Persian troups are threatening Athens, let’s see if the legendary charge can push them back.
The map is a little bit overkilled but it has its effect on the board. Placement is forced and Athens will have initiative for the first 2 turns. They can decide a charge and run 8 hexes for the cost of 1 cohesion hit.
Beginning of turn 3 they are not in range and ready to charge. Persians decided to take the historic approach, not doing anything fancy and standing ready to shoot arrows.
Most of the Persian archers rout under the pressure of the running armored. The center holds but it is looking good for Athens.
Time for Persian counter attack. They manage to hold everywhere, rout the weaker central hoplite unit, killing its leader in the process. So far still historical. Athens should win on the wings and close on the persian infantry.
Then it goes wrong, in the next activations, their best leader is wounded and 2 more hoplites run away, the Persian center expands on both side menacingly.
An then, except for the platea smaller hoplite unit cleaning routed archers, everything that could go wrong does go wrong. They even get another unit breaking in trying to engage.
The hoplite manage at last to rout a Persian medium infantry… only to flee under a volley of arrows.
The Persian can now stand still and enjoy the view of the Greek army running away, but for their last activation they get cocky and try to mop up. In some weird turn of faith, the Persian leader dies in Personal combat, as the same time as the Greek one when his routed army manages to hold the contact check and does try to defend against the Persian doing the pursuit. But except for the unnecessary death of their leader, it removes everything from the board, except some skirmishers and the heroic Platea unit, only one to manage somehow to fight.
That was a catastrophic day for Athens. Not so much decision making in this scenario, it just showed how swingy the game can be, and how it can be impossible to manage anything if the luck is not on your side.
80 rout points for Athens, double what they needed to lose. It was not the most interesting scenario. I will probably revisit it in the future as a learning scenario when I teach the game to someone. And I hope for a more realistic result. But was fun to see the horror story for the Greeks unfolds, bad luck after bad luck.