The Forsooth Saga: Part The Fourth
Lookit! Despite RPS selling out buying in, things Carry On As Before. Like our Mount & Blade: Warband warband, complete with our own server, voice comms and everything! It was the second of our 'proper' Training Knights last night and once again our 64 player server was impressively full. EG may have taken our ads responsibilities, but they'll never take our freeee-dooom!
Once again a huge thanks to everyone who showed up. It's one thing to get a bunch of chaps to show up to an event, another to get them to come back again. Ta awfully. Report below.
Even more surprisingly, we actually managed to get some formation training done, rather than just run around bashing each others' heads in for four hours (OK there was some of that, but it came later...).
My humble aim for Knight II was to get the 50 odd who showed up again to divide into their allotted Divisions: Archers, Cavalry and Infantry. With everyone on one side (no enemies), and the teamspeak channels divided into corresponding rooms (with channel commander officers), the idea was to test our chain of command, see if we could get a group of people who've only just met to listen to each other, work together, and fight as one. Dashed if we didn't pull this off to some degree. In very short order we had ranks of Archers (two rows count right?) volley firing in unison, Infantry practicing an advancing maneuver where the front rank held up a shield wall while the second poked through the gaps with polearms, and... erm... some sort of dressage from the Cavalry involving synchronised rearing and lines of horses jumping over the Archers (but it was organised, which was the point).
Despite the impressive horsemanship it wasn't and unbridled success (oh that's a keeper). It's becoming clear after two Knights that we need to improve our voice comm discipline if we're actually to fight as an organised army. If the point of Forsooth Saga experiment (aside from having a clan and having fun) is to try and fight battles as organsied, sychronised units then those units are going to have to get discplined fast, and that means blindly obeying orders even if the orders are /stupid/. All martial art is based on this premise. I'm thinking of making Teamspeak overlay a requirement, but that's a discussion for the forums.
This is all part of my dilemma. I'm trying to strike a tough balance at the moment between letting people just show up and have fun, and enforcing enough order to get the warband organsied. So last night we just did 40 minutes of the drilling, then got on with some two team PVP, and this is where things started to get a bit more chaotic.
It doesn't help that Warband (the game) allows multiple admins to be logged in at once and this led to a fair bit of administerial confusion. There was helpful admin contributions like someone adding an enemy bot so the rounds didn't just keep restarting while we drilled, but there was also some administering which seemed (to some) illogical. See, we have our first clan match lined up, organsied by our Match Officer Mr_T. This is brilliant, well done T. So, some people turned up to the Training Knight expecting us to be preparing for that. Others (myself included) hadn't really thought about it... So while some admins and players were trying to get the masses to practice playing Saranids (the Faction we've been assigned for the clan war) others were blissfully unaware of this attempt at focus and so things got a bit fractured.
But it's OK, this is all a learning process. I'm sure we'll iron out the comms difficulties, both in terms of voice comms and about events and practice sessions. Considering we're a new group of players I've been very impressed with the level of on field organisation we've managed in just two short sessions, especially when there are so many people to get organised. Well done you.
The next Training Knight is on Thursday when we'll try to build on what we achieved last night. Why not pop over to the forums and get involved?