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2021/09/29 18:53:18
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Okay, so I've wanted to do something like this since I started the hobby and now I've got enough models and friends that play 40k that I think I can. While I've organized campaigns before, they've never been anywhere near the scope and scale that I'm planning this one for, this will literally take years to play and I'm so excited! That being said, I'd love to get some feedback from large campaign vets on my thought process, common issues for large campaigns I may not be aware of, and a few specific things I'll list at the end.
The background: The Corialus system lies deep within the Damocles Gulf and as such has been oft cut off from the Imperium and been forced to take care of its own matters for large stretches of time. This isolation has served it well however, and Corialus has maintained good its relationship with distant Terra all while reaping the benefits of being beneath the notice of most of the major players in the galaxy. Corialus III is the major industrial center of the region, supplying most of the arms and armaments required to protect their small corner of the galaxy, so when Commander Farsight looks to expand his Enclaves in that direction, he knows that Corialus III must be taken for victory to be possible. The planet itself will be a long hard battle, but ultimately, victory will be decided upon the moon of Ibix that supplies bountiful food to both Corialus III and the rest of the sub-sector. If Farsight can take control of the Imperial supplies coming out of Ibix while engaging the main Imperial army on the planet below, he can starve them of supplies and assure victory.
The campaign takes place solely on the moon of Ibix with the battle for Corialus III serving simply as the backdrop. The Imperial forces will be composed mostly of Astra Militarum regiments, but will be supplemented by some small Space Marine, AdMech, and Sisters forces with the total PL at 50,000 across the entire moon. The Tau player will start in orbit, also having 50,000 PL and have to begin the campaign by establishing beachheads across the moon.
Victory is the campaign is achieved (currently) in one of three ways. a) Provide enough relief to the planet below to turn the war in your favour (this will be done by a scoring system based on the number of intact towns and farming regions an army has secured), b) eliminating enough of the opposing command structure that their army breaks down, c) Tau capturing the Imperial Capital City and killing the Planetary Governor, or the Imperium Capturing / destroying the orbiting Tau ship.
As both factions are attempting to secure new supply lines, any battles inside of towns or cities have a change to damage them and reduce the number of points that you score from them until the can slowly be re-built.
Regiments / Tau Colations will gain exp rather than individual units and use a system similar to Crusade. Unique / High Ranking characters will still gain exp on their own.
Current fatality system idea is that at the end of a game you roll for each model "killed" On a 1-2 the model is dead, on a 3-4 it is badly wounded and will need to recover before being fielded again. There will be a -1 to the roll if you were overrun and had to retreat. Space Marines get +1 to the roll because, well they're Space Marines, and will be comparatively few in number for the campaign. Units within the companies then redistribute to make as many "full" squads as possible. If one is under half strength, it is split up and the other squads spread out the excess.
So, here are a few things I'd like some insight on:
Making Leadership important on a Macro Scale: I've already got an idea on how I want to tweak Ld on the tabletop, but I wanted something with a broader scope as well. I was thinking something relating to the reputation of the current force commander based on their record in the war so far, but I'm unsure of what actual benefits or negatives to give from that score.
Off table strategic support: How best to implement things like Basilisk artillery that is off table, to Air Strikes and Deep Striking units.
Possibility of incorporating other game modes: "Apoc" is just going to be bigger 40k since due to wanting to keep the moons resources in one piece Titanic units will be VERY scarce. However, I'm trying to think of a way to incorporate Kill Team and maybe Aeronautica Imperialis to the game as well.
Logistical Challenges: I want to find a way to make the Logistical challenges of fielding a large army come across on the macro scale, giving players the chance to cut supply lines or gather/prevent valuable intel, things like that.
Secondary Objectives: Things like Hospitals, production facilities, sensor towers, ect. How would be a good way to have them effect things on a macro scale. Hospitals are pretty easy, just buff the recovery rate of wounded units that are there, but I know there are plenty of strategic assets I'm not thinking of that could be important.
Other general advice: I'm basically just diving in face first and hoping that I can swim here, so any advice at all that could help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time and help with this.
Armies:
2021/09/29 19:09:29
Subject: Re:Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Here's an unfinished concept I started a few months back. Feel free to peruse and pluck things out you like. It was being built with "large scale combat" in mind. However, if you plan for this to take years, you may want to find a way to accommodate changing rules/codexes/editions. Nothing sucks more than when a crucial unit suddenly gets a massive buff, massive nerf, fulfills a totally different purpose, gets put into legends, or whole new units appear and you have no way of adding them.
Spoiler:
- Players have a set roster. They can split their forces up into different armies. Each army MUST be led by a Warlord.- Players get requisition points at a steady flow. These are spent for most "campaign board" actions, such as improving or repairing units, purchasing new Warlords, or pushing armies beyond their normal limits.- Armies normally only move 1 hex at a time.- Different detachments provide unique bonuses.- Relics and additional campaign resources appear randomly on the map.
- Battles are fought as normal, but with modifications, like different primary scoring, additional secondaries that impact the campaign state, and additional damage to forces that lose the battle.
WARMASTERS & CHARACTERS:
- At the start of the campaign, you must purchase a Character unit to be your Warmaster. Your Warmaster is a Warlord, but if the Warmaster is slain, you lose the campaign.
- Only Characters in this campaign can be Warlords.
- You cannot have duplicates of any Characters in this campaign.
- You cannot take Named Characters in this campaign.
REQUISITION POINTS:
- Activating an alternate deployment "zone" costs 1 Requisition Point (ex. if your army contains any units that can be set up "in the teleportarium", then all such units that can be set up "in the teleportarium" may access this deployment method during the battle at the cost of 1 Requisition Point, though other units that can be set up "in orbit" may not do so unless an additional Requisition Point is spent).
- An army can be set to Forced March for 1 Requisition Point. If you do so, the army can move an extra hex. However, when it does so, its units become exhausted and reduce their WS, BS, and Movement by 1 until the next Crusade Round.
- An army can be set to Fortify for 1 Requisition Point. The army doesn't move any hexes this turn, and its units have the benefit of cover until the 2nd battle round if it takes part in a battle this Crusade Round.
- Otherwise, Requisition Points are earned 1 per Crusade Round before any other actions or events occur.
FORMING ARMIES:
- New units are purchased at the end of a Crusade Round after all other actions and events have occured.
- When new units are purchased, they must be added to an army either at or adjacent to your Headquarters.
- An army is formed when a Character is purchased and placed on an empty hex.
- An army may be organized into any number of Detachments whenever a new unit is added to that army. Existing Detachments can be disbanded so that the units contained within them can become part of a different Detachment at that time.
- If an army contains more than 1 Character, then it can split from the current army, taking any number of units from that army with it, for 1 Requisition Point. The new army cannot move further this Crusade round.
USING ARMIES:- Armies can move 1 hex per Crusade round.
- If an army moves into a hex that either has an army under their control, or from which that army moved from, then a battle takes place with the army that moved into the conflicted zone being the attacker. If both armies would be the attacker, the attacker is randomly determined.
- Every detachment brought to a battle must have its CP cost paid for, otherwise that detachment may not take part in the battle.
- If an army is victorious in a battle, it completes its move, and the defeated army cannot complete its move. If the defeated army would be in the hex that the victorious army was moving into, then the victorious army chooses 1 hex for the defeated army to be moved into instead.
- When an army is defeated, any units within it that take an Out of Action test do so at a -1 modifier, and are permanently destroyed on a roll of 0.
ARMY SPECIAL ABILITIES:
- If an army is composed solely of Outrider Detachments and/or Air Wings, it can be set to Forced March for no Crusade Point cost, and doesn't suffer any penalties for doing so.
- If an army is composed solely of Spearhead Detachments and/or Super Heavy Detachments, it can be set to Fortify for no Crusade Point cost, and can do so even if it moved this turn.
BATTLE MAP MODIFICATIONS:- If multiple armies are adjacent to a single, shared enemy detachment, then your opponent must declare one of your two detachments to be the engaged detachment. The other detachment must be put into strategic reserves, though this costs no command points to do.
- Acid Wastes: Industrial waste has been dumped here for centuries, resulting in a toxic and corrosive environment. Units cannot receive the benefit of cover in battles that take place in this region.
- Bunker Network: An army in this territory receives a free Bastion in addition to their other forces if it engages in combat.
- Critical Location: A random location not in your territory every turn is a Critical Location for your forces. Critical Locations remain until claimed.
- Reinforcement Zone: These will randomly appear on the map and remain for 2-5 Crusade Rounds, or until utilized. When utilized, a Reinforcement Zone counts as your Headquarters for the purposes of adding additional units to an army during the turn it is utilized. A Reinforcement Zone is automatically utilized the Crusade Round it is encountered.
SECONDARIES
:- Wrath and Ruin: At the end of the battle, score 2 victory points for each enemy unit destroyed, to a maximum of 6 victory points. At the end of the battle, each enemy unit you destroyed rolls an additional Out of Action test, and subtracts 1 from the result as if that player had lost the battle.
- Covered Retreat: Score 3 victory points each time one of your units completes the following action; Retreat - One of your units may perform this action at the start of your movement phase if it is wholly within a number of inches of any board edge equal to that unit's Movement characteristic. Remove this unit from the battlefield. It counts as destroyed, but automatically passes any Out of Action tests it would be called upon to make at the end of the battle.
-
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/09/29 19:10:11
Galef wrote: If you refuse to use rock, you will never beat scissors.
2021/09/29 19:29:20
Subject: Re:Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Yarium wrote: Here's an unfinished concept I started a few months back. Feel free to peruse and pluck things out you like. It was being built with "large scale combat" in mind. However, if you plan for this to take years, you may want to find a way to accommodate changing rules/codexes/editions. Nothing sucks more than when a crucial unit suddenly gets a massive buff, massive nerf, fulfills a totally different purpose, gets put into legends, or whole new units appear and you have no way of adding them.
Thanks a bunch. Yeah, since Tau/Guard are both 8th ed still, we're going to use those until both have 9th codices. The other factions will have a small enough footprint that I don't think it will effect the grand scheme of things.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/09/29 19:29:50
Armies:
2021/09/29 19:48:02
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
One source I'd recommend grabbing is "At the Sharp End" - it's a ladder campaign construction guide for Chain of Command (a world war 2 wargame) that includes a lot of what you are looking for. However, to be more specific:
1) Obviously intended to be a map campaign, that's pretty cool but you'll have to figure out "map turns" (or, alternatively, just let the most active players take the most actions on the map, but this can be a problem for groups where people WANT to participate but can't due to life).
2) Fatality system I would limit to big models (or half-units or something). Rolling this for 200 guardsmen sounds super tedious if 150 of them died.
3) your point on Macro-Scale Leadership is where the COC example struck me. There's three "leadership levels" in COC that matter outside the game:
a) "Commander's Opinion" - this is the opinion of your higher command and affects the number of Support Points (i.e. non-organic (or non-"core" perhaps in 40k) units you can take.
b) "Your Opinion" - the most controversial, this is just a scale for how well your platoon commander (yourself) thinks you're doing in the campaign. This is the easiest to scrap.
c) "The Men's Opinion" - this is the opinion of your subordinates in the campaign. Losing opinion with them generates lower Force Morale (essentially total army leadership value); in 40k, this could be done by reducing the Leadership score of every unit on the board. Just some thoughts.
4) Off-Table Strategic Support could be done any number of ways, but having it affected by the "Commander's Opinion" (or what you are calling Macro-Leadership) might make it interesting, especially if you want off-table things to be very important or effective.
5) Mega-game integration is hard, especially if you intend to run them in parallel rather than in series. I have found out that if you want to determine air-superiority (for example) for a 40k battle, you can fight a Aeronautica battle before hand. Directly integrating in "real time" is very difficult to impossible.
6) Logistical challenges will be fed by the map campaign; a super simple one is a unit that has no Line of Communication through the map back to a friendly logistics hub (town, I suppose) gradually loses supplies. What the effect of those lost supplies is can be flexible depending on the scale you want the game to be at - everything from -1 LD because they don't have their Rum Ration to a loss of access to wargear and certain stratagems due to a critical shortage of something.
7) There are TONS of important strategic targets. Orbital C2 stations like SOSI sites that interface with the ability of the force to communicate with its orbital support, ISR fusion sites to allow players to see past the fog-of-war (see the contents of far away map tiles for example), Operations C2 nodes that affect the ability of the players to communicate with others on their team (for example, if you have an "attack, enemy must declare defense" type system, you don't allow the players to select who is defending; simply randomize it or the like). There's tons of these.
8) Honestly, for your first attempt, this is GIGANTIC and I'd recommend slowing it way down and starting small. COC's At The Sharp End is a ladder campaign for 2 players with about a company of men each, and addresses some of the same things you're concerned with (e.g. the fatality of individual models) at 50,000 power level which is absolutely bonkers. More power to you if you can do it, but my STRONGEST advice would be slow down and take a small bite of designing campaigns first.
2021/09/29 19:56:20
Subject: Re:Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
I'll echo what Unit said about managing expectations.
Everyone wants to do a super big campaign but the reality is that the bigger you go the harder to manage it will be.
50k Power is something that I literally can't even visualize as a concept. How many people are involved in this? A Warlord is the largest and most expensive unit in 40k and your Power limit would allow 181 Warlord Titans. I don't even think there's that many Warlords in actual40k background.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/09/29 19:57:05
2021/09/29 20:28:22
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Not wishing to stifle your creativity, but I can only echo what has been said already: you’re being very ambitious in terms of the scale of this operation.
I also can’t help but feel you’re going to be playing a lot of Tau vs Imperial Guard battles. I know Space Marines and Sisters are also involved but as you said yourself the main opposition is Tau and IG. Don’t you feel that after a few months of this things will get a bit repetitive?
I would understand the scale of it more if you were planning to use other gaming systems, like Epic 6mm or Battlefleet Gothic. Both should be achievable by using third party models rather than tracking down expensive second hand GW models. If you don’t want to include systems other than 28mm 40K that’s fine, it just brings me back to my earlier point of playing a lot of the same game.
I just think if you dial down your ambition the odds of actually completing this campaign will increase dramatically.
2021/09/29 21:21:19
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
I'll take a look at CoC for sure, that sounds like exactly the kind of inspiration I'm looking for.
Yeah, it is a map campaign, the current plan for movement is to have all players move in secret (with the possibility of a "second movement phase" that allows redeployment based on intel). If two moving armies clash, they are both treated as the "attacker" but where one is attaching a unit group that didn't move it is an attacker/defender scenario.
You may think this is crazy, but 50,000 PL was me downsizing it through veto of being the organizer. XD The original plan was to do a planetary campaign while making it somewhat realistic in terms of forces committed, but it just got absurdly large, so I changed the setting to a small moon and capped it at 50,000 PL (It's working out to about 40-50 Guard Regiments + support units and armour if you want a comparison to the Titans)(For a real world comparison, that's about 85,000 infantry, plus support, about 2/3rds of what was deployed on D-Day to protect a whole moon). Not all of these will be fighting at once of course, these will be all the units stretched across the entire moon of Ibix, most of which wont even be fighting in every battle round. Most battles will be 50-100PL, for engagements over a wider front, they will be broken down into a separate game for each portion of the front.
As for the time to play, I'll be fighting for the Imperium and my best friend for over two decades will be playing Tau. I'm designing it so that it will work with additional players coming and going, but still function even if it's only the two of us. We're also still wrapping up our current campaign which will take at least the rest of the year, so I'm not rushing this by any means. Going to plan it through for sure.
We're considering making a Youtube series for the campaign, but not too sure about that yet.
This message was edited 5 times. Last update was at 2021/09/29 21:44:24
Armies:
2021/09/29 21:44:18
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
This is for 2 people? OK you need to just drop the 50k Power thing. You will literally never get near it, ever. I get what you're trying to do from a narrative POV but honestly there's no reason to have a Power cap, especially not one that high. At most you want to make sure teams are balanced if other players want to join in.
2021/09/29 21:46:17
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Gert wrote: This is for 2 people? OK you need to just drop the 50k Power thing. You will literally never get near it, ever. I get what you're trying to do from a narrative POV but honestly there's no reason to have a Power cap, especially not one that high. At most you want to make sure teams are balanced if other players want to join in.
So the 50,000 is more of an abstract number of available forces that are spread around. They are deployed on the world map, but represent the total force of all players of that faction. This enables other players to bring in their own armies and play for different sections of the war. So if there are 2 or 10 Tau players, they still have the same number of total PL.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2021/09/29 21:47:57
Armies:
2021/09/30 13:22:49
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
I get that it's nice to have a force cap, but 50,000 is just mind-boggling. That's like 1700 Baneblade tanks. (Which, if we take the Departmento Munitorum estimations seriously, is like 85 Imperial Guard regiments worth of combat power)
2021/09/30 16:59:04
Subject: Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
This sounds like exactly the type of thing I'm into- my own campaign is huge- overly ambitious in fact.
I really liked the Streets of Death system from 8th ed's Urban Conquest- it divides the territories into a 5 x 5 grid. I found it didn't give enough flavour to the territories, so I invented a bunch. I also felt that the 5 x 5 arrangement was great for a hive or a city... So I built multiple 5 x 5 grid STC cities (shake and bake colonies, to quote Aliens) and spread them across different continents of the various planets in the sub-sector where the campaign takes place.
Mixing game sizes is easier now than ever- for many armies, a 25 PL force isn't a lot bigger than a kill team. And now that the base rules provide mission support for games up to 3k, escalation in the base game is baked right in.
Personally, I love Crusade, and I find it's great for campaigns- others who have commented will disagree. Both points of view are valid- it all depends on what you're looking for out of a game.
As for the 50k limit: it can work if you use it as an abstract number of points from which casualties can be replaced. You can make that as simple or complex as you want to- you could just have it as a 50k pool, or you could allocate the 50k at the planet level, the continent level, the city level or the territory level.
Reinforcements from the pool can take longer to arrive; in the same city? Replace your casualties for the very next game, with no counterplay possible. Off planet? Might take a game or two playing with a depleted force before the reinforcements arrive, and it maybe subject to random Warp Fluctuation or enemy blockade.
2021/10/01 01:18:35
Subject: Re:Advice Requested for organizing a MASSIVE Campaign
Since you asked, here is my unsolicited old timer advice.
The most important rule of gaming is keep it simple.
So you want to do a map based campaign? Then here is my suggestion.
-Fight one small battle (maybe even a skirmish game like kill team) to determine "initiative." The winner picks a spot on the map and gets to attack it.
-Now do a super small tree campaign. Three battles. Win two out of three games to either hold onto (defender) or take control of (attacker) the territory. If one side wins all three games they keep the initiative and get to attack a spot on the map. If one side winds two games then you have to fight another small battle/skirmish to determine which side is launching the next attack on the map.
-Rinse and repeat until one side has taken control of all the strategic sectors on your map or one side gives up. If you want to add some complexity than assign certain bonuses for who ever controls a sector.
"Iz got a plan. We line up. Yell Waaagh, den krump them in the face. Den when we're done, we might yell Waagh one more time." Warboss Gutstompa
That being said, I'd love to get some feedback from large campaign vets on my thought process, common issues for large campaigns I may not be aware of, and a few specific things I'll list at the end.
