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Long time ago(well more like 10 years ago) when I had 6mm russians and brits for cold war era I got my hands on bunch of micromark OOB's detailing real world division compositions for say russian tank division.

This was rather fun and led to campaign where we had 2 russian tank division and 3 russian motorized divisions(all understrenght as per OOB notes as russian divisions generally were understrength) in campaign against brit force composed of 1+2 divisions. Map movement, game battles, stuff was available only if you really had the unit and if unit got wiped out tough luck no more it. This resulted in situations like it british doing breakthrough attack against supporting artirelly wiping them out depriving russian forces from artirelly support for a while. Fun!

Got me inspired that might be fun doing something similar with 40k though as 2nd ed is more of platoon scaled I need to scale down a lot. But that's fine by me.

However are there much detailed OOB's available or do I need to make all up? Marines are fairly easy(I suppose like half a company could be used). IG isn't too hard either. But orks are bit of a ??? and what about eldar? Those are armies that will be involved at most(maybe not eldars since I don't have yet much models for them so representing any kind of force is hard).

GW codexes etc are pretty hopeless but whatabout FW books? Do they have any good numbers for say batallion sized forces?

You can find some stuff here and there, but the problem with doing a campaign like this in 40k is that most battles end with 90% or more of both armies destroyed (unless one side is getting wiped off the table by a stronger opponent, which is its own kind of bad). You'll very quickly have one or both sides run out of units and then the game stops being fun.

I think the Forgeworld books have some of that information, though its usually for specific battle campaigns (such as the Badab War). Might be some in the various Imperial Armour books as well.

 Peregrine wrote:
You can find some stuff here and there, but the problem with doing a campaign like this in 40k is that most battles end with 90% or more of both armies destroyed (unless one side is getting wiped off the table by a stronger opponent, which is its own kind of bad). You'll very quickly have one or both sides run out of units and then the game stops being fun.

That's why there's big reserves. It's not one thin line on map. Cold war commander resulted in pretty mauled sides often(well short of one side having attrocious rolling in command tests)

Also 2nd ed is bit less deadly especially since it's 4 turn games and stuff are moving less fast(basic movement for IG is for example 4", 8" if they forego shooting) and transports are death traps so rarely used. Less issues with alpha strikes with LOS ignoring stuff or drop pods coming down. With good amount of terrain and lack of D weapons stuff quick tabling don't happen.

Also did I mention if one side felt he was going to get mauled he might basically not even try to win but get away in good order. Basically give up battle but scenario would be one designed for fighting withdrawal. This also reduced casualties as getting outnumbered didn't mean neccessarily your entire force getting wiped.

While reserves exists games themselves tend to be reasonable(after all you just bring in reinforcements!). If one side runs out of reserves fast and it's clear it's going to be mobbing up...Well doesn't that sound to you "campaign won, time to start new one"? We obviously won't be playing campaign to "last ork standing wins" The old campaign was won by brits(grumble grumble) when they used gained artirelly superiority to do series of hit&run attacks against motorized battalions to deadly effect basically robbing russians of fast moving infantry. With basically only tanks and some foot slogging infantry left they were hard pressed to archieve strategic goal anymore so waved in white flag(retreat wasn't much of a option anyway except maybe for some tanks. With roaming british mechanized columns between you and home good luck foot slogging into safety!).

Yes it's not fun if you end up in situation where you can only bring in small token force against full size army but that's why armies are lot bigger than you field on table. However what campaign did result in:

a) you didn't simply field up best units all the time. There was only so many T-90's russian force HAD so if you ran out of them he had to deal with more numerous T-80's and T-72's. So you prioritized where you wanted to put in your T-90's.
b) you cared more about your troops and had to weight in "victory in this game or survival of unit" choices. At what point it's not worth taking a risk to win even at the expense of my units? In standard game who cares if succeeding in winning game means losing most of your army including HQ. You won! There's no drawback in it so go for it. Now you have to consider that "yes if I attempt this I MIGHT win this game but odds are good I lose one of my few land raiders in it".
c) it gave you characterful scenarios right off the bat. You broke through and sent in force to hunt down enemy artirelly support? To prevent reinforcements stopping that plan put in delaying forces between you and your spearhead! Or the above mentioned "fighting withdrawal".

Obviously campaign had it's own problems but overall it was great fun and don't see any critical "cannot do it" for 40k. Especially 2nd ed which isn't near as deadly. Also guess we could put in some sort of "5+ guy recovers". Maybe with extra penalty if you died in CC(on principle you are more certain to be securedly dead when getting mauled by power fist. Enemy can more easily check are you dead or wounded. Plus in 2nd ed getting to CC takes a while and wiping out large number of models in it is harder as well).

Maybe it fails, maybe it won't. Don't know until one has tried it!


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 Stormonu wrote:
I think the Forgeworld books have some of that information, though its usually for specific battle campaigns (such as the Badab War). Might be some in the various Imperial Armour books as well.

Specific campaigns would be just fine as it would give me some guide lines. The books are so expensive though that simply buying randomly hoping it MIGHT have what I look would be bit expensive though. That's why if somebody has one of those books that has good info I would appreciate if they would tell. Book price isn't unreasonable IF it has the info I need. It's less tempting idea to buy them blindly.

It seems like a good idea to force people to play "bad" unit / to play fuffy !

 godardc wrote:
It seems like a good idea to force people to play "bad" unit / to play fuffy !

Well that's not original goal(cold war commander had less issue of lousy balance) but does have that side effec too.

One of the russian motorized divisions actually had T-64 battalion. When there's already T-90's in the field(so circa 1990-2000) that old tank is HARDLY big threat But OOB so...

(incidentally I used it as part of 2nd line breakthrough unit. When primary task force broke through it would follow in and attack soft targets. Well that was the plan. Alas that spearhead attack got blunted and poor T-64's had to try to delay much more advanced brit tanks. As it is it failed which wasn't really much of a surprise seeing what kind of technological gap units had )

Another side effect is that transports gain new role. Since map movement speed is related to units you have if you are mechanized you go faster. So having your infantry mounted up in transports is very handy even if in game they aren't much more than bolter bunkers. Very handy in 2nd ed since transports are raw death traps. Nobody wants to keep anything inside a rhino if there's chance AT fire gets directed. Something we plan to fix though. Another thing we need to work out for this is offboard artirelly rules fit in with original campaign.

One crucial thing to add when doing a campaign like this with 40k is an after-action casualty roll. Give a chance that any infantry model that was removed as a casualty in the game was only lightly wounded and has recovered. Say on a 5+ the model comes back for the next battle, on a 3-4 the model is kept on a casualty list and rolled for again after the next battle (optional) and on a 1-2 the model is dead.

Do something similar for vehicles that are destroyed - maybe they weren't really destroyed, maybe they were lightly damaged and abandoned by their crew. Things like weapon destroyed and immobilized results could be repaired automatically between battles.

This keeps your standard 40k games from completely wiping out your force after the second battle.

It also gives you an added reason to keep a medic/techpriest etc alive if you have one. So if your medic/apothecary/dok survived the battle unscathed, or there's one in your reserve force, you could give yourself 5 re-rolls on your casualties (or whatever). Same for techpriests/techmarines/meks. Similar characters could be worked out for other factions.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I am sure Epic used to have an OOB for choosing armies from.

It was a very long time ago , and I have consumed many beers in the mean time .Can any one else remember this?

I would like to develop this for 40k if others would like to get involved? Make an open source rules system for this and have unique rules for each faction.

It would require playtesting for each army though, I would be able to do this for Eldar and have my cousin help with Imperium

PM if interested

My friends and I have been considering something like this as well. Namely a campaign style game with fixed armies and more reasonable OOBs.

We're likely going to start with a large points value for the overall army, say 10-15,000 points. This will be broken into X number of armies (probably five). Army lists will be composed prior to beginning a campaign. Army values will not be disclosed until engagements. Some basic premises we'll be using:

-Some form of recovery mechanism for vehicles and losses...essentially allowing an army to withdraw and not be completely wiped out.

-Armies which are completely mobile (mounted in vehicles or bikes etc.) will move two spaces on the campaign map vs. one for mixed units.

-Reserves will be units which are able to infiltrate and deepstrike and may be kept separate from the five main armies. So if a small force runs into a big force that player would be able to request (perhaps use a dice roll) additional units in drop pods, deepstriking, etc.

-Special characters will be removed if they die during combat and may not be used again, etc.

-Certain locations on the campaign map will aid various types of units/armies/reinforcements/recovery rolls etc.

Hopefully we'll be using a bunch of non-traditional scenarios so that an army will have to be balanced in order to stand a chance of succeeding in certain scenarios. There are a lot of excellent ways to do this and use this.

Failing the availability of proper OOBs you can simply make a reasonable force organization chart for your own use.