Campaign System

[Mad Russian]

Leto]

I never stand in the way of valid and reliable empirical data. Nevertheless, I would presume that we haven't exhausted all our options. I'd like to take a closer look at your framework. I doubt I can add anything helpful, but an extra set of eyes never hurts.

One of the things that was not done was to see what would happen in later battles. For one thing the defender cannot run forever. You can only give up so much ground before you have to defend SOMETHING or give the attacker his objectives and he wins.

So what is happening here then? Why not just play it out and watch the battles start to take on more and more combat?

There is that factor. What I see happening is an actually realistic event. The defender starts piling more and more troops in the line. He pulls back and consolidates. As he does he gets more troops in defensive positions at the start of the battles instead of later/not at all.

This will have the effect of the battles getting larger and larger as the campaign moves further towards completion. There is a set limit to the size of battles that an administrator will accept. When that limit is hit then the battles are fought with those forces. The attacker determines what goes into this battle from his side. The defender may send in reinforcements depending on the map location of his un-engaged units.

The question is...

are you all willing to fight through a series of extremely unbalanced actions in the beginning to get to the more fierce fighting later on?

While battles will not take more than 30 days under any circumstance!!!

That still leaves a period of several months(actual time) of withdrawls possibly before the actual heavy fighting starts up.

The real operations come in three phases.

1) The initial assault where specific points in the enemy defense are overwhelmed.

2) The exploitation of the broken line normally with mechanized forces of some sort. Move as far and fast as you can before the enemy responds.

3) The re-establishment of another defensive line with the enemy bringing in fresh troops, use of terrain, your own losses limiting further offensive action.

That should happen here as well. The playtesting we did modeled only the first phase of this process to see if the system would work.

It does.

With regards to the decision making structure, I would hope that it would be team based with an overarching team leader or Field Marshall (complete with at least one batman of course). Further to that, there isn't much more I can add.

LMK if there is anything specific that I may be able to do to help.

Cheers!

Leto

In this particular case Bootie and I were the single commanders. We sent out the battle orders and assigned them to players to fight.

I should have thought about the need for a Batman!!!

It was discussed that the TOAW bunch of gamers be brought in to do that level. I personally would rather the CM players get to do that part as well.

If there is enough interest we can continue to develop the system.

The maps are not an issue. Both the tactical maps and the operational maps can be done without much problem. Once a battle location has a map then it keeps that map from then on until the operation is over.

Good Hunting.

MR