Examples

A — An unprepared attack

A thousand Hoplites attack a walled city. No siege engines.

They cannot scratch the wall and cannot reach the garrison, while the defender's archers keep shooting from above. Standing in front of a gate nobody brought the tools to open costs morale every round, and the army eventually breaks and marches home.

Lesson: you cannot take a walled city with a wall still standing unless you brought engines.

B — A prepared siege

600 Phalangites, 400 Archers and 20 Catapults, with enough Physicians to cover every soldier and enough Engineers to cover every catapult.

The catapults work on the wall, the phalangites hold the line, the archers wear down the defence. Every round the physicians carry some of the fallen infantry off the field as wounded, and the engineers haul back some of the smashed catapults. When the wall goes, the attacker's morale jumps and the infantry walks in.

Lesson: a siege is an ARRANGEMENT — engines, the line protecting them, and the support that brings the losses home.

C — A ranged force runs dry

Two thousand archers in a long siege. Say the ranged line holds 240: 240 archers shoot each round.

When their quivers empty they do not die — they fall silent. The spent formation steps back and 240 fresh archers with full quivers step in. The cycle runs until there are no full quivers left; then two thousand archers are alive, are targets, and cannot loose a single arrow.

Lesson: ranged strength has a lifetime. Depth lengthens it but does not make it infinite; in the end the only remedy is to send fresh troops.

D — Fresh reinforcement arrives

Sending one archer to that dry army adds one full quiver to the ground; the rest is still dry and the morale effect is nearly nothing.

Sending 800 archers puts the ranged line back into action, refreshes the depth behind it, and lifts morale by a real amount.

Lesson: reinforcement works in proportion to the army already there. Feeding help in drips throws it away.

E — An army breaks

Your besieging army's morale collapses: it breaks and enters a pending rout.

At the next boundary it is asked again. With no relief it withdraws without fighting that round, and the survivors march home with their ammunition, their support units and their wounded. With real reinforcement arriving at that same boundary, the rout is cancelled.

Lesson: a broken army is not a destroyed one. The difference between recalling in time — or feeding in time — and not is the whole army.

F — The physician at work

Two equal armies grind each other down; one of them has enough physicians with it to cover it in full.

Each round the same number of men fall on both sides — the physicians do not change how the battle goes. But on their side some of the fallen are not dead, only wounded, and the physicians carry them off the field. When both armies have broken and withdrawn, the one with physicians takes part of its losses back home. Had the supplies run out, the work would have stopped there.

Lesson: physicians do not win the battle; they bring back some of the men you lost — as long as your camp is not overrun.

G — A city feeding itself

A garrison of 300 in a city with a high Arsenal: while production covers what the garrison spends, the garrison never runs dry.

Put a garrison of 5,000 in the same city: the same Arsenal makes the same amount and consumption is many times higher. The panel says the city cannot keep up, and the garrison runs dry anyway.

Lesson: local production is strong, but it is not infinite; every city has a garrison size it can keep supplied.

H — The order before the wall

12 Battering Rams, 4 Catapults, 300 Hoplites, 100 Peltasts and 150 Archers attack a walled city. Behind the wall wait 150 Archers, some of them on the battlements.

The defender's archers hit whoever is nearest the wall. The catapults, like the rams, strike the wall from its foot, and only the men on the battlements shoot at them. The first arrows go to the Hoplites: they stand nearest the wall and take arrows without reaching anybody. When the Hoplites melt away the Peltasts are hit, and once they too have fallen, the Archers at the back. Meanwhile the attacker's archers shoot over the wall at the battlements, and the rams pound the gate.

If the wall falls before the Hoplites are gone, from the next round the battle goes on as in the open field. If it does not, the attacker loses the foot waiting under the arrows and the morale that ebbs every round, and in the end withdraws.

Lesson: whoever stands nearest the wall takes the most arrows. Only the men on the battlements shoot at the engines; if the battlements are full, bring enough of them not to melt away in the first rounds. Your foot only takes arrows until the wall falls: the later it falls, the more men you lose, and your army's morale drops a little further every round.

The order at a glance