Mediterranean & Near East · 336–323 BC

Alexander the Great: The History Behind the Game

In thirteen years, a twenty-year-old king turned a small mountain kingdom into an empire stretching from Greece to India, then died before he could organize what he'd built. Era of Warlords lets you play the conquest — or the chaos that followed it.

The young king and the Great King

Alexander inherited the throne of Macedon in 336 BC at just twenty, after his father Philip II — who had already forged Macedon's professional army and subdued the Greek city-states — was assassinated. Two years later Alexander crossed into Asia to make war on Darius III, the Achaemenid "Great King" whose Persian Empire stretched from Anatolia to the Indus.

Alexander won three set-piece battles that broke Persian resistance for good: the Granicus in 334 BC secured his beachhead in Asia Minor, Issus in 333 BC routed Darius himself, and Gaugamela in 331 BC — fought against a Persian army several times the size of his own — effectively ended the Achaemenid Empire.

To the edge of the world, and no further

Alexander didn't stop at Persia. He pushed on through Bactria and Sogdiana into India, defeating King Porus at the Hydaspes River in 326 BC — a victory so costly, against war elephants and a monsoon-swollen river, that his exhausted army finally refused to march further east. He turned back, and died in Babylon in 323 BC, only thirty-two, having named no clear heir.

What followed was chaos: his generals, the Diadochi ("Successors"), spent decades fighting each other over the pieces, eventually splitting the empire into rival dynasties — Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire in the east, and Antigonid Macedon — that would shape the Hellenistic world for the next three centuries.

101 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.