88 AD · Tapae, Dacia
At the First Battle of Tapae in 88 AD, the Roman general Tettius Iulianus defeated King Decebalus at the mountain gateway into Dacia during Domitian's war.
In 87 AD a Roman army under the praetorian prefect Cornelius Fuscus was destroyed in Dacia, losing a legionary standard. Domitian needed the answer to that, and sent Tettius Iulianus north the following year.
Tapae was the pass that mattered: the gateway from the Banat plain toward the Dacian heartland and the fortresses around Sarmizegetusa.
Iulianus forced the pass and defeated Decebalus there in 88 AD. Roman losses were reported as heavy, and the victory did not open the road to the capital — Domitian, with trouble on the Danube elsewhere, made terms instead.
The detail is thin. Cassius Dio survives here only in later summaries, so the battle is better known for its consequences than for how it was fought.
It restored Roman prestige after Fuscus's disaster but settled nothing. The peace that followed paid Decebalus subsidies and sent him engineers, and it is precisely that arrangement Trajan went to war to overturn thirteen years later.
The scenario is a fight for a pass: Dacia holds ground that multiplies a smaller force, Rome has to break through and pay for it.
The sides, the commanders and the setting are historical. Because so little of the battle itself is recorded, everything about how a match unfolds is the game's own design.