I'm currently reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and so far many battles between armies of thousands of soldiers seem to be settled by one on one battles between commanders, at times it seems before any other fighting has taken place. When a commander is defeated lines break and the "battle" ends in a huge retreat.
Is it accurate then that battles were settled via one on one combat often rather than large scale clashing of troops? Or did battles start but the defeat of a commander often ended them? Or am I misunderstanding the battles completely and this is more of a way to centre the stories around a few dozen major characters.
The romance of three kingdoms (RoTK) by nature is a historical novel; emphasize on the novel part. While the general chain of events was true, the details were not neccessarily accurate, it even wandered to realm of magic and fantasy sometimes. The court history of this period - or any other periods of China did not record many instances of champions dueling in front of armies; athough a few personal killing (ie Guan Yu slay Yan Liang, causing his troop to retreat) did happen. The fighting will have to be carried out by the average soldiers every single time.