"Campaigns vs. Strategic Games (and a little more)" Topic
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Ad Astra News | 02 Dec 2014 12:24 p.m. PST |
tl;dr-- … the way you win a strategic game is to make the tactical combats as amazingly lopsided as you can possibly manage. Bambi-vs-Godzilla is probably too close for comfort. … A campaign game needs to generate interesting fights for the tactical engine of choice. Ken Burside wrote (original-- link ): I contend that most campaign games don't generate enough fun for the amount of work that's been put into them, both by the designers and by the players trying to run them. Dan Kast's "one page" campaign game in the old Starmada Compendium had a lot of the right ideas. VBAM has a lot of ideas as well….and we can all look back to Starfire 3rd Edition (and later…) as an example of integration on the idea of "Yeah, sure, we'll add it as an optional rule." The major conceptual hurdle is that a campaign game is not the same as a strategic game. Both strategic games and campaign games generate a narrative of events in what happened through the war. People want their strategic games to read like the ur-Narrative of David Weber's Starfire novels, and to a lesser extent, his Honor Harrington novels. Unfortunately, the narrative desire leads people to the wrong tool. They set up a strategic game when what they want is a campaign game. A strategic game is usually played by two to four people, and the way you win a strategic game is to make the tactical combats as amazingly lopsided as you can possibly manage. Bambi-vs-Godzilla is probably too close for comfort. In a strategic game, your decision loop is on allocating forces to face specific threats. A campaign game needs to generate interesting fights for the tactical engine of choice. Those fights shouldn't be horribly asymmetric, should have a strategic past and implications for a strategic future, and a campaign game should keep the fight within the "sweet spot" range for the tactical engine. For example, a campaign game for Star Fleet Battles that generates battles that look like mid-to-late General War will result in fights that nobody wants to play, because they take too damned long. Even in Federation Commander, they'd take too long. Dan's "extract" from The Sovereign Stars does this – a fleet is a bin of X points. No worrying about construction times or costs, just trust that a fleet of X points versus a fleet of the same point cost will be a fun fight. Dan's extract, in the name of simplicity, uses setting up logistics bases as the nodes people fight over, and because he wanted to keep it at a page or less, he got rid of the idea of ships as individual entities. This undermines the narrative requirement, so while it's a great start, and points in the right direction, it's not a complete solution. VBAM is on the other end of the spectrum. It's written to be an over-game for (originally) B5Wars, and later genericized to handle the other High Detail game in this space, Star Fleet Battles. It's got accounting rules, it's got tables to generate narrative events, it's got discounts for series production of ships…and it takes a lot of work to manage. Some of the optional rules include resource management. I think Diplomacy is actually one of the best "other game" frameworks for a campaign game. 1) The "move fleets around" level tends to result in even, or not horribly UNEVEN fights. An Army is an Army is an Army – or in Space Diplomacy, a Fleet is a Fleet is a Fleet. 2) It provides something to fight over with Supply Centers. Dan's campaign game also does this with player-placed logistics nodes. 3) With a small tweak, you can differentiate between "countries at war" and "countries at peace." Countries at peace resolve their battles with the standard Diplomacy rules, while countries at war break out the minis and blow things up. 4) Diplomacy's rules are very…very…very simple. You start out with 3 or 4 resource centers, you might double that count by the midgame, and after that your military might will grow or shrink by one or two units per turn. It's only towards the end game that the unit counts get into "Wait, which fleet is that again?" Diplomacy has a problem, though. The end-game more or less relies on betraying someone, and most Diplomacy games end up eliminating one or two players, and hitting a frustrating stalemate. So some tweaks would need to be made to have the campaign game aspect end the game with a clear winner before the Diplomacy Stalemate happens. Diplomacy is also easily automated, making it ideal for having a web-based campaign system. Indeed, once you make that leap, you can get to the point where one group of players plays the campaign game, and another group of players subscribes to receive battles from a campaign game – they get a report with what ships to fly, they get a context for it and an objective, and a deadline to report results. This, by the way, is a prototype map for a Space Diplomacy game. adastragames.com/ringmap (Click "Show Menu," then click one of the "Display" buttons.) You can turn off links of different link values by selecting the check box for the link, and see how cheap you can afford to go on your FTL drives. Drag to move around the map, mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Number of spikes on a star is how many links it has; colored dots are resource points of different type. This should work with most tactical engines. You'll need to be able to specify fleet endurance as a trait or cruise endurance as something that matters when designing a ship, and you can either use the "levels" of FTL access, or they can be set (when generating a map) to 1 for all players if you don't want to bother. Because it will be computer moderated, you'll have limited intelligence about systems that you don't control or have units in. |
tkdguy | 02 Dec 2014 4:38 p.m. PST |
Good article! My solo "campaign" is more like a series of one-shot battles, although follow-up games are also played. Hence, the opposing forces are usually evenly matched, although there are exceptions. The results of each battle has consequences for the whole setting, however. |
wminsing | 03 Dec 2014 12:46 p.m. PST |
I'm a sponsor on AdAstra's Patreon, so I've seen a draft of the rules. They are VERY promising; the basic concepts are very easy to explain, the edge cases are few, the paper work is minimal, and the campaign tempo promises lots of fairly interesting fights. -Will |
TheBeast | 03 Dec 2014 6:00 p.m. PST |
No, I want a strategic campaign game that allows a war to be fought, trivial battles fought trivially, i.e., abstractly, and has enough important points to risk near even battles, nay, requires a few, to actually play out. Is Diplomacy as a game title trademarked? Doug |
wminsing | 03 Dec 2014 7:41 p.m. PST |
Then this might be the campaign system for you. It has a diplomacy engine (appropriately enough) that provides definite start and end points for wars, the fleet system reduces the chance of trivial battles occurring (and if they do you can possibly revert to the regular diplomacy rules), and each player has assets that need to be fought over that contribute both to their board position and their victory conditions, meaning roughly even and interesting that battles *will* occur. Space Diplomacy is only a working title. :) -Will |
TheBeast | 04 Dec 2014 6:58 a.m. PST |
But the fleets are the only resources under control? Logistics and new construction aren't? Admittedly, there's a very abstract version of logistics in Diplomacy, though one I'm not sure I'd want in a space version. Sorry, in-my-own-head distinction between fighting battles and fighting a war was probably opaque. Doug |
wminsing | 04 Dec 2014 7:53 a.m. PST |
Actually, there's provisions for both logistics and new construction, though in the spirit of the campaign concept they are fairly simple. Construction happens on two levels. On the first level you build Fleets (and a few other meta-Unit types), with a turn delay before the fleet is completed. Fleets have a player-set cap and are made up of individual ships. The maximum size of ship is based on how large the shipyard is where the fleet is being constructed. The second level is when you need to reinforce fleets by building individual ships while the Fleet is at a friendly shipyard. In this case you build new ships, up to the fleet cap, again max size based on the shipyard present. There's provisions for fleets swapping ships via orders, so you can have a fleet that is dedicated to running reinforcements up to the front. What you *can't* do is just churn out ships continuously and throw them into the grinder. So the system is focused more on how many combat units one can maintain in the field, rather then how fast you can crank them out. It also breaks your forces down into a manageable number of discreet maneuver units. Logistics has a few different dimensions. Ships get damaged and have to be repaired. Munitions get expended and have to be reloaded. There's also optional endurance rules that force fleets to eventually rotate home. So there's some level of individual ship tracking. I do care that in Fleet 1 Destroyer A used all of it's torpedos in the last battle and that Destroyer B took a hit to the engines, but I don't need to track their endurance (fleet level stat) or even their location and orders (again a fleet level stat). By making the primary maneuver unit the Fleet (rather than individual ships) you break the 'how much detail do I care about regarding each individual unit' down to a manageable level. -Will |
emckinney | 04 Dec 2014 11:18 a.m. PST |
On endurance, Winch pasted some of Ken's blather onto the Atomic Rockets site link In the real world, endurance is a very important trait, but most games seem to treat is as a constant among ships. |
TheBeast | 04 Dec 2014 11:23 a.m. PST |
More fiddly than I thought, Will. I'll try to hold judgement. But, I AM so set in my ways… Doug |
emckinney | 04 Dec 2014 11:49 a.m. PST |
Wait, I thought your problem was that it wasn't fiddly enough??? |
TheBeast | 04 Dec 2014 12:29 p.m. PST |
;->= It was; I meant it as a good thing, and I will hold my usual knee-jerk reaction. Doug |
wminsing | 04 Dec 2014 12:47 p.m. PST |
Also note that lot of this stuff could be dialed up or down based on your tactical combat system. Some tactical games would probably benefit from allowing ships to simply repair damage between battles or to reload munitions without worrying about returning for repair/supply. Other games probably should track damage and munitions, but you don't really then care about fleet-level endurance (ships might have return to base fairly often anyway). Other games might allow you to build ships with larger bunkers and ammo bays specifically so they can stay out in the field longer. The campaign system is currently being written with an eye on Squadron Strike, but other games might need a tweak or two. -Will |
Yellow Admiral | 04 Dec 2014 3:46 p.m. PST |
This is an excellent analysis:
…the way you win a strategic game is to make the tactical combats as amazingly lopsided as you can possibly manage. …. In a strategic game, your decision loop is on allocating forces to face specific threats.A campaign game needs to generate interesting fights for the tactical engine of choice. Those fights shouldn't be horribly asymmetric, should have a strategic past and implications for a strategic future, and a campaign game should keep the fight within the "sweet spot" range for the tactical engine.
I've recognized this dichotomy for a long time, but never been able to express it so well. Clarifying the definitions of "strategic game" and "campaign game" is a tremendous help. Very well done. The primary focus of this thread is "space empire" gaming, but these same principles apply to any sort of military simulation gaming. I've used these principles to design simple ancients and Medieval campaigns and WWI naval campaigns, and am currently musing about staging a brief Revolutionary War campaign. One of my favorite campaign game formats has been the "piston campaign" – like a piston in a bore, the two armies fight up and down a linear track of abstract strategic boxes. A piston campaign can be turned into a perpetual battle generator with tweaks, such as increasing reinforcements with proximity to the army's "home" end of track. This PDF is an example of a piston campaign I wrote as a DBA battle generator for Hellenistic armies. The format works best in situations where strategic outflanking is impossible, irrelevant, or easily abstracted into a grand-tactical development (e.g., commit some forces to a "flank march", they enter a flank edge of the battlefield during the miniatures game). Military campaigns along river lines, peninsulas, valleys, archipelagos, coasts, or otherwise "linear" strategic situations are all good candidates. - Ix |
Dan 055 | 04 Dec 2014 10:28 p.m. PST |
I also find this a very interesting idea. The campaign games would have to be produced by a rather simple campaign system or else much of the detail would be lost or irrelevant. I think many people play the campaigns specifically FOR the detail. I don't know how the two can easily be combined. But I'd probably reverse the definitions of campaign and strategic games. 'Campaign games' as a term, is already in common useage, while 'strategic game' is a good term for battles resulting from simple strategic games. |
wminsing | 05 Dec 2014 8:34 a.m. PST |
I think the main question is what SORT of detail is both 1) useful in generating interesting tactical battles and 2) reasonably easy to track. That's why, for example the 'Space Diplomacy' system cares about how damaged your ships are (since dealing with damaged ships presents interesting tactical issues), but doesn't track or care about how many economic points the asteroid mines at system LV-123 produced, since that's not really a piece of information that's going to actually make the campaign any more interesting; it's just more paperwork. One reason I think this 'Space Diplomacy' system has so much promise is that I think even at this fairly early stage it actually manages to hit the sweet spot of just enough detail to make it interesting, not so much detail the campaign is going to break down under its' own weight. -Will
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hagenthedwarf | 06 Dec 2014 9:38 a.m. PST |
I've recognized this dichotomy for a long time, but never been able to express it so well. Clarifying the definitions of "strategic game" and "campaign game" is a tremendous help. Very well done. I think we discuss this quite regularly. Example: TMP link My quote:
The only campaign design for Napoleonics that I have ever done used Corps as a building block to ensure that the two sides that would meet on a battlefield would be roughly similar in size. The map was a network of roads (taking one corps at a time so advance on parallel roads) linking points backed up with simple logistics, limited intelligence and reconnaissance rules. My point of counter-intuitive is that for wargamers you need two equal sides who want to fight whereas in real life you want to manoeuvre or stack the numbers in your favour. Work back from the desired end product (appropriate battles) with clear victory conditions that should provide six to eight battles. The only space campaign I designed used FTL 'carriers' which could be 'analysed' from a distance. The carriers were preset designs that delivered a set sized fleet, so a level 2 carrier delivered a 1,000 point fleet against a level 1 carrier fleet of 500 points … or was surprised to meet a 2,000 point fleet of a level 3 carrier. Smaller carriers automatically retreated from larger ones. We got even battles that were interesting to work through and achieved a campaign winner. |
Spudeus | 08 Dec 2014 1:22 p.m. PST |
I found this discussion interesting and useful as this is an issue that always stymies me (and apparently others!) Linked scenarios/random scenarios are too content-lite, a grand strategy galactic war is just too much work. But if a system can effectively create the end result miniature players are typically after – a balanced, interesting scenario – the rest is ultimately unnecessary. Although, I don't think of 'balanced' as an exact point value for each side – lopsided battles can provide even more excitement with the underdog in the escape/survive/gather intel role. |
Lion in the Stars | 08 Dec 2014 1:59 p.m. PST |
I really like one of the SFB mini-campaigns, I think it was called the Commodore's Game. For a given fleet (IIRC, Command cruiser, 2x CA, 3x DDs, 4x FFs or thereabouts), you had ~7 or so different 'mission areas' you could send your various forces out to do. You and your opponent write your orders assigning any number of ships to each mission area, and then you would reveal your orders simultaneously to determine which scenarios you would play with what forces. There may have been a box where you could put face-down game counters instead of writing actual orders. IIRC, the mission areas were Player 1 base defense, a couple "control the trade with the planet" scenarios, a neutral zone patrol, a couple more "control the trade with the planet" scenarios, and a Player 2 base defense scenario. I forget what the actual victory conditions were, it's been an incredibly long time since I played SFB. The specific campaign I am referring to is actually out of the pre-doomsday 2nd Generation X-Ships rules! ===== One interesting format I've seen for tournament play is the so-called "Iron Man." I first saw it as a 40k format, where you'd have, say, 10,000 points to choose your entire force from, but would only be fielding ~2000pt forces on the tabletop. All losses in one game applied for the rest of the tournament. So if you had a Pyrrhic victory, you would be out all the forces you lost for you next battle. I hope you didn't get your elite forces demolished. IIRC, the total points allowed for the tournament was equal to the nominal game size times the number of rounds played minus one round. To give a better example, a 6-round tournament with 2000pt games would only have 10,000 points total. If you didn't play conservatively enough, you wouldn't have anything left to field by the later rounds! When designing forces for that kind of game, I tended to make 2-3 different force lists and take multiples of the entire list. |
Felix Magnus | 17 Jan 2015 8:56 p.m. PST |
Thanks for this conversation, very helpful! This sound very similar to a tournament, I participated in a number of years ago for Full Thrust. Google Full Thrust Admiral's Tournament. We've also used that at our local gaming group to create a "mini" campaign. Cheers! |
emckinney | 18 Jan 2015 12:14 p.m. PST |
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