"Thoughts on Campaign Design" Topic

I have a bit of time on my hands so thought it may be of interest where we at Maneouver Group are regarding campaigns. We have not published any rules on this, so it is just for interest.

First a definition or aspiration as to what this is about for us.

Like all wargamers we started out playing episodic games based on increasingly varied and complex scenarios but in the end you can run out of steam. We wanted to play interconnected battles.

It should be said that our rules are for playing only sections of real battles. In our case probably only a company or perhaps in exceptional al circumstances 2 or 3 companies in a World War 2/modern setting.

We had no interest in modelling higher level games directly as we like 1 to 1 gaming. Like some Napoleonic gamers we scale down the battles we play so as to be more manageable

Having set out our objectives I will set out the steps and thought processes we have gone through to get where we are today. We have achieved an optimum point for us and currently are not looking to do any more work. The current system meeting all our needs and aspirations at the moment.

Our first steps were to generate a series of episodic battles linked together. These never did it for us, the links were to artificial and did not create new un-thought of games.

We then went on to use actual maps but this revealed some interesting issues at our level of gaming. First is that the universe is really, realy big and you can get lost in it really quickly. Second the universe is really complex terrain wise so it was not possible to map well, terrain on a map to a wargames table.

Some more usefull lessons were learnt:-

In reality battles can only be fought effectively down a road,rail or much earlier sea/river routes. For the purposes of this discussion I have assumed a road, at least some of the assumptions will apply to the other options.
The first requiremnt is that the road has to be capable of supplying the armies logistical needs. This is as true of the early Greeks and Romans as it is today. Earlier periods like the Greeks had folk to set up market on the route of march so as to be able to obtain supplies. Taking supplies by force requires much man power and is inefficient. Therfore at whoever level you are playing, to some extent the need is foe a strip map(s) of the route(s). Vast expanses of ground with no big communications routes are of no interest as logisticaly they are impassable. Alexander's March through the wilderness is a good example and it is thought that was not really wilderness but essentially a relatively sparsely populated area. In WWII the battles were centered round rail routes.

Cross country movement in areas of the world by motorised transport is severely limited by the bridge weight limits off main routes. While bridge layers and baily bridges help locally, too many are required to make a long artificial route. As an example, in a flat bit of the UK adjacent to a major route there were 100 bridges in a 10 km by 10 km area. Most would not take a 70 tonne tank.

Ignoring the stupidity of politicians as we are modelling what a commander would like to do, even on a major route there are areas that are of no military value. That is areas that are not usefull to a defender so would never be fought over by either party. Therefore detailing of such areas is not usefull.

I guess this is enough for part one. Is it of interest?

This is why I like node based campaign maps. The purpose of the campaign is to give interesting battles. The hard part is balancing things so a loser of one battle does not get plowed over in all following battles

Could you please define "node based"? I am unfamiliar with that term.

An example of a node-based wargame map:

The concept is that only the important places and the practicable routes between them are defined. Trivial places and impassible routes are left out.

For many campaigns I've come to the same conclusions mentioned in the OP – drastically limiting the scope of the campaign generates more/better battles. By way of example, here's another concept I've mentioned before: a 1-dimensional campaign track. See this ancients campaign (The Syrian War) for an example.

The basic concept here is that the two armies fight back and forth along the single line. The campaign ends when one side gets forced off it's own end, or when time is called. This works very well as a battle generator without all the distracting paperwork logistics usually introduced into wargames campaigns.

This format works best to represent a fight along a well-defined line of communications (coast, road/rail/river line, valley, unit operational bounds, etc.) where there's essentially no "maneuver" at the operational or grand tactical level, just a slog forward and/or back along the line. The defined variables are the force pools available and the rate of recovery/reinforcement in each campaign turn. In the campaign I linked above I deliberately gave each side better reinforcements/recovery closer to its own base line and worse reinforcements/recovery farther from it to extend the campaign beyond a single-encounter paroxysm.

In the example of the Syrian War campaign I left the terrain choices open, since the tactical game had terrain generation rules and the areas covered by each space on the track were assumed to cover huge area. For the scale of a company-level fight, I might instead define the terrain within each area of the track and just vary the setup rules. I would probably also require players to define fighting positions in the areas of the track to their own rear, to force them to think about the positioning of fall-back positions and off-board artillery siting.

- Ix

A slight modification of the 1-dimensional track I mention above is to use 2 or 3 parallel tracks, so some sideways maneuver is possible. This has the potential to drastically increase the complexity of maneuvers, terrain generation, scenario generation, etc., but also makes possible such things as grand tactical flanking maneuvers, pincer movements, surrounding or bypassing less mobile forces, leapfrogging/bounding battles, etc.

I've toyed with this concept but have yet to execute one. Here's an example from one of my favorite AAR writers.

- Ix

I'm still struggling to find good ways to play naval campaigns.

Many times since the late 1990s, I've experimented with ways to use the Avalanche Press maps (e.g. the Baltic and Mediterranean maps from the Great War At Sea series), but in the end the "endless choice" of unlimited maneuver room makes for long, boring campaign phases and too frequently generates extremely lopsided battles. I still like the concept and would totally dig in again with the right opponent(s), but for casual infrequent gaming with less serious players, map-search naval campaigns tend to be completely overwrought.

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I once ran a campaign-on-the-table game of a 1916 German assault on the Bay of Riga. I used a huge 6'x14' table to cover the northern half of the bay. The German starting positions assumed the mine barrier blocking the Irben straight was already penetrated by significant forces under way to the East/rear, while more German forces continued to clear the minefields and neutralize the batteries defending them. The Russians had forces in the East end of the bay, near the Irben Strait, and coming down from the North outside the bay, so the battle split into 3 battle areas, but with some movement/reinforcement between areas taking place. Parts of this game were fun, but I was totally overworked. It turned out my biggest problem was keeping the game moving – players at a convention ask questions of the referee before checking the QRS or the rules and then wait (and wait, and wait, and wait) for an answer, so I was stuck in a constant flurry of paperwork and unable to keep the players in unrelated parts of the table moving. I wouldn't try this again without help from co-GMs, or start it with a cadre of experienced players who can push along the separate, unrelated action areas.

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An idea I had more than 15 years ago but have yet to try: a campaign of linked scenarios that pits the players against the GM. That is:

• The GM (me) sets out the overall goals of the campaign, then generates all the scenarios, runs all the enemy forces, and provides the surprises (shoals, minefields, subs, air attacks, blue-on-blue accidents, unexpected enemy forces, unanticipated advantages, etc.).
• The players are all on the same side, making all operational (campaign) decisions together and playing out the resulting tactical situations as a unit.

Taking a lesson from the Bay of Riga game I mentioned above, I've since decided a player or two helping run the "bad guys" would be a great benefit. I have nascent ideas to play this format using a WWII German DD flotilla mission to Norway (inspired by accounts of the actual odyssey that ended at Narvik); a Dutch expedition to the New World in the early 1600's; a fanciful WWII French attempt to escape from from Mers-el-Kebir (Algeria) to the Caribbean in 1940; recreating Graf von Spee's voyage in 1914 (with some modifications to make the outcome less of a bummer); Farragut's expedition to capture New Orleans and then run up the Mississippi; and a few fanciful ideas set in the 1880s and 1890s (mostly because I love the ships and want to use them).

- Ix

Thank you for the explanation of "nodes." A House Divided is my favorite ACW board game, and I have often thought of using it for miniatures campaigns. One problem that I haven't been able to work out is the fact that, when one side attacks, they usually do so with a rather significant advantage in numbers. Given the combat system in AHD, this is not as big an issue. But I wonder how well most miniatures games would work out if one side began with a 3:2 or 2:1 advantage. Any thoughts?

This is very interesting because we had come to similar conclusions. I think what v we have done is similar but probably worth documenting. With a few changes to fall in line with what has been stated already. Our next iteration was the nodal campaign as has been mentioned. However we featured two standards of nodes, those representing terrain you would want recnoiter as potential battle positions and featureless nodes just to represent the intervening areas of no military use. This sort of worked but the battles were still too episodic to feel th a t they had developed organically. I final solution seems strange but I can assure you it works. As has been said as a means to generate small level battle, one or two routes is fine. Now bearing in mind how little o f ogres was made for instance in the early days what if we eliminate from the map all the none useful terrain. The trip time unopposed drops. However. bear in mind from comments from the battle field tours books Caen is only about 15 minutes drive from the beaches. Now at our scale 1 mm represents 1 meter and a board width of about 600m, which is typically the defensive front of a platoon and an attack frontage of a company, if you play round 3 edges of an 8 by 6 board you get about 4.6 km of board. Given that against a well defended area 1 mile a day was not untypical in the real world where some terrain is of no value, on an "engineered terrain" where all of it is of military value progress of less than this could be expected.

juggling the board we found we could get an equal flanking route.

The mission is for example for the attacker to be given
A set of resources that given th scale of the defence should get him through the board. Both sides are allowed to deploy long range reconnisance on or just off the routes, but not enough to by any means cover it all. The defender is then given say 6 hours unopposed but not unobserved. Reconnisance units foolish enough to call artillery from their position makes them very high value targets that will likely be taken out. They cannot be replaced so blinding their forces. This is insufficient time to fully deploy and dig in. Which means the attacker has to be slowed down.
Now any unit advanceing or fighting has only in our case 8 hours endurance at maximum, then it has to leave and rearm and get replacements. Now at any given time player needs to be sure that they do not run out of endurance, that there are fresh units available when the initial forces are either spent or run our of endurance and that artillery do not run out of ammunition. Therefore many of the functions at higher level are simulated but in a scaled down fashion.

what this produced was an organic change from screening the defenders engagement area, to the actual battle within the engagement area. By having a second route with roads incapable of taking main battle tanks, the forces need to reflect the commanders intended strategy on the potential attack routes. As no single force can make it to the end of the table or defend all the way back, both sides have to be wary of committing too much at time for fear they will run out of use able forces. Allowing the other side to gain an advantage.

This approach has a number of advantages. Basically y ou need just your normal rules plus the endurance factor, and perhaps a very high speed march move that gets a formed column where it is intended to go quickly. Deployment out of the column is by normal war games moves. If mortars for instance use a more typical range sayb 3000 m not extreme where accuracy falls off, they will be on table at times.

Record keeping is minimal, we use a tablet to photograph the battle at the end of each session. The only other paper work is how long a unit has left on the table before it requires rest and re supply. Doing this in sight of the enemy is not recommended.

Okiegamer said:

One problem that I haven't been able to work out is the fact that, when one side attacks, they usually do so with a rather significant advantage in numbers. Given the combat system in AHD, this is not as big an issue. But I wonder how well most miniatures games would work out if one side began with a 3:2 or 2:1 advantage. Any thoughts?

Strategic games rarely make good campaign games. The goal of a strategic game is to win the battles, encouraging players to initiate battles as lopsided as possible. The goal of a miniatures campaign is to fight interesting tactical battles, which requires relatively even battles, the opposite of the strategic goal.

Piston campaigns like the one I linked to above are one way to resolve this problem – all battles will see both armies at full (current) strength.

Most of my other descriptions (and UshCha's) illustrate more complex approaches to solving the problem.

- Ix

May I suggest Battlefinder

link

Includes a board on a hex layout to make a point to point campaign area.

Yellow admiral, Paul the other half of Maneouver Group has a love of modern and WW2 naval. I think the latest game was Coral sea. It was a nodal campaign he had designed based on our land game experiences. Water (and some islands) being represented by a few dozen nodes (actually 2 types but why is a bit hazey). The nodes represent large areas of sea. Vessles have to be in the same node to fight other than with aircraft. Ships move one node at a time normal and have an endurance in nodes, so re – fuelling and the preservation of fleet tankes is critical or the carriers have to go home.

Aircraft also have a points value for fuel . Traveling across a node (called travelling above cloud level) uses a relatively small amount of fuel. Searching a node ( which is a big bit of sea uses significantly more) flying below clouds. Hence commanders can search big bits of sea (large er number of nodes) close in to or smaller bits of sea further away. There were surface non-carrier squadrons as well. Shadowing a found fleet with observtion planes was also acceptable.

Obviously timing to get planes off and retrieved and re armed plus combat patrols close to the carriers are bits of the system.

The game mechanisms were new to the players of this one day game. Most masters it and enjoyed the game and it's surprises and it played to a conclusion.

A few just wanted to see all the ships and just throw dice to kill them but hey you can't win all the time. The majority wanted to play something like it again.

So this way may be worth some thought.

I had thought given the reception it got Paul should publish the rules but writing take time he may not have at the moment.

However the idea may not be that had to develop to fit your purpose.

The real questions here are "Is it an opposed game?" That is, is there another side which makes campaign decisions that can affect the parameters of the individual battle along the way?" If there is then the minutia of bridge loading and the like is irrelevant. The problem becomes of who gets to what first and what is the reconciliation of the the competing versions of the future history. That is, if both are assumed moving simultaneously and consistently through "the veldt" at what point do they meet, what is around them, and at what point does the campaign action stop and the table top action begin. Also what are the parameters of the pre-existing orders given in the campaign at the moment of contact.

On the other hand if you are doing this for yourself as a means of stringing together battles, most of what you are talking about is superfluo8us, which it would seem to be if you are on a 1 to 1 scale. At that level there are no real campaign decisions to be made and you are either marcing down the road as a recon company, with very little ability to make strategic decisions, and with almost no tactical latitude, or you are marching down in a column with 200 or so other companies with even LESS tactical latitude.

As for specific functional map styles there is road and node but there is also point and area, that is a game where there are large areas that armies move through, and within them are various strategic points. An army therefore can be "at large" in an area, or at one of several specific points. for example Take an ordinary map of the United States The 48 contiguous states are the "areas" and some of the major cities on the map are the points. Thus New York State would be an area and Alabany, New York City, Rochester, and Buffalo would be points. These point can be in the interior of the state, or on the borders, so for example New York City would be on the border of New York State itself, but also Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey and an army could move from New York City to any of these areas.

it all can be handled rather neatly but there are huge problems with both road and node and area and point. This is why I simply dispensed with a map in my 18th Century Imagi-Nations Campaign

The lager problem is as Okie Gamer notes the often wide disparity of forces when contact is made on the map. This is not really a problem in the strict sense, as the campaign is simply doing what you want it to do, and like Napoleon gamers like to accrue huge forces against tiny opposition which of course is the real life dream of all generals. Here the problem of the game comes in. Never forget that the purpose of the campaign is not to be to itself or the be all and end all, but as UshCha said, to link battles together in some way, and provide for interrelationships battle to battle. Gamers will naturally attempt to stack the odds in their favor, though for the guy across the way, fighting at 1 to 20 odds is no fun. Therefore at some point "the needs of the game" for an interesting yet equitable table top battle, take a huge club to all our niceties of campaigns and have to smash it to smithereens. Again I solved this in my 18th Century Campaign in the use of "strategic" units and limits on the same that ensure that any battle engendered can be interesting and challenging like the recent "Battle of Froggieboddom" demonstrates.

The first thing you have to have in all cases is an umpire, and if you can't get someone to take that roll, forget the whole thing.

The other problem is that you have to make it very clear what you are doing in each phase of the campaign, and what questions can be dealt with at which level. I remember one campaign where I told one side that the enemy had been spotted at Rottingham. He then proceeded to ask how many, when, what regiments, what was their condition, what did the hussar see, and eventually I told him that this was only a courier and that's all that was written on the paper. He then wanted to have the scouts report to him what they saw, what the regiments were, what were their colors, who their friends were etc. I finally told him that one more question and I would rule that while he was wasting all this time, the enemy had surrounded him, and cut him off and offered him only unconditional surrender.

I once worked the problem of disparity of forces out in a naval game by assigning each side a deck of "missions." These would specify what had to be done, like sweeping this area of the sea, or convoying supplies to this island or ally, or staging a raid on this port. The players were able to devote to the missions whatever ships they wanted. They had a choice of drawing one to five missions in a turn. For each completed mission they got a specific number of points. It still can give you woefully imbalanced specific actions, but not as many as you would think. In the game one player drew only ONE mission in a turn and sent everything he had on that mission. The other drew five per turn, and broke his ships up among them. In the end the latter swept the seas sometimes with only a few cruisers and sent resupply misisons unescorted and largely won because the other side would not risk defeat by sending out less than everything he had. I believe he lost like 8 to 1.

I didn't use a map for that, nor do I use a map for the Imagi-Nation Campaign. It only gets in the way.

Maps are only contingent devices to strategic decisions already arrived at, and as such- useless.

In my modern game, which is an "Army Level" Game there is no map either. Each of the 12 countries in the game shares with some of the other countries "areas of conflict" which is assumed both can get to, so for example Fahrvergnuggen and the 443rd Flounce Republic share an area of Conflict in Souee, Bancock and the Welay Peninsula, Macaraini etc. They do not share an area of Conflict in Irate or the Phillip Morrisco Islands. So they can attack each other in the former but not in the latter.