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March with Julius Caesar and his legions in the conquest of Gaul, 58-52 BC. The unit mix includes legions, auxiliaries, fleets and tribal war bands.
In AD 533 the eastern Roman Emperor Justinian began the reconquest of the west from the barbarian peoples who had overrun it the century prior. One player commands the Romans, the other the Vandals; both maneuver units representing comitatenses (elite regulars), tribal warbands, fleets and limitanei militia.
In the summer of 1189, the army of the nascent Third Crusade had lain siege to the Muslim-held fortress of Acre on the Levantine coast. Saladin deployed his lightly-armed, highly-mobile field army to break the siege. In a swirling clash of cavalry and archers on 4 October, Saladin was repulsed by the heavily-armed Crusaders.
In the summer of 1191, Richard Lionheart’s Crusader army marched down the Levantine coast in a tight battle formation to preclude an attack by the shadowing Muslim army of Saladin. Near Arsuf on 7 September, Saladin finally attacked. Repeated Muslim assaults could gain no traction, and Sladin’s host finally was dispersed by a massed attack of Crusader knights.
One of the largest battles of its time, Breitenfeld was fought on 17 September 1631, near the mid-point of the Thirty Years’ War. It was a clash of styles as well as armies, the flexible, open formation of Gustavus Adolphus’ Swedes facing the massive pike blocks of the Imperial tercios. The new order won the day as the nimble Swedes isolated, then destroyed each tercio.
Pavia, fought on 24 February 1525, near the birth of the pike-and-shot period of warfare, was the deciding clash in the long contest for Italy between Valois France and Habsburg Spain. Fought in the jumbled terrain of a hunting preserve, the French reliance on heavy cavalry bested by the firepower of Spain’s loose musketeer formations.