"Migration to Kingdom – Sub Roman Britain test assessment." Topic

I have posted an assessment of the latest test games.
There are some items that need firming up but on the whole I am pleased with the results.

The next tests will have Hispania 409 AD as its central theme.

link

Cheers,
Robert

Though I can't think of a solution to your problems, I wish you best of luck and hope you release them soon. Played a couple of campaigns with your last set of rules shortly after they came out and they were great, so I'm looking forward to this new set.

Hispanian campaign sounds interesting, enjoy your blog.

@ Carlo,
Glad you liked the campaign rules.
That version is ideal for simulating a campaign season requiring monthly tracking.

This version allows for a longer time frame, more armies and requires virtually no record keeping.
The two can be used together.

@ mghFond,
I am looking forward to doing Hispania 409 AD.
There are some tough armies in that scenario.

-EDIT
TLDR: If the Barbarians and Romans have different play styles it would encourage raiders to settle and the defenders to drive off intruding armies. Skip to fourth paragraph.
-EDIT

Yes, yes. I've been keeping up to date with development on your blog. Think I might do a 7th century Byzantine campaign with them.

Oh, I've been having a quick think about your conundrum and I haven't come up with much. Only stuff that seems better suited to larger or longer campaign games, not a 3-battle system (if that still applies to these rules, I'm working under a lot of assumptions).

When I've used your rules it seemed like the 'defending' army spent most of the time driving off the intruding army rather than actually defending against it, so in my Slav's V. Byzantines game I allowed the Slavs to raid settlements and the local countryside for activity points by spending at least 2 uninterrupted months in any given place, certain settlements might give more points after longer 'sieges' i.e. Constantinople. I found this gave an imperative to actually fight battles, because in another campaign both armies just sat around for a year and swelled to 16 units each before fighting one another.

So this is my solution to your problem. The two sides function differently. The defending side functions normally, 'harvesting' activity points while raiders have to raid to get their points. If a raider army hangs around long enough it colonises that region and can start harvesting activity points like the defender can. All this would require a much longer playing time and probably a much larger map also, maybe multiple defending armies, I'm not sure. The card mechanic could still remain it might just have to be altered in some way, determines how well an army raids or how good a crop is, I'd assume they have slightly different 'difficulty' settings, ie the stability of tax and harvest means it is more reliable method of gaining activity points than raiding.

I hope that makes sense, just occurred to me. I hope that you might find any of it useful, even just to think about and then discard. Just trying to be helpful!

Carlo,

You present some good ideas.
The rules offered were originally six pages of text and rather detailed.
The decision to reduce this to two pages was so the campaign could still be played alongside our usual three games without adding extra time.

The Byzantine/Slav campaign should be interesting.
Keep us posted.