So I set up with my Warlord and most of the good units on my left, levy in the middle, and some warriors and Hearthguard on the far right. The idea was to get the Knights to split off a few units to go after the flanking ones. The levy and mostly meant to be an annoying distraction, maybe get a few easy knight kills with javelins.
The Knights had 3 units of Knights and grouped them into 2 sixes, and 3 units of warriors, one with crossbows, and grouped into a 12 and a 4. Their main mass set up to my left, with one unit of Knights off to the side. Turn 1 they just advanced and started to get some piety going to empower their abilities later on.
The Pagan Rus are a more defensive faction then most, and are also different in that their style is more about letting the cold Russian wastes fatigue and freeze them. Since there was an isolated unit I was able to make use of a combination of abilities to do that. Fear the dark puts enough fatigue on a unit that is more then 6" from the other to exhaust it, which is 4 for Hearthguard. Then Endless Wastes removes a model from every unit (including yours) for every fatigue it has, so this cut the teeth out of a unit of Knights very early. Then finally I used Great Winter, which reduces all movement and shooting to 4" which greatly hampered the Knights ability to move up. But this used up almost all of my dice so there was not much left to maneuver, which could become a problem very easily.
This left the knights with not very many options, so they advanced slowly, and formed up. On my turn I had a good idea to toss some javelins. So I used Barren Lands, which reduces the armor of all mounted models by 1 in melee and shooting. This would bring the Knights down to armor 3, so I was hoping for easy pickings. However I miss placed the dice on my board, so the levy only got to move up and through once instead of the twice I had hopped for. This meant that only 1 knight died.
Now one of the things about the Knights board is that they hate levy, and have a very good ability for killing them, Repent Sinners. This removes levy from a combat equal to twice their piety, so the Knights charged and sued this, removing half of my levy, and then stabbed the rest! Not really what I was hoping for there.
On my turn I finished off the last pesky Knight who still had a fatigue with Endless Wastes, and then started to advance up my guys on the flank and pull back my Warlord. I was a bit worried about the remaining big unit of Knights who can do allot of damage if you let them, and the crossbows can be deadly with a good combat pool ability.
The Knights then took their turn to press in towards my Warlord. So they started to set up some attacks on my Hearthguard units. They got a couple with the Crossbows, and then charged in with the Knights. Here I sued some defensive stuff and got unreasonably lucky, so my two guys killed some knights with no losses! But the warlord then finished them off himself.
At the end of all this the Knight Commander was left isolated with striking range of one of my units of Hearthguard. So I figured that this would be a good chance to take a crack and killing him! I used Barren Lands again to drop the armor of mounted units, and then charged in with Standing like bears to trade 3 attack dice for an extra armor, and then For the Khagan! which gives 5 extra if you have the most armor. Again I was unreasonably lucky and got 7 out of 10 hits, so the warlord was not able to save off death even with a couple of extra defensive dice.
So a win for the Pagan Rus, teach the Teutonic Knights a lesson about invading Lithuania.
We will probably give SAGA another go next week depending, but if so I will try out the fancy Rus (Rus Princes), and Serge wants to give the Vikings a go.
Thanks;
Mike
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