The Battle of LeuctraThe Battle of Leuctra, fought 371 BC between Sparta and the Boeotian League under the leadership of Thebes saw the end of the Spartan dominance over the Peloponnes - a Spartan force with (including allies) superior numbers was defeated by Thebes using an innovative strategy, and the event was repeated in Mantinea in 362 BC.How was it done? The usual way to wage phalanx battle so far had been to assemble the strongest forces on the right to counter the right-hand drift (due to the arrangement of the shields, soldiers seeking protection under the shield of their neighbour would tend towards the right). Thus the Spartans could expect to oppose the weakest Theban elements. Instead the Theban general Epaminondas massed his forces on the left side, there arranging a phalanx 50 ranks deep. This left the rest of his units much weaker of course, so rather than assembling them in a line he assembled them in an echelon progressively further away from the Spartan line to keep them out of the battle for as long as possible - in this way he could hope to crush the actual Spartan units early and only leave Sparta's alleys in the field.
The simulationLoad example04.cfg. You should see the following:
That's... a lot of Spartan line. And apart from the three deep units T1 to T3, the Theban allies (the Boeotian troops B1 to B9) are each less deep than their Spartan opoosites. (Actually there's less troops on the field than were at Leuctra, but the overall ratios give the right impression. While we're at it, the example shows only the main clash, at the time opening cavalry and light infantry moves had already played out in reality - this is moderately important because at that moment the best Spartan units S1 to S3 were caught in disarray trying to extend their line. Also the proportions aren't all to scale - so it's really more a mockup of the real battle to illustrate the general idea of what happened.) If you run the example, you'll likely see that a running charge of the deep Theban units vanquishes the opposing Spartans early on - due to the 50 ranks they have enormous pushing power and can throw the Spartans back. Sometimes this happens even before the Spartan allies engage the backward Theban units. Alas, it is to no avail. Whatever the Thebans try (you can vary the strategy a bit, you can lower the strength of S1 to S3 to add more confusion, you can even make them yield against the assault - in the end the numbers elsewhere determine the outcome and Sparta wins more than 90% of the encounters. So the innovative tactics as such isn't enough. How did Leuctra work in reality?
Global events driving morale checksThe key is to realize that most of the Spartan allies were actually unwilling participants in the fight. Without Sparta to compell them to battle, they just left the field because they saw no need to fight.In the simulation, this can be implemented with an event-driven global morale check. Add the following lines to the config file:
What this says is that upon destruction of unit S1, every unit belonging to the same army has to do a morale check with difficulty 0. Since the unwilling units have a morale of 6 only, a fair share of them will leave the field once all three events have been triggered - and this alters the odds for Thebes, now they win more than 50% of the encounters. So battle morale is indeed a major factor at Leuctra. But there is more: The success of Thebes hinges on a few more factors just as well:
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