Universal Map Based Campaign System Where Manouvering Matters!

[brutalcities]

The TL;DR:
Hey guys! I’m writing some universal map based campaign rules.
UPDATE> Free PDF of the Campaign Rules Alpha Playtest rules are now available!
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I’d love to hear about your own experiences with map based campaigns!

A more granular campaign system

I’ve had a blast playing Legions Imperialis lately. But the campaign rules for that game are pretty similar to most that I’ve seen:

1) Move your single army, or nominate one tile onto a tile your opponent has that you will attack
2) Fight the battle (usually the stand-alone matched battle you’d play anyway) – win or lose, get some random small perk if you win
3) Generate some resources (not all campaigns do this)
4) Rinse and repeat.

These are designed to be simple & easy for multiple players.
But what if you had more dedicated invested opponents? Or you were just playing a campaign with your regular opponent?
I wanted rules that are far more detailed and allow multiple forces to move around on the campaign map. Think more operational level, rather than strategic. Where the actual tabletop missions, deployment zones closely follow the location of formations on the map.

The modular campaign rules so far feature optional rules:

– Multiple formations able to manoeuvre on the map and fight in the same battle – flank, reinforce, capture and deploy in important terrain features
– Simple but realistic supply line mechanics
– Semi-fixed rosters in your ORBAT (When units or formations are wiped you, you will strike them off your massive roster of units. Why? No more throwing away elite units to capture some circles on the tabletop. Sometimes you might want to voluntarily retreat!
– Fog of war and recon mechanics – you can see enemy formations, but you may not know their composition without recce!
– Combined arms actions- Artillery present can slow down and pin formations on other map tiles within range

And a bunch of more rules already written.

Creating More Realistic Objectives – Not E-sports Circles.

I was basically inspired by a feeling that pick up game objectives are all well and good for tournament play, but they are also kinda arbitrary. A circle on the tabletop is kinda a weird objective. You’ll lose the battle if you can’t hold more circles each round? Maybe the actual objective is to break through your opponents lines to cut them off from supply!

Universal Campaign Rules For Combined Arms Wargames

The campaign rules I’m writing are intended for games of a scale of Warhammer 40k and above – any games that allow a level of combined arms list building. So, from Bolt Action, to Epic 40k and Legions Imperialis, to cold war games. I hope to cover a wide range of setting with some modular rules, so you can pick and choose the rules that suit your game system. If you are interested and have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you! Please let me know about your experiences playing campaigns in the comments. What worked, what didn’t?
Did you finish the campaign? How many people played?

And I have a 5 min survey here too, if you’d like to see a bit more of the context, and give me some more feedback and wish-lists.
SURVEY HERE

I’ve done a bunch of research already but more is good before I write too much!

Appreciate your time with this,

Cheers,
Ryan/ Brutal Cities

• This topic was modified 3 days, 15 hours ago by brutalcities. Reason: updating project status and link

[greyhunter88 1658xp 1]

I have played many campaigns over the years, so I will try to lay down a few of my thoughts in case they are helpful.

1) The impact of long-term damage binary is critical, but a very fine balance. What I mean by this is that games where casualties have no impact (eg. Warmachine’s Frontier Campaign) don’t feel very connected. You can throw your army away without much qualm, which makes you feel very disconnected from them. Warhammer 40,000’s Crusade gives out “Battle Scars”, which are a bit narratively bizarre. My men were obliterated by a nuclear strike so now they have -1″ movement? They also don’t matter because the campaign gives you the means to just remove Battle Scars or just fire and then rehire those units anyways, so they feel pretty moot.

By that same token, if the damage is too punishing it can lead to serious feels-bad moments. BattleTech, for example, can have your ace pilot and heavy ‘Mech go up in a single ammo detonation, which can put you out of a campaign instantly. This is obviously more a problem in BattleTech Classic than Alpha Strike, but it’s definitely ended some campaign early when a single bad round puts one player way too far behind to catch up. It also sucks if your lovingly painted unit gets permakilled in the first game. Even if it’s a good narrative moment it feels like you wasted your time painting them.

I actually think 3rd Edition Age of Sigmar had a really neat way or doing casualties, where units could degrade over time and had to spend resources to try and rally back to strength, with bonuses if they sat out a game.

2) By that same token, experience is a requirement but also a dangerous tool. Everybody wants their armies to improve in experience, unlocking new abilities and what-not. That’s what makes formations and characters feel memorable. This balance is so hard, though. If upgrades are too weak (think Rangers of Shadow Deep… playing like 10 games with a sidekick only for him to go from 15 to 16 HP), then they don’t feel worthwhile. If they are too powerful, though (think Jumping Jack or Melee Master in BattleTech), they can risk ‘breaking’ the game. This isn’t a bad thing in of itself. Campaign play is where that stuff should show up. After all, if some super-pilot busts the game but runs the risk of dying every time he takes the field, that problem might naturally address itself. The issue comes from one side overwhelming the other in a win-more snowball. One side gets so strong with its better upgrades that it continues to win and get better. Many a Mordheim campaign has ended this way.

3) Fighting losing battles is just… not fun. I’ve done some historical games in Bolt Action that had asymmetrical objectives. Maybe it’s just me, but “try not to lose too bad” was just not that much fun, even if it was a historical scenario. If a battle feels like a foregone conclusion, it feels like a waste of a rare gaming night to play it out. I had this issue in a map-based campaign of The Old World, where a 500 point scouting force ran into a 1400 point Orc army. It was understandably a massacre, and felt like a waste. On the one hand, auto-resolving it feels bad for the losing player because they don’t want to just lose all their stuff when they might save a few units by playing it out. On the other hand, there just wasn’t much of a gameplay loop to just turtle and run down the clock. I’m not sure what the best way to handle this is. Whether it’s ensuring that no army can get beyond an arbitrary size, or saying that a superior force can only bring so many men to bear in an operational theater, so the game’s can be unbalanced but not completely one-sided.

4) Having a catch-up mechanic of some kind is always appreciated. When I think of a big, map-based campaign, I think of a long-term investment. Some campaigns (skirmish, especially) can benefit from having brief win conditions and fast wrap-ups. Like I think a Company on Company campaign of BattleTech could wrap up in 6 games, and I wouldn’t be against playing a best of 5 in a game like Malifaux. However, if I’m going to be making multiple armies and moving them around the map, I’m in it for the long-haul. As a result, while it might be realistic to play “Germany” and just try to lose as slow as possible, I think most players find that boring. It’s also boring to be the player who’s so far ahead you know you’re going to win. Of course a campaign with a GM can find organic ways around this, but even building in some kind of an Underdog mechanic can really help keep everyone invested until the end.

5) Army Building often needs special restrictions to make unique units feel unique. I was playing a campaign of The Old World, and despite every effort to limit rare units, lords and monsters, the armies all ended up feeling so weird. Like, an army full of Big ‘Uns with no regular Orcs at all… Modern wargaming gives you such flexible list construction options that you can basically take anything you want. To me, this was always a bit anti-climactic, because at the operational level you’ll have like… 40 Tactical Marines, but 80 Terminators, 10 Dreadnoughts, etc. Bolt Action works great for this because bog-standard infantry are the core of the game and interact very well with the mechanics. Not to mention they’re actually good… I do think that campaigns benefit from having limited elite units in some capacity, so that they feel special and their presence is really noticed when they show up for a battle.

Either way, those are kind of my stream of consciousness thoughts on the subject. Sorry I didn’t really format or edit them, but maybe there’s some useful food for thought in there!

[BrutalCities 81xp 0]

@greyhunter thanks for the tips and insights!

Yeah there’s a lot to manage it seems. I’ll address your points by point:

1. I have done this a few ways: The limited number of units in your ORBAT. There are some different options for players to tweak the rules but in general, if a squad is more than half destroyed they pay a small resource  points cost. (RPs)

   But when an entire formation (Platoon, company, battalion etc, depends what scale game you’re playing) You lose some actual Victory Points. You also lose your commander if the formation is wiped. I have built the XP system around commander abilities.
   The AOS rules sound cool! The system above is similar I guess?

2. There are too many different profile rules for me to try and give upgrades to units. I’ll just let players pick the native campaign rules for units if they like.
   Instead, as mentioned commander abilities level up – But it’s quite fast.
   They provide:
   -Reserve roll bonuses
   -Extra D6 for the Generals Roll Off (This is used to determine the battlefield, and mission to play. It’s important because the map is much more zoomed in compared to most systems, where you move your entire army as one.  Each formation can occupy a 1′ x 1′ Square foot (or approx) – This is designed so it’s easy to work out where units come on if you have adjacent reserve formations, just outside the battlefield area. It also allows you to maneuver on the map and know there will be a dense city in this tile, therefore more cover when the battle occurs.  (Obviously the other map tiles still need cover too usually)

   Example:
   
   -one leadership re-roll per battle for one unit (Optional rule)
   -And finally, the most important is the Order Tokens: Basic commanders generate 2 order tokens which are used to move and take actions like entrench, fire artillery etc.
   But the max orders generated will be 3. I added a ‘mythical hero’ profile that’s even slightly better, but you need 15 battles to obtain that profile. And it’s optional anyway.

3. Regards to fighting losing battles – Yep that makes sense to me. I have tried to resolve that in a few ways:
   – Auto retreat optional rule (Otherwise you can retreat and you’re caught on a 4+, and play a quick rearguard mission. (3 turns) If you still don’t want to fight you can auto-resolve.
   But yeah I can see why some people would get a bit down.
   I think looking at it more as a narrative rather than “It’s a tournament, I must win most of my battles”
   The (optional) supply chain system means that even smaller armies have a decent chance against bigger ones, if they can cut off their fuel and ammo.)  Actually writing this just gave me an idea – Perhaps there can be a slight movement penalty or cost if one player is massively outnumbering the other, to represent strained logistics.

   I did also make a guerilla tactics mechanic to help underdogs.

4. Yeah absolutely. I think this system lends itself better to shorter campaigns for this reason (That is, if you’re playing all the rules as I intended) Because of the map scale, it’s really the operational manoeuvres and set up to the battle. Then the same for the subsequent fights.
   I encourage players to try another way of gaming rather than capturing objective circles on the map – whoever has the most wins? I get that it’s a game, and players can of course play the traditional matched play tournament style rules that are so popular.
   But I wanted to really bring the tension between...”do I send in this unit to win this battle now? or should I save them for later?” And – ‘I’ve almost won but if I risk losing this last unit the formation is destroyed – I should probably cut my losses’ etc.
5. Wholeheartedly 100% agree. I think using the fixed roster ORBAT as above, made of what forces you would really have in the lore will really make elite units feel elite. They are a finite resource.

Nah your format is great, thanks for the input.
I have some other tasks that will take over this for the next couple weeks so I decided to launch the Alpha playtest rules PDF for free on my website.

I’ve called it Tabletop Ops: Wargaming Campaign Rules for now.
Get it here – https://brutalcities.com/pages/map-based-wargaming-campaign-rules

If you’re interested, I’d love to know what you think of them, particularly the Battle Phase section and the formation movement rules.
There’s 50 pages as I’ve put a lot of ideas down. Now It’s time to playtest more and refine them.
Thanks for your time and reply, again!

[greyhunter88 1658xp 0]

Thanks!

All sounds really fun! In case you’re interested, how casualties worked in Age of Sigmar was that you rolled a d6 for every model who died in the game. For every 1, that unit took a “Casualty”, and you effectively lost your Casualty Score worth of guys at the start of every battle.

Eg. if my 10-man unit was wiped out and I rolled 10 dice and got three 1’s, I’d get a Casualty Score of 3. At the start of the next game, if I deployed them, I’d remove 3 guys and deploy only 7.
You could spend money to ‘recruit’, and you’d roll a number of dice equal to your Casualty Score and each 4+ would reduce it by one. If your units sat out a game, they could ‘recruit on a 2+, instead.

I thought it was really fun because your units would slowly attrite over time, and sometimes you would have to sit units out to try and refresh them because it could get expensive with pricey units!

Secondly, with regard to the ‘narrative VS tournament’ mindset, I am very firmly in the former camp. What I meant about ‘fighting losing battles’ being unfun is that it doesn’t tend to lead to really exciting narrative moments, in my experience. Wargaming mechanics don’t generally allow these underdog forces to win a Battle at the Hot Gates. So what happened in Bolt Action, for example, was I was eating so many random pin markers from the vastly overwhelming enemy force that I couldn’t really do much. If I passed my Order Test, I’d fire a few ineffectual shots, but mostly I waited for death.
In 40k, you’d just eat so much volume of fire that you would be wiped out too quickly.

My issue isn’t losing, it’s just that if I get one rare game a night to play with my buddies, I don’t want it to be some massacre where one player is just going through the motions. A ‘quick game’ doesn’t usually exist for me because set-up and tear-down takes a lot of time, unless you’re playing something like Combat Patrol or BattleTech.
Though maybe underdog/guerilla mechanics, as you’ve described, could work, or some kind of sudden death win scenario.

Curious to see what you’ve come up with! We’re currently in campaigns of Warmachine and BattleTech (neither of which seem like systems you designed these rules for), but I will try to grab a volunteer to try it out with WW2 or 40k or something! We’ve actually been looking for an excuse to play Legions Imperialis for a while. This could be it!

When I get a chance to try it out, I’ll let you know what we think!

[brutalcities]

@greyhunter88 –
That casualty system seems quite fun! Perfect for 40k or bolt action. Mine is below.
I’m trying to add a lot of mechanics to this system. But at the same time I don’t want to get too crunchy with book keeping.
The casualty system is like this:
Are you in supply?
Yes > Did you lose less than half your units models? Yes > They are replenished. (No need to worry about removing units/models from your ORBAT)
If a unit lost more than half the models same as above, but pay 50 RP (resource points) per unit.

No > You can’t replenish unless you reinforce by air for 100 RP perunit . You will need to note survivors for next battle. (But most of the time people will be in supply)

If they are Destroyed, you then pay 3 VPs and cross off a unit from your ORBAT (if no supply), and 2 VPs if they are in supply.

Because of the ORBAT, reinforcement and supply system, and the fact that you can withdraw after turn 3 in a game, the system really encourages players to NOT sacrifice your units. The missions I have written need work, and players can of course just play similar missions from their wargame rulebook.
But the objectives are quite loose and mostly to destroy or force your opponent to take a morale check and retreat. The ‘Objectives’ are really defined by the map situation, not the scenario. A player could keep throwing units at the enemy if they wished and had the numbers.
Might be wise to keep some elements of your formation as reserves though. If the whole formation gets destroyed, you lose a commander which are very important.

It certainly needs refining and streamlining though  – I’ve had almost 200 downloads in 2 days since the alpha was launched so hoping some feedback speeds that process up 🙂

Re: Losing, rare battles.

Yep, I feel you! I’m much the same. I think that the system I described above may mean there will be some turns without fighting – players will need to pick their fights. If you lose your whole formation you also lose a lot of map control as each formation has a ZOC that blocks enemy movement. There are some exceptions – If you invest and train a whole formation to be a Recce unit, they can ignore ZoC – great for sneaking around and causing havoc in the enemies rear.

Oh yeah- I’m going to make a Vassal module, since this game can effectively be a board game too. I’ll be able speed up play testing then too! Can be handy to track campaigns.

Cool well I hope you enjoy LI if you play that! LI is very killy. Things die quickly. How are your campaigns going for battletech?

• This reply was modified 1 day, 22 hours ago by brutalcities.

[greyhunter88 1658xp 0]

We’re currently playing through the Hot Spots: Hinterlands campaign system, which sits pretty much between what you’ve written and the very bare bones campaign systems you were trying to improve upon.

You create a Mercenary company and train up pilots, hire and repair ‘Mechs, and pay maintenance and travel fees. All that fun stuff, but it’s all handled by a generic “Supply Points” system, rather than needing to micromanage technical resources, transportation availability, etc.
What’s cool is that the “Hot Spots” are these unique little story planets that have some unique contracts and mechanics that you play in. For example one we just played had local warlords fighting over control, so in each mission we were reinforced by a bunch of free infantry and other low-tier forces. It’s nothing too crazy but it’s definitely a lot more interesting than pick-up games, to me.

We’ve also done the full Campaign Operations mode for BattleTech, and I don’t really recommend it. Even using Excel to automate most of it, so much was more trouble than it was worth. Some things are needlessly complex, and other things are surprisingly easy, and overall it was just way too much work. It was fun as a roleplaying game campaign, but definitely too much for weekly wargaming.

As for Legions Imperialis, if it’s that killy it sounds like a perfect excuse to stress-test your casualty rules!

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