of defeat clouding my thinking.  I would just want to go into the next game a little bit more deliberately than I did the first play.  Now that I know the capability of the troops types and the way that terrain works I would play differently next time.