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I've played in a few map campaigns. Most notably, I've played in the map campaign sold
by GW and it made me wonder, how do map campaigns work, really?

I ask because after a while a lot of interest gets lost for me as one player clearly
becomes the rolling victor, and the losing players lose more and more ground until
they have no real reason to play. What kinds of game rules do you put in place to
make map campaigns work for multiple players?

G'day - In the campaign map game im playing, I tried to take the focus off of simply winning territory. To win the game, a person needs to either a) collect all territories, or b) collect 5 'secret items' - that may randomly appear in any battle, regardless of how many territories are held.

Last one I was in, we had different territories that gave out differnt things.

You start out with your base army, both sides had a HQ guy, two squads of troops and then it escelated, based on the game and direction you went on the map.

By the end, we ended up with a number of different allies, extra units, and special terrain pieces that ended up being objectives.

One notable for me was when my IG took over an orbital relay with the inquistor model that was hiding inside, holding out. He ended up being a guy I won after the game.

Another was the Terminator squad that joined the army after the fact, I ended up buying models for them and they started showing up as an add on to the game in the form of my reserves for that campaign.

Basicly there was a start of 6-8 different players that put up a couple of bucks each and the pot went to buying different things after the battles, based on the winner.

You do something like that when you have a good solid structured game and that you know all of the players. I really don't think it would work if some shmoe off the street just walked in and started playing.

Games like this are for fun. These are the kind of games that I started playing for. Because win lose or draw, people got something, or bought something based on thier performance in the game. I ended up playing in this one for a couple of months, and let me tell you how fast time passes when your having some sort of fun like that one.

We tried the same thing for fantasy, but there was a different dynamic to that one then 40K. We based the fantasy campaign off of a combination of an Old world map from the hogshead RP game, and Mighty Empires ( the old boxed set, not that new crap.)
The fantasy one ended up self destructing, based on the same issue that you had mentioned in the op. The winner eventually overshadowed the other players, and even if you tried to combine against him, it didn't work out so well. Partly because of the instability of the game, partly because of the armies.

Last one I ran, a captured territory was not safe from being stolen by someone else.

You could elect to leave a garrison in place (in which case your territory became harder to conquer AND they had to play a game against your army and WIN to get it off you).

If you didn't, then taking it was a simple die-roll.

Different territories had different effects and bonuses.

Logistics is what often makes a campaign difficult for the winning side.

As they advance, their line of supply gets longer and more difficult to sustain.

More supplies and troops are tied up just in maintaining communications.

The loser is pushed back towards his base and his supply problems are eased.

Logistics is hugely important in war however it is quite boring so any logistic rules added need to be as simple as possible.

This can be done by allocating each side a fixed number of points per turn which are spent to maintain existing forces, bring in reinforcements, and maintain control of the hexes/areas which have been conquered.

On the supply line thought, you could simply make it so you lose a very small amount of points from the battle dependent on the amount of land you gained since the beginning of the campaign

Example: Player X starts with 3 hexes. Over the corse of a few games, he wins 2 extra hexes from player Y. Player X now has to pay for the supply lines in the area so loses 10/50/100 (choose depending on map size) points from each battle for each of these new hexes.

But as player Y loses hexes he started with, he gains 10/50/100 extra points for battles in his orgininaly hexes.

Battles fought over hexes that didn't start originaly with player Y don't get bonus points.

malfred wrote:I've played in a few map campaigns. Most notably, I've played in the map campaign sold
by GW and it made me wonder, how do map campaigns work, really?

I ask because after a while a lot of interest gets lost for me as one player clearly
becomes the rolling victor, and the losing players lose more and more ground until
they have no real reason to play. What kinds of game rules do you put in place to
make map campaigns work for multiple players?

My experience on that front is that you have to make players' "empires" (for want of a more accurate term) be resilient so that a loss here or there doesn't crush them. One way is to restrict how fast you can lose territories. The original Mighty Empires did a good job of that with the "yearly reset" of forces. Another way is to have a % of losing armies actually survive, even the models that were "killed". Say, for instance, roll a d6 for each killed model and on, say, a 4+ it is returned to play for the next battle. Another is to make the points pool deep enough that a few losses are killer. Yet another is to have an army consist of a points total, but not specific units. That lets people re-tune their armies and not get locked into one list. One last one is to make sure that not all battles are fought to the death. Victory condition missions are handy in that regard.

To make the game interesting, you can give special benefits to the winners of battles, but you need to keep the games competative. You need to make winning important, but not the be all and end all.

Hope that helps. A good campaign is VERY hard to run, but it's also arguably the among the best experiences wargaming has to offer.

Valete,

JohnS

One thing I've seen work was to make only the very last battle be the one to determine the winner. However all of the battles leading up to it will affect that battle, such as giving more strategic assets to the side that seized important installations. Things like taking control of the space station allows re-rolls of scatter dice for deep striking. Having control of a hill overlooking the final battle allows for off-board artillery support. Controlling a communications hub allows one leadership test per turn to be rerolled. Controlling an ancient site of psychic power allows all failed psychic tests to be rerolled. Things that will affect the final battle significantly, but not mean an auto-win.Granted this was used for a TEAM campaign comprised of two teams of four, but I believe it could be implemented to a regular campaign. It worked wonderfully as we were able to culminate the campaign in a monster apocalypse game.

JourneyPsycheOut wrote:One thing I've seen work was to make only the very last battle be the one to determine the winner. However all of the battles leading up to it will affect that battle, such as giving more strategic assets to the side that seized important installations. Things like taking control of the space station allows re-rolls of scatter dice for deep striking. Having control of a hill overlooking the final battle allows for off-board artillery support. Controlling a communications hub allows one leadership test per turn to be rerolled. Controlling an ancient site of psychic power allows all failed psychic tests to be rerolled. Things that will affect the final battle significantly, but not mean an auto-win.Granted this was used for a TEAM campaign comprised of two teams of four, but I believe it could be implemented to a regular campaign. It worked wonderfully as we were able to culminate the campaign in a monster apocalypse game.

So the last battle becomes a major clusterfeth?

It does, buts its a fun clusterfeth. Properly planned apocalypse games are loads of fun. We had the board set up a week in advance so teams had ample time to plan their deployments and basic strategy and determine their strategic assets.

Hi Malf,

I've been running a long-term Map campaign for over a year now (see the Batreps section for the action reports). I found keeping it fairly simple and having two distinct sides was the key. Feel fee to PM me and I'll send you out the rules and map we have been (pretty sucessfully) using.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Setting-wargames-campaign-Including-adaptions/dp/B0007AHYZM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275545608&sr=1-1

Unfortunately it seems to be out of print, however you could probably find a copy on eBay or Abe's Books.

We haven't yet, as it happens.

One thing I will be trying is instead of going "Campaign, pick a side, X-thousand points, go!" it'll be done more like our Dark Heresy Campaign. The basic idea will be:

1. There is a pre-determined setting (ie. where they are fighting, how the war started, and so on).
2. The setting will determine what forces are available (ie. for our first one it will be Marines, Guard, Tau, Eldar, Orks and Chaos - no other forces allowed).
3. Everyone comes up with a plausible explanation for the forces they're bringing, why they'd be there (within the context of the given setting), as well as a few key characters who will be leading their forces.
4. Each player makes an army. No FOC. No points limit. They bring what they think makes sense for the fluff of their army in context with the setting. Someone can bring a nice 2000 point list, a small 800 point list, or go crazy and bring a 10,000 list filled with Titans. Up to them.
5. Campaign map determines where they can fight.
6. Each major location has scenarios written for it (ie. the run-down space port will either be a defensive mission if someone holds it, or more a chance encounter if two players meet on that tile at the same time).
7. Missions are not balanced. Sometimes one player will out-number another, sometimes a mission will be specific about what you can take (ie. take roughly half 1/2 your army, or , choose 6 units from your army, etc.)
8. And, most importantly, don't treat it like a tournament.

Would some of you guys who've successfully run these types of campaigns post up the rules that you used? I think I speak for more than a few of us when I say that we'd appreciate it a lot.

THe one I ran worked really well until I had to move due to a job relocation.

Map was broken up into different sectors. At the start everyone got a set number of sectors that must be next to each other. They then picked one section to be their base of operations. This is important because once you lost your Base you lost the campaign.

Each turn players received 100 Resource Points (RP) for each section. These can be used to purchased reinforcement units, or factories. Reinforcements can only enter play from Bases or factories.

Each player would have a push pins that represented 500pts of units, and they could have up to 4 pins in one sector (so the most you would play is a 2000pt game). After each battle For every 500 VP's an army lost, it would lose one pin from that section. Round down.