It seems your campaign has suddenly become a lot harder. How is your economy?
State of the Pontic treasury in 191 BC:
I'm running enough of a profit to keep up with construction, but that army upkeep is going to have to grow. So far I have an expeditionary army fighting Carthage, large static garrisons protecting my eastern borders from the Ptolemaioi in Mesopotamia, and I'm doing some rapid recruitment in western Asia Minor to counter the Makedonians - but all that is just to maintain the status quo. To take the fight to the Seleukids in the east will require more stacks.
Hopefully this can all be funded by my Carthaginian conquests - as I take more of their ports, I'll open up trade routes across the Mediterranean, and that will also benefit my Roman allies.
@Stingray970: I thought I was good just to get some Mnai off the Ptolemaioi for peace: getting Tarsos is pretty amazing! I predict you'll be fighting lots of bridge battles to keep the Seleukids from its walls, though
Ah, bridge battles. Now there's a reason to not play with bi.exe if I ever saw one.
It's almost inevitable with Tarsos - any army besieging it from the east will do so while standing on a bridge tile. So if you send a relief force to break the siege, you have to take the offensive in a bridge battle, and since you'll be facing the Ptolemaioi or Seleukids that means fighting your way through phalangites defending a bridge. The definition of pain
The most fearsome part of the Seleukid force that laid siege to Ani-Kamah in 191 BC were the Kataphractoi, armored behemoths that had never been seen before by the armies of Pontos. Accompanying them were regular phalangites, but they were easily outnumbered by the levy garrison that held the town.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
It seemed that the Arche Seleukeia were merely testing the defenses of Pontos - when the garrison sallied, and quickly surrounded, harassed, and finally shattered the phalanx, the Kataphractoi cantered calmly away, ignoring the despairing cries of their infantrymen fleeing the field behind them. After the corpses had been cleared from the field, a Seleukid diplomat arrived to explain that this had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding, due to a headstrong young captain, and that of course the Arche Seleukeia desired peace. Pontic spies revealed the real reason for this sudden change of heart: the Seleukids had now overrun the Kingdom of Hayasdan, exiling the royal family to the steppes beyond the mountains, and their armies clearly needed a few months to reform and reorganize. New Pontic armies were hurriedly raised to meet this threat.
Meanwhile, in far-off Africa, Zenon Kianos fought a great battle in defense of the city of Lepki. The Carthaginians had brought many mercenaries to the fight, including Hellenes, Gauls, Iberians, and even Ligurians from northern Italy, and the different contingents were commanded by no less than three different generals. To face them, Zenon had reinforced his own army, and also counted on his son Megabazos to march out from the city with locally-raised troops to reinforce his position. However, on the decisive day the Carthaginians arrived at the battlefield much sooner than Zenon had expected, and his son's force arrived too late to affect the outcome.
The battle was fought on farm slopes next to the coast, around an old farmstead that Zenon used to anchor his line. He stretched his long phalanx out into the grain fields, the men resting there as the Carthaginian force advanced up the slope to meet them. Soon cries went up in every language, as the mercenaries urged each other on, seeking to be the first to break through the wall of Pontic sarissas poking out of the grain. Zenon kept some of his forces in reserve, expecting the Carthaginian generals at any moment to lead their elite cavalry bodyguards in a crashing charge.
Minutes passed, the cries of encouragement were changing to those of pain and mortality, and still the generals did not charge. Suddenly, as one, they turned and left the field, accompanied by a few reserves, but leaving the vast majority of their mercenaries to face their fate without leaders. Zenon took swift advantage of this unexpected good fortune, sending his own light troops around behind the enemy line, to hurl javelins into their rear and then charge home. Caught between immovable sarissas and fresh charging troops, and sharing no common language with which to organize a cohesive defense, the tired mercenaries died by the hundred - it is said that to this day the fields of that farm give especially abundant crop. Thus was Lepki saved again, but Zenon knew that it could not hold out forever. The disposable mercenaries had bought the Carthaginians time to raise more troops of their own, from the elite garrisons of Kart-Hadast itself, and stopping that threat would be his life's work.
While Zenon sought to hold onto (if not expand) his lands in Africa, his younger brother Pharnakes had finally arrived in Asia Minor to take command of the campaign against Makedonian aggression. No sooner had he arrived in the great city of Nikaia than he found himself besieged there, by a small Makedonian force whose path was otherwise blocked by Pontic border forts. He soon saw off the attackers, crushing them into the spears of Nikaia's garrison as he and the governor led their bodyguards in charges of the old style.
The Pontic cities of Nikaia, Ipsos, Sardis, and nearby Ankyra had been recruiting troops for the past year and a half in expectation of Pharnakes's arrival, and so he found two considerable armies waiting for his command. Less of a tactician than his brother, Pharnakes strove for simplicity in all things, and brute force where necessary. Rather than waste time in strategic maneuvering, marches and counter-marches, he simply ordered both armies into battle in the same season, simultaneously besieging the Makedonian island fortress of Mytilene and their subject city of Pergamon. And there he sat, determined to starve the defenders out instead of taking the cities by storm .
The garrison of Pergamon was the first to run out of supplies, sallying forth in 188 BC with less than half of its original manpower. Throughout this time a Makedonian general had been trying to raise an army nearby to break the siege, but Zenon had prevented this by the simple expedient of recruiting every mercenary band as soon as it appeared on the market, paying them to resettle elsewhere in the Pontic kingdom, and thereby starving the Makedonians of their manpower. When the garrison sallied they therefore found no reinforcing army to support them, and Zenon's local klerouchoi phalangites easily held the Makedonian hoplites and local axemen at bay. Even when the enemy general charged, breaking the phalanx apart, Pharnakes still had troops in reserve, and simply sent a unit of thureophoroi in to support the disrupted phalanx, and bring the Makedonian crashing to the ground.
At the death of their commander the enemy army broke and ran back for the city, and now it was the turn of the contingent from Ankyra to charge into action. Heavy Galatian heavy spearmen, proudly wearing blue cloaks as the picked infantry bodyguard of a Pontic general, braved boiling oil to race through the gates behind the routers, capturing the gatehouse. As they were weighed down by their heavy armor and discomfited by the hot oil, Pharnakes then allowed them to rest for a while, before leading them into the square and the final capture of Pergamon.
Mytilene's garrison had stretched out their food supply to last even longer, but that just meant they had fewer men fit to take the field when the last dog had finally been eaten. Facing impossible odds, they surrendered without a fight six months after Pergamon fell. And thus by the winter of 188 BC, 84 years after Ktistes Mithridates Kianos had first led his army to war, Pontos finally controlled all of Asia Minor.
[There's a lot more happening in each year as the global conflict heats up, so I'll try to make the fronts a bit clearer]
Carthaginian Campaign: While Zenon Kianos rebuilt his army in Lepki, his Roman allies continued to land small expeditionary forces near Kart-Hadast. Zenon could not stand the thought that Rome would seize this great prize before he could get there, and so he left Lepki in the hands of his son Megabazos and set sail again along the coast, landing and besieging the next Carthaginian city of Adrumeto. Carthage's nearest army was out of reach to the south, having been outpaced by the Pontic fleet as it raced up the coast, and Zenon had time to orchestrate a set-piece assault of the city in 187 BC.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Gaining the walls easily, the Pontic thureophoroi and Cretan archers rained missiles down on the Carthaginian elites in the streets below, forcing them to retreat to the square where the governor stood. Here the battle became another push of pike against Libyan spearmen, and Zenon's superior numbers soon took their toll. The Carthaginian governor fell to a machimoi sword, and his city quickly followed. Zenon could now threaten Kart-Hadast itself.
This new threat spurred the Carthaginians into a frenzy of recruitment, and they now sent three armies marching south. One beat back the latest Roman expeditionary force, another guarded the border, and the third and largest army besieged Zenon in Adrumeto.
Possibly the Carthaginians intended to combine these three armies before the final assault on Adrumeto, but Zenon was not going to give them this time. He sallied forth immediately, pitting his veteran klerouchoi phalangites from Alexandreia against the elites of Kart-Hadast, who were supported by a host of local troops. This seemed to shock the Carthaginian commander, who ordered an immediate withdrawal while leaving the phalanx to cover his retreat. He managed to save half of his army, but mere numbers did not tell the story, for he had abandoned the best troops of Carthage to die before the walls of Adrumeto. Zenon's path to Kart-Hadast now seemed open.
Armenian Campaign: After the initial Seleukid siege of Ani-Kamah in 191 BC, they had launched two more attacks in the succeeding years, fleeing each time from the hail of missiles from its high stone walls. Meanwhile Pontic troops had been streaming in from the west, and in 185 BC a young Kianos prince finally went on the offensive, taking a mostly Hellenic army from the northern coast of Anatolia and laying siege to the old Armenian town of Kotais. He was Antipatros son of Arses, and at the age of 20 his slick ways already led some to compare him favorable to Zenon's own son Megabazos.
Antipatros sent word to Zenon that the Seleukids had replied with a small relief force, led by an overconfident general who immediately charged the Pontic hoplites. Counter-charged by Cappadocian hillmen, he had fled in disarray and been run down by Steppe riders, leaving his army leaderless and easily flanked.
Victory came cheaply to Antipatros, and he reported that the grateful citizens of Kotais were offering their immediate services as light troops, skilled in the mountain ways of fighting.
A later message from Antipatros carried a more somber tone, for he had been besieged in Kotais by a large force of phalangites. Before sallying, he had explained his tactics to his men: the hoplites would stand firm against the Seleukid sarissas, while the professional Pontic thorakitai would flank as soon as an opening presented itself. In doing so, the thorakitai had taken heavy casualties, and it had been up to the hoplites to finish the job. Still, Antipatros could not resist including the casualty rolls in his report, emphasizing how few Seleukids had left the field alive. His star was clearly rising, and he wanted his king to know it.
[Global Diplomacy: Time to kick off the Roman/Iberian wars. Pontos was allied with both of them, so it was just a matter of sending my fleet to blockade a Lusotana port - there was even a little Roman fleet nearby to observe the casus belli. This triggered the collapse of the alliance between Lusotana and Rome, and kicked off a wave of diplomatic changes over the next year. A Roman army aimlessly wandering around Europe soon besieged a temptingly-undefended Lusotana town, but elsewhere the Getai did the same to a Roman province, and swiftly allied with Rome's old enemy Epeiros.
So my Roman allies are now fighting Lusotana for Gaul and Germania, while trying to fend off the Getai and Epeiros in Illyria. I've disabled their ability to recruit vigiles, in the hopes that they'll start churning out more heavy legions and stand half a chance]
Out of curiousity how dependent is Rome on mercenaries? It seems more than half their armies are made up of them usually.
Good question - I looked at all their major field armies:
#5 and #6 both seem to contain more than their fair share of of mercenaries, but others are quite decent. I particularly like #4 (right in the middle) as an Illyrian heavy legion
Lusotana are the Iberian faction, who start in modern-day Spain/Portugal. They have a wide variety of infantry (many with armor-piercing weapons), some very good cavalry, and the surrounding lands have lots of rich mines. When the AI plays them, they tend to have a slow start but then suddenly explode, kicking Carthage out of Iberia and then spreading over Europe. They seem to do very well in auto-resolved combat against Roman legions, probably because of their AP weapons. I'd include the link to the faction on the Europa Barbarorum site, but it seems to be having one of its periodic meltdowns right now... http://www.europabarbarorum.com/factions.html
Great updates and great progress. Seems that your opponents weren't quite as big of threats as they seemed. You going to invade the Macedonian homelands?
Great updates and great progress. Seems that your opponents weren't quite as big of threats as they seemed. You going to invade the Macedonian homelands?
I'm still trying to engineer a final world-encompassing clash against Rome, so I'm staying on my side of the Hellespont for now. If I cross over there's a risk that Rome would stomp the Epeirotes, get a land border with me, and declare war too soon.
Tiro
Re: [EB AAR] Pontos Rising
Originally Posted by Diomede
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