Crusader Kings: Prisoners of War

Since Orville is the commander-in-chief, his decisions will naturally be implemented.

Originally, according to common sense, when marching and fighting, there would also be a financial officer.

The Ombudsman is responsible for managing the finances, and on the other hand, he also plays a surveillance role. After all, the general who leads the troops to fight may inevitably have his own little calculations, and someone has to watch them.

There will inevitably be some conflicts of opinion between the legion commander and the financial inspector. At this time, they will spend some time discussing and arguing. In the end, the legion commander will definitely take advantage, but it will delay some time, or the power of the legion commander will be restricted to a certain extent. , but the situation on Orville's side is completely different.

Orville's own private army was not equipped with an inspector, and the Ninth Legion was only equipped with the position of inspector in form. In fact, it was a capable accountant assigned to him by Vespa. He was a good accountant, but he never He will not participate in Orville's political and military decisions, and will turn a deaf ear to everything except finance, which is very worrying.

In this case, the discussion on Orville's side was very efficient. It was nothing more than various officers providing Orville with several options. In the end, Orville made his own decision on which one to implement. He already had a plan in mind, so this process was not necessary at all. How much time is wasted.

After the order was issued from the regiment commander's headquarters, the entire army immediately set off and marched in the direction of Hastings, arriving soon.

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The armies of both sides entered the vicinity of the battlefield one after another and set up camp according to their respective plans.

The German allied forces were centered in the town of Hastings, while the Romans faced off against the Germans across the river.

North of Hastings is a small river called the Bullard River. This is the key area of ​​the confrontation between the two sides. The river has become a natural dividing line between the two sides.

Generally speaking, the performance of both sides was very restrained, and no one wanted to take the initiative to launch an attack. The Romans camped on the north bank, and the Germanic coalition was stationed in the town of Hastings on the south bank. However, the war overtly did not start for the time being, and secretly. Small-scale conflicts were inevitable from the beginning.

As the main water-fetching point, the Bridge River has become the focus of competition between the two sides. Every day, both sides send soldiers here to fetch water. The river is neither wide nor deep. Weapons such as bows, arrows, javelins and slings can reach the enemy on the other side of the river. Army, so there was inevitably some intense physical exchange between the two sides every day when they were collecting water.

At first, it was purely a spontaneous act by the soldiers. Later, after the command levels of both sides noticed it, it became a battlefield for small-scale wrestling between the two sides. Overall, Orville has a slight advantage because his equipment training level is better.

He specially sent a small force to escort the soldiers who were fetching water. These people were his specially trained large shield crossbowmen, imitations of later Genoese mercenary crossbowmen, equipped with a large shield with a bracket and a powerful crossbow.

When used normally, crossbows have their own strengths. The crossbow output is more durable, while the bow has better explosive power. At least when shooting against each other, Orville has the advantage.

The crossbowmen can hide behind the big shield and use their pedals to wind the string, and then stick their head out to shoot after the string is loaded. They are always protected by bunkers, which makes them safer. The archers can't do this. At most, they can tie the crossbow to their arms. A small shield has a small protective area, and these Germanic archers are not equipped to equip advanced weapons and equipment such as shoulder shields and mail armor. Most of them just use commoners and a bow.

Crossbowmen can often easily suppress the same number or even more archers during crossfire. The Germans have insufficient engineering skills. They attach great importance to cavalry and relatively despise long-range troops. They do not have accurate heavy weapons such as torsion crossbows. 2. There is no powerful enough crossbow.

It should be said that these Germanic people are not stupid and have good flexibility. They soon came up with a good solution. They slightly modified the water-carrying boxcar and added a thick wooden bunker on one side. .

In this way, their archers also had bunkers to cover when shooting, and the safety factor was much higher. However, the Romans also had preparation plans for this situation.

They pulled two modified horse-drawn ballistae over and set them up on the other side of the river to shoot at the water carriage. The torsion ballista used by the Romans was an awkward weapon to some extent, but its accuracy was pretty good, and its range was acceptable. It could at least shoot carriages and horses as big as three to fifty meters away. The target can still maintain a certain degree of accuracy.

Since it is not the kind of super-heavy ballistae that is difficult to move after it is installed, the Romans' ballistae cannot disintegrate the boxcar with one shot, but if it hits the horse, the result is needless to say, there is no normal carbon-based Any creature that can withstand a direct attack from a projectile weapon of this size will surely die.

The small-scale war of attrition continued like this for about a week. In the end, just as Orville expected, the Germans were the first to fail and began to overturn the table.

One day when the Romans were trying to fetch water, a group of German cavalry came out of the hiding place on the other side of the river, waded across the river and came straight to the Roman army fetching water. The two sides also had many battles by the river, so the soldiers fetching water were very vigilant. They quickly took off the javelins from the water-fetching carriages, used these slender and sharp javelins as short spears against the cavalry, and quickly formed formations to prepare for the German attacks. impact.

The Franks were undoubtedly very clear about the Romans' tactics and organizational model, so they were wary of the Romans' javelins. They did not foolishly charge into the heavy infantry in formation, but just wandered outside the range of the javelins, so that the Romans dared not give up the formation and could only be dragged in place and unable to move quickly.

At this time, many light infantry appeared from the other side of the river, rushing across the river to launch an offensive against the Romans who were fetching water. The Romans were caught off guard and fell into a bitter battle this time.

The Romans also reacted quickly. Seeing this, the cavalry commander on standby nearby quickly organized the cavalry team to appear on the flank, trying to force back these light infantry who appeared, but the effect was not good. The enemy had too many people, and without the command of the cavalry officers, they did not dare to directly run into the enemy's line, which was easy to get stuck in.

Originally, the Germans seemed to be on guard against possible Roman reserve forces, but after discovering that there were only some scattered scout cavalry here, they felt relieved and began to boldly besiege this small group of Roman troops. The difference in numbers made the battle situation undoubtedly one-sided, and the Romans could only hold on with difficulty.