Long ago before Myth was released, back in the demo.net days, there were two classes of players. The "campers" who fled battles like the plague, and the reckless "newbie rushers" who just wanted a good battle and didn't care about winning necessarily . The former were performing a successful strategy and it was their choice, but the later were gaining a far more valuable experience. They soon learned ways to eliminate equal sized armies while maintaining enough of their own forces to still have a chance at winning the game. The primary tactic used was a pincering maneuver that involved a wall of thrall closing in on one side of an enemy mass, and a wall of warriors clashing from the other side. There are some basic principles that were instrumental to the success of the pincering maneuver.

Key Concepts

1) If 8 warriors attack 8 warriors while 14 thrall attack 14 thrall, both sides are going to take heavy losses and the only deciding factor is luck. However, if 8 warriors AND 14 thrall combine their attack on the 8 warriors they are guaranteed to kill the warriors much faster and thus take less damage to themselves. Now there are more surviving warriors to team up with the thrall in attacking the opposing ones. With 14 thrall AND some warriors attacking 14 thrall they are guaranteed to win that skirmish as well.

2) If an unorganized clump of melee units allows themselves to be enclosed by an equal sized group as shown in the graphic to the right, they will have a huge disadvantage. As you can see, their are an equal number of units fighting for both sides, but the enclosed group has several units trapped in the middle (marked with X's) and unable to get hits off while the enclosing side is able to use their entire force on the exposed units effectively giving them a 13:7 advantage while the 6 enemies are obstructed in the center.

3) If you win the archer battle but lose the melee skirmish, the remaining enemy warriors will run down your archers and you will be screwed. The primary purpose of the archer is to support your infantry and increase the odds of their victory in the melee. Engaging enemy archers with your own is the same as sending 8 warriors against 8 warriors and watching them kill each other. Archers can be used much more effectively by carefully shooting at the backs of enemy melee troops while fighting your own. Furthermore, do not go out of your way to protect your archers if it will compromise your success in the melee. In other words, don't try to pull more then 1 or 2 warriors out of the skirmish in order to chase a horde of ghols after your archers.

[See Keys to Winning for more on these concepts]

Applying the Concept

The basic defensive pincer involves fanning out in a snare with your archers in the middle as shown in the picture below. Inch the formation forward altogether until your archers are in range to start scatter firing on the enemy mass.

In the good old days you could move your archers even further forward to first pick off enemy dwarves, then count on them to charge your exposed archers with warriors. Then all you had to do was use your archers as bait and retreat them backwards while your warrior and thrall lines on either side hinged in on the poor enemy mass from the sides.

It is often useful to engage your archers with the opposing ones for a moment while you break off 1 or 2 warriors from the pincer action to run down the enemy archers. Then if your melee skirmishers look like they need help, forget about the enemy archers and start firing arrows into the backs of the opposing melee units.

With the pincering maneuver and the arrow support your melee should win the skirmish with many survivors and if you have any archers they should have no trouble cleaning up the remaining enemy archers along with some charging warriors or thrall for distraction.

Now that is a perfect pincer.