Greek Persian Wars - The March of the 10,000

This battle was loosely based on the 10,000 Spartans that fought for Cyrus the Younger in a civil war against Artaxerxes the second. The Spartans ended up on the losing side of the battle and had to fight their way out of Persia, this battle was a theoretical action of a Spartan rearguard against an attacking Persian force that was trying to cut them off.

For the full details of the battle I would like to refer to this wonderful detailed write-up that my opponent did, but be warned it is full of Greek proproganda and heresay:

http://themonkeythatwalks.blogspot.com/2012/02/plateaesque-kind-of.html

I won’t repeat the details of the battle other how I saw it go from my perspective. My overall plan was to win the flanks and hold the centre, and that’s why I placed my infantry behind difficult terrain. I knew my infantry was outclassed and didn’t want to commit them to battle. I was relying heavily on my horse archers and light javelins to shoot him up on the flanks and disorganize his line. So when my unit of horse archers got completely wiped by a lucky roll of the dice I knew it was going to be downhill from there.

I made a few key mistakes in the battle, I placed my general on the wrong flank where he got bogged down in terrain and was too far for his command distance. I hadn’t played the game in a while and so lost the skirmish battle due to poor placement. My execution of attack with my infantry and medium cavalry was poorly co-ordinated, it was my plan B and when I needed them to move the terrain hindered my progress severely.  Lastly, I could’ve made a better army list and used more FL with Javelins and probably one more horse archer in place of CM.

All in all is was a good game, albeit a bit frustrating, I learned some more important lessons about how to use the Persians. They are a tricky army to play with because they have a lot of diverse weapons but not all of them are good and they have to be combined to be used effectively.

Also, looking back through my blog posts I noticed I’ve lost 5 out of my last 6 games, with my sole victory being a technical victory at a high price in material. I hope this trend ends soon, but in the meantime here’s how the battle looked from the perspective of the doomed Persians.