Alexander the Great's Empire - My First Divide et Impera Campaign
I rarely play Rome II these days, but two weeks ago I discovered Divide et Impera and decided to dive into it completely. After spending around four hours reading about the mod's mechanics and playing a short 20-turn test campaign as Rome, I decided to play as Alexander the Great. The timing was perfect, since I had just finished reading Alexander's biography by Fritz Schachermeyr (highly recommended for history enthusiasts).
Before starting the campaign, I set myself a number of rules:
- No submods whatsoever.
- Medium campaign difficulty / Medium battle difficulty.
- The war against Persia had to begin no later than 334 BC.
- All armies had to be recruited exclusively in Thrace. No mercenaries and no AoR units. This meant that the troops assembled before the Persian campaign would have to march all the way from Thrace to the Aral Sea and the Hindu Kush. I also avoided recruiting the special named units associated with Alexander's generals.
- Every single battle had to be fought manually, even against a tiny rebel force of four units. Every city assault and every walled siege had to be played manually as well. I never besieged a settlement for more than one turn and captured almost every city and fortress immediately.
- Conquer the Persian Empire by 327 BC, the year Alexander historically pacified Sogdiana.
- Conquer nothing else in Europe besides Thrace. No Sparta, Crete, Epirus, Rhodes, Illyria, or Rome.
After conquering and thoroughly looting Thrace, Alexander prepared two armies for the invasion of the Persian Empire. Both armies had identical compositions and roughly equal strength. One was commanded by Alexander himself, the other by Hephaestion.
As Alexander approached the Asian shore by ship, he ceremoniously hurled a spear into the land. With that gesture, he declared that every territory ahead would be conquered by his own hand.
The hardest part of the campaign was Asia Minor.
Here Alexander faced nearly forty eastern armies arriving in waves. There were moments when 2,500 Macedonians annihilated 15,000 Persians in two consecutive battles, only for scouts to report another 20,000 Bactrians and satrapal troops approaching immediately afterward.
Alexander's greatest defeat came at Ancyra.
After capturing the city, he decided to remain there and neglected to scout the regions to the est. Unbeknownst to him, King Darius himself had arrived with an enormous host-roughly six Persian armies combined. Alexander had no possibility of retreat and was forced to prepare for a desperate defense.
The following month, Darius personally led the assault on Ancyra. Alexander hoped that Hephaestion's army, marching from Pergamon, would arrive in time, but it never did. The battle was brutally bloody. Eventually the Persian hordes overwhelmed the defenses. Alexander was wounded, and his entire army was destroyed.
It was a devastating setback.
Yet only a month later Alexander recovered, raised a new army from scratch, and systematically hunted down every force that had participated in the battle. During the subsequent campaign in Asia Minor, he even killed Darius himself in personal combat during one of the battles.
While Asia Minor was still being conquered, Alexander used the spoils of war to raise a third army under Ptolemy. This force would later conquer eastern Asia Minor, Armenia, and northern Iran before eventually reaching the Aral Sea.
With three armies in the field, the campaign accelerated.
Hephaestion marched through Syria into Judea and then Egypt. After Egypt fell with relative ease, he chose not to advance into Libya. Instead, he liberated the territory, allowing a Ptolemaic successor state to emerge from the former Egyptian satrapy. Hephaestion remained in Egypt, since by then Alexander's armies had already pushed deep into the Persian heartland and there was little he could do to support them directly.
When the Persian Empire was reduced to only two cities and the satrapies of Arachosia and Bactria, Persia sued for peace. They offered to become Alexander's vassal and pay 10,000 talents of silver.
Alexander refused.
Without granting his soldiers even a single month of rest, he continued the campaign. The Persian Empire finally ceased to exist when Partava, its last remaining province, was conquered.
Only the satraps remained.
By this point a fourth army had arrived from Thrace. It had been raised when Alexander captured Babylon and took roughly a year and a half to reach the front. Its arrival proved invaluable, as the exhausted and understrength armies of Alexander and Ptolemy were occupied with the remaining satrapies. Since I never recruited mercenaries or AoR units, every reinforcement had to come all the way from Thrace.
Arachosia fell first.
Then, after a long and difficult war, Bactria followed.
The Achaemenid Empire and all its satraps were fully conquered by June 328 BC.
Alexander's campaign had begun in 333 BC rather than 334 BC due to a few early delays. The entire war lasted five years, and about half of that time (2.5 years) was spent fighting through Asia Minor.
Now Alexander is 27 years old and preparing for the next phase of his ambition: the conquest of the entire known world.
For the next two years he plans to consolidate the Empire from Babylon. Every province already has a governor (generals without an army), dignitaries are working throughout the realm, and the state is functioning well-but much more remains to be done.
His immediate plans are:
- Move the capital from Pella to Babylon.
- Launch a major anti-corruption campaign (reduce the empire's maintenance to zero).
- Standardize provincial development across the Empire.
- Establish Hellenic culture as the majority culture in every province.
- Create two major fleets. One will be based at Hatra, south of Babylon, and support the conquest of Arabia. The second will be built in Athens.
- Raise two additional armies, increasing the total from four to six.
- Reform the government and transform the Kingdom into an Empire.
All of this is necessary to stabilize and strengthen Alexander's rule.
Afterward, Alexander will travel to Hatra and begin a new expedition. Accompanied by his fleet, he will advance along the Arabian coast, exploring and conquering new lands. Arabia will be followed by Ethiopia, then Carthage and all of North Africa.
Next, Alexander intends to beat Hannibal to history by conquering Iberia and Gaul, marching on Rome itself through the Alps, and eventually returning to Pella through Illyria after at least a couple of decades away from home.
Only then will he look northward-to the wild and frozen lands of Dacia, Germania, and the British Isles.
The conquest of Persia is complete.
The conquest of the world has only just begun.
Posted Jun 17, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC