The Battle of Dyrrhachium took place on October 18, 1081 between the Byzantine Empire, led by the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and the Normans of Southern Italy under Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and Calabria. The battle was fought outside the city of Dyrrhachium (present-day Durrës in Albania), the major Byzantine stronghold in the western Balkans, and ended in a Norman victory.
Following the Norman conquest of Byzantine Italy and Saracen Sicily, the Byzantine emperor, Michael VII Doukas (r. 1071–1078), betrothed his son to Robert Guiscard's daughter. When Michael was deposed, Robert took this as an excuse to invade the Byzantine Empire in 1081. His army laid siege to Dyrrhachium, but his fleet was defeated by the Venetians. On October 18, the Normans engaged a Byzantine army under Alexios I Komnenos outside Dyrrhachium. We recently refought this battle using the Lion Rampant rules. When I say refought I used my Byzantine/Rus army vs my wargaming friend’s Normans which were loosely aligned with the troops available for the actual battle as far as this can be ascertained.
For geographical reasons we don’t have opportunities to game very often so we opted to used Lion Rampant as they are easy to pick up and give an enjoyable and realistic feeling game. Our only house rules were:-
• Although units in the rules don’t really have flanks, units attacked in the flank had a disadvantage modifier
• Though the game was just between a friend and myself, we had three generals on each side. A CinC and two sub-generals. 3 x D6 were rolled at the start of the game. The total gave the number of tokens each enabling a re-role of a failed activation. These tokens were allocated to each general as each player decided.
• We played the rules as written in that when you failed an activation it became your opponents go although we didn’t regard it as a new turn until every unit rolled to activate, marking each unit as we went along.
Given the marshy rough ground on my left I put all my cavalry on the right. My horse archers took their toll and although the Norman mounted Knights were better quality, my greater numbers won out.
I anchored my left with the Varangian guard and they were fortunate in facing the poorer quality unarmoured Norman spearmen which they drove back.
The best Norman infantry were in the centre. They kept repulsing my attacks but my opponent conceded defeat as I had won on both flanks and I was just going to use archers to wear down his centre.
To be fair I had more stuff as did the Byzantines on the day. The Norman crossbows seemed quite weak with these rules as their slow firing was reflected by them being harder to activate. Which they often didn’t so suffered against my horse archers. That said my opponent seemed to have quite a few bad dice roles and I was quite lucky in this game.
A few pictures follow of the game. Apologies for my poor photography skills and not tidying up the table enough
Most of the Rus element of my army were painted by top brushman Olicana (on LAF) to whom my grateful thanks are extended for getting the last of the cavalry to me in time for the game although I didn't quite get the basing finished
Welcome, Guest. Please 
April 25, 2024, 10:41:42 AM
November 07, 2014, 09:39:59 AM