The Ground Battle on Dathomir occurred when Tyber Zann, obsessed with opening a Sith holocron, traveled with his lieutenant Urai Fen to Dathomir in order to find a Force-sensitive to unlock it.
Urai Fen, looking for dark side user to open the artifact, told Tyber of Dathomir. However, the Empire had blockaded the planet, so Tyber dispatched a defiler to disable a orbital sensor array in order to give him and Urai an easy landing. The Defiler successfully destroyed the scanner.
Zann deals with the Nightsisters
After landing on the surface of Dathomir, Tyber Zann and Urai Fen proceeded to attack and destroy the Singing Mountain Prison and its power generator, freeing the prisoners, including three Nightsisters, from whom Zann learned that another Nightsister, Silri, has the power to unlock and analyze the Sith artifact in his possession, so they proceeded to free her from Imperial custody.
The initial thrust towards the Frenzied River prison revealed turbolaser towers protecting it, so the Consortium forces destroyed the generator at the nearby dam powering the turrets. Having freed Silri, the Nightsister agreed to aid Zann in his quest to learn the artifact's secrets, in exchange for the death of the Imperial governor who had put her in public display in a cage. In accordance with this, the Consortium then destroyed the Imperial governor's quarters and Silri slew the governor.
After the battle, Silri joined the Zann Consortium and accepted to decrypt the Sith holocron.
The battle appeared in the 2006 video game Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption as part of the Zann Consortium single-player story campaign.
During the battle, the player has the option to destroy mining facilities, each of which yield 5000 in-game credits, and destroy three uplink stations to halt the flow of Imperial reinforcements.
The composition of prisoners freed from the three prisons vary on each replay of the battle, save for Ewok Handlers and three Nightsisters that always spawn upon destroying a prison.
Each prison contains initially passive enemy units that appear to be present for the purpose of getting Tyber to bribe them:
- the Singing Mountain Prison contains one AT-AA. one AT-ST, one HAVT B5 Juggernaut, one 2-M Repulsor tank, and one SPMA-T.
- the Frenzied River Prison contains three AT-ATs.
- the Misty Falls Prison contains five TIE Maulers, however bribing them fails to work in practice as bribing one results in all other TIE Maulers becoming aggressive.