Last post covered a generic fight set 3v3 with polearms to generally talk about where they should stand and how to prioritize targets so as to stay alive. This post is about vaguely being on the other side of the line without polearms and figuring out how to get through. After all, if you have polearms your job should be to support them so they wipe out the line in front of you, not run off yourself to do heroics. But, every so often it'll be a line of shields vs a line of shields (or other similar melee weapons) where no side has a clear advantage. But as the general law of the battlefield dictates, if you do not make decisions quickly then your enemy will make those decisions for you (like where, how and when an engagement takes place) and that will always be to your detriment. So! Assuming that you're lined up one line across from the other and it seems like a stalemate because no one has poles to win that fight the best thing you can do is try to punch a hole in the enemy line. Once a line begins to fold the aggressor gains an advantage because a line only works when someone is covering your left and right, and no one is behind you. As soon as someone gets behind the line and is a credible threat that line is screwed. This will be another diagram post since working with images certainly seems to make things easier for me.
The Dead Man Breach
The first breach is probably the hardest that's part of why I cheekily call it a dead man breach. It's ALSO called that because in order to pull it off successfully you need a person who has just recently become a corpse to pull it off. I've tried to outline the person doing the breach in blue in each case to make it a bit more obvious. I've tried to mark team aggression with blue lines and enemy aggression with red lines. The enemy team has a slash through the center of the circle to designate them as such, similar to how I did it the last time. Right then, onward. In the first diagram there's a small gap so it's possible to get through to the other side of their line. However, with 2 combatants actively covering that space going through at this moment is suicide. In order to get through that gap you need to first apply pressure to your right or left, to help your teammate take out the person they were fighting. Once that person drops you step into the gap and rotate so that your back is facing the now dead enemy. In the period of time it takes for them to clear they represent an obstacle for their teammate one more person down the line to swing through. This allows you to turn into the live teammate (in the diagram the one to your left) with your defenses and immediately aggress on that person. You mostly want to block, but if you can get a free kill, that's just a bonus.
(2nd diagram below) Your real goal is to get BEHIND that person QUICKLY so that you can run down the line (on the diagram that's to the left). That final bit is in the second diagram. Once you've cleared a person on the right the teammate standing next to you can now apply pressure to the next guy down the line, setting up a 2v1. If they then win this fight, they too can now run down the line, and for each person they kill the N people vs 1 will increase. So initially it's a 2v1 then a 3v1 then a 4v1... etc until the entire enemy line is destroyed. The person who runs to the left, if they are able to get the kill on the first opponent to their left gives the teammate to their left options. That person can either help you run that gap all the way along the line, or, once that first person drops immediately turn and shoot for the right side of the line, instantly gaining access to their back lines without any interference at all. If the enemy team has a back line with archers, they can also opt to immediately ditch in that direction for ranged weapons.
The Barrel Roll Breach
The first half of the diagram covers the second chunk of the above paragraph. I've split them up to clarify. The second maneuver looks a like like the first maneuver but instead of using a corpse to cover your back you use a teammate. If you find a gap that's big enough for two people (perhaps after a partially successful 1 man breach?) then you can do the same footwork as a 1 man breach but with two people. Getting the timing for this right is difficult, so if you're going to try and pull it off it's best to have some practice with whoever you're executing it with. In the figure above you're person A and your teammate is person B. When you go, signaling your teammate by giving them a shove on the back you 45 degree angle toward the center of the gap, taking you away from your opponent and then a 45 degree angle back towards them turning your body toward the opponent on your left. Your teammate does the same thing, but mirrored. They take a 45 degree step in towards the center of the gap and then take a 45 degree step back toward the opponent on the right, turning to face them. If this has been executed directly person A and person B are now fighting back to back, so even though this breach would normally get a person hit from the left and right, because 2 people fill the space simultaneously, person A blocks person B's back and person B blocks for person A's back. In this case you apply a little bit less pressure initially but you've also got 2 opportunities to run the line. If either person succeeds you can inflict massive damage. If instead person A or B get legged, then they're still fighting their immediate opponent at an angle, so that if their opponent turns to face them they expose their side to the front of the allied line. If they DON'T turn to face them then person A and B get to engage a person's side instead of their front where all their defenses are in place. Timing on this one is pretty difficult, but if you execute it properly it's almost impossible to counter. While the dead man breach can be done with any set of gear, so long as you can block in melee effectively, I've found that the 2 man breach works best with 2 shields as this allows for slightly slower moving fighters to execute on it effectively. Specifically parts of the shield wall can execute the maneuver and then simply kill their way down the line, rather then relying on cardio to hit backs. ...Although, speaking of cardio.
The Hammer Breach
Ah the hammer breach, a little bit of breach 1 and a little bit of breach 2. There's a modified version of this called a Trojan Horse for the end of the line but I didn't make the diagram for it, so perhaps another post to follow is END of the line maneuvers instead of middle of the line maneuvers. Anyways. The hammer breach starts with a third person behind the line looking for a gap. Once a person finds a gap in the line they recruit a person A and a person B to do the 2 man breach. Person A rolls into the opponent on the left as they did before and person B rolls into the person on the right as they did before. This time however neither of them need to survive the engage they just need to block for the person doing the full dive, you. Once person A and B are in position engaging the people covering the gap you are able to loop out behind them and ignore the people who were watching you breach. You can either dive the back line and take out archers or simple sweep back into the opposing line to the left or right a person down and start racking up kills. Once the people in the immediate vicinity have fallen person A and person B will have plenty of cover if they're still alive. If the line can master the second breach then it makes the third breach very easy. If your person A and person B are not in sync with you then you'll either dive first, and be instantly executed, or you'll dive AFTER they've already gone, which may mean that your opponents on the left and right have the opportunity to actually swing at you. In either case it's bad news. The reason to do a 3 man breach over a 2 man breach is that at least in theory it protects the third person so that when they dive they have all their limbs to inflict damage with, whereas in a one man and a two man breach there's a high likelihood of failure in the case of the 1 man breach and a high likelihood of injury in the second case, making running the line less probable.
That's it for this post. Trying to keep it shorter and sweeter with more diagrams :-P. As a final aside, for those who are interested the library of diagrams I've been generating can be found here - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BySPGwBzcCcdM1dtNnlJRmdtYmM?usp=sharing
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