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brainpsyk wrote:
I remember going thru the forums for the 13th BC campaign for the forces of order, and it was a mess.

But I put that on GW. In my 30 years playing 40k, I find the Imperium players (painting with broad strokes here) are the people wanting to be "the hero", not heroes, just the singular hero. While Xenos/Chaos players are there for the anarchy, and if organizing causes more anarchy, then they're all in. Whereas in an actual Imperial WZ, there really would be 1 person in charge (Logan Grimnar, IIRC), which never really materialized/galvanized into a single team/person because of the hero syndrome. So GW expecting unity in the Imperium player base was asking too much.

It really is kinda funny how flipped the psychology of the campaign was. Imperium being disorganized while ostensibly under the orders of a single leader. But FoDisorder were organized, but the lore has their campaigns failing because their warbands constantly go off to do their own thing.

I actually can see the Imperium being fragmented (and a mechanic that allows for less numerous factions to win) as being a necessity for any world wide campaign to work, or rather the Imperium must have factions or goals that take them in different directions or pit them against each other as otherwise the player numbers are just too imbalanced. All the campaigns before and since were Imperial victories without any real moment of doubt as they were straight number grinds of who could post more wins, and since more players meant more wins posted per day, the Imperium won all of those handily. For these campaigns it was to be honest pointless for the opposition side as they were doomed to be overwhelmed, as Imperium + Eldar overwhelmed all others. Eldar were and maybe still are the most numerous xenos faction by players.

Ideas could be things like Mechanicus wants archeotech buried with a dead hero of the Ecclesiarchy or SoB, but the SoB see this as disturbing the dead. The SoB whipping populations into a heretic hunting frenzy even if this disrupts production and causes damage to worlds and populations. Badab War style SM chapters siding along different lines etc...

In terms of background I see command councils as not unusual for the Imperium as there are so many different organizations involved, from Guard to SMs to SoBs and Mechanicus Tech-Priests. In the background though, often times it is a SM or Inquisitor that effectively takes charge, possibly because narratively it is also easier to write for a singular character rather than faceless groups.

This cannot be counted on to work in RL world wide campaigns because too many big egos and people wanting to be the chief. The Forces of Disorder got mostly organized around several key groups and key figures like the Triad, who got credibility due to figuring out the threshold effect.

@Iracandus: excellent breakdown and analysis of the EOT campaign.

As a member of the chaos Triad (I was Taumarshal on the EOT forums), I was amazed at how quickly the disorder side got organized after I asked for for everyone to post their wins to a single planet for one day to trigger a "knock on" effect.

As far as the disorganization among the order players, I know for a fact that there were people from the Planetkiller group that had created fake forum accounts on the order side to spread disinformation about the system-wide triggers and encouraged the competing leadership structures (including posting fake event cards suggesting that the Dark Angels were traitors and their results secretly counted for disorder and not order).

Waaaaghmaster wrote:
@Iracandus: excellent breakdown and analysis of the EOT campaign.

As a member of the chaos Triad (I was Taumarshal on the EOT forums), I was amazed at how quickly the disorder side got organized after I asked for for everyone to post their wins to a single planet for one day to trigger a "knock on" effect.

As far as the disorganization among the order players, I know for a fact that there were people from the Planetkiller group that had created fake forum accounts on the order side to spread disinformation about the system-wide triggers and encouraged the competing leadership structures (including posting fake event cards suggesting that the Dark Angels were traitors and their results secretly counted for disorder and not order).

Greetings to one of the Triad.

I think the organization of Disorder was bolstered by the successful discovery and test of the threshold or "knock on" effect, first at St. Josmane's Hope, then Vigilatum.

I do not know how much success the attempts at fomenting chaos and disorder among the Order forums actually had, so I did not delve into speculation in my write-up. There are already Order players eager to seize upon that as a form of cheating to explain away their defeat. However I can say that as someone that was not directly active in any group and only just reading the GW forums at the time, I could clearly see where the best place to post wins would be. It was not that hard and the map control % was public knowledge to both sides so I am personally a bit skeptical of the overall effect of those attempts at forum disinformation. What was more confusing to me anyway was whose side the Necrons were supposed to be on. They were seemingly listed as Disorder, yet at least one event card showed the Necrons falling upon Chaos (and the event card aided Imperials), so I recall even some Necron players being unsure which side their wins would count for.

FWIW I played Tyranids and Eldar (for the Webway war). My one notable contribution was arguing that Disorder should not dump wins on Cadia on the penultimate day in response to the card:

The Final Push 8/30/2003 10:14:10 PM CHAOS
Abaddon concentrates his forces onto and around Cadia, determined that the Cadian Gate should fall to his hands. Every inch of the planet is consumed by total war, and it is only a matter of days before the fate of Cadia is sealed forever. The forces of Chaos surge into the Cadian gate, committing every man, daemon, mutant and cultist to the downfall of this bastion of the Imperial defence. Play this card to bolster the Chaos war effort upon Cadia once and for all.

My argument ran along the lines of saying that if it took roughly 300 net wins over Order to shift 0.1% on Cadia, even if the Event Card doubled or even tripled the value of Disorder wins it would still be a tiny Imperial Control shift compared to the 5% of a threshold effect.

One of the Triad read my post and called off the planned focused attack on Cadia in favor of the standard attack pattern to trigger a threshold effect. This was done hence why on the old hipcat site there is a drop of 5% right before the final day. The final day just proved the point as Disorder did try a head to head match against Order on Cadia and Order won out, pushing the % up ever so slightly.

Iracundus wrote:
What was more confusing to me anyway was whose side the Necrons were supposed to be on. They were seemingly listed as Disorder, yet at least one event card showed the Necrons falling upon Chaos (and the event card aided Imperials), so I recall even some Necron players being unsure which side their wins would count for.

Yeah, it definitely felt like several of the xenos races were shoehorned into the disorder ranks for the campaign. I think it made sense for eldar/dark eldar to be active in the main theater of combat, so to speak; but to me it didn't feel like GW gave Nids/Orks/Necrons enough incentive to participate. Atleast, not until the Nid and Ork players organized themselves and basically said "you guys have fun with Cadia, we're going to go play in Scarus and Agripina. Although I do give GW credit for scanning the EOT forums and working a lot of the player-driven stuff into the campaign.

Iracundus wrote:
One of the Triad read my post and called off the planned focused attack on Cadia in favor of the standard attack pattern to trigger a threshold effect. This was done hence why on the old hipcat site there is a drop of 5% right before the final day. The final day just proved the point as Disorder did try a head to head match against Order on Cadia and Order won out, pushing the % up ever so slightly.

yeah. It was pretty clear from very early on that actively trying effect to Cadia by directly posting wins there was a losing proposition. Throughout the campaign I maintained the spreadsheet that we used for target selection. With it we tracked from day to day exactly how many net wins it would take to drop imperial control by 1%, and a lot of times we could see the effects of a card being played before GW "officially" announced it.

Waaaaghmaster wrote:


Yeah, it definitely felt like several of the xenos races were shoehorned into the disorder ranks for the campaign. I think it made sense for eldar/dark eldar to be active in the main theater of combat, so to speak; but to me it didn't feel like GW gave Nids/Orks/Necrons enough incentive to participate. Atleast, not until the Nid and Ork players organized themselves and basically said "you guys have fun with Cadia, we're going to go play in Scarus and Agripina. Although I do give GW credit for scanning the EOT forums and working a lot of the player-driven stuff into the campaign.

Tyranids and Ork players were not allowed by the campaign rules to post results to the main warzone of Cadia, so they had to make do with other zones. Andy Chambers had envisioned them fighting the Tau, but Ork and Tyranid players did not want to be nameless unmentioned speedbumps for the Tau so they all decided to pick targets for their own factions. Similarly, despite all the anti-Tau talk and views of some Imperial players, the vast majority of them wanted to fight in the main action and so did not end up fighting the Tau. So the Tau were effectively unopposed aside from the unfocused background "noise" of individual players posting against the Tau. That is why their warzone was so ho-hum. With no room for strategy and such lopsided numbers, it was just a relentless climb in Tau expansion % aside from 1 day where it actually fell. I suspect it was a small band of other players posting a burst against the Tau, but not sustaining the effort.

Rather than making things into a binary Order vs Disorder paradigm, I think it would have been better to further differentiate all factions and give them all separate faction goals. So Necrons might have been to push back Chaos and all other races from certain key locations, for example. I recall these factions were disgruntled over being lumped in among Chaos followers.

yeah. It was pretty clear from very early on that actively trying effect to Cadia by directly posting wins there was a losing proposition. Throughout the campaign I maintained the spreadsheet that we used for target selection. With it we tracked from day to day exactly how many net wins it would take to drop imperial control by 1%, and a lot of times we could see the effects of a card being played before GW "officially" announced it.

My post was because it seemed Disorder and at least one Triad member were bursting with enthusiasm at the thought of the Event Card (by the endstage, event cards were known at the time of activation) and it seemed to be a knee jerk response to swarm to Cadia.

The event cards should have all been known at the time of activation so that players could actively take advantage of it, rather than initially only being announced the week after they had already had effect and expired. That meant that overall many of the event cards were meaningless as only a few random wins posted by individual players to those warzones would actually be affected by the card. The cards themselves were also often unfocused, often times affecting minor systems that were not the focus of any players.

Iracundus wrote:

My post was because it seemed Disorder and at least one Triad member were bursting with enthusiasm at the thought of the Event Card (by the endstage, event cards were known at the time of activation) and it seemed to be a knee jerk response to swarm to Cadia.

The event cards should have all been known at the time of activation so that players could actively take advantage of it, rather than initially only being announced the week after they had already had effect and expired. That meant that overall many of the event cards were meaningless as only a few random wins posted by individual players to those warzones would actually be affected by the card. The cards themselves were also often unfocused, often times affecting minor systems that were not the focus of any players.

I think it might have been khornesone who was pushing for that; but after 20 years, it's hard to remember a lot of those details.

As far as the cards go, I didn't really like the whole idea of giving them out at in-store events and making it be up to the person the card was handed to whether or not it was played. I think it would have been better if they'd done all of them as planned events. (just my opinion).

I've always felt that it was a shame that GW didn't do any more campaigns along the lines of EOT (we won't discuss the WFB version that was a train wreck because it didn't even attempt to hide the fact that the end result was fore-ordained) I made a lot of friendships during those couple of months that have existed to this day. Although we didn't know each other prior to the campaign, it ended up that all three members of the "triad" lived within about an hour of the battle bunker in Glen Burnie, MD. We got together in person several times during and after the campaign.

Waaaaghmaster wrote:
@Iracandus: excellent breakdown and analysis of the EOT campaign.

As a member of the chaos Triad (I was Taumarshal on the EOT forums), I was amazed at how quickly the disorder side got organized after I asked for for everyone to post their wins to a single planet for one day to trigger a "knock on" effect.

As far as the disorganization among the order players, I know for a fact that there were people from the Planetkiller group that had created fake forum accounts on the order side to spread disinformation about the system-wide triggers and encouraged the competing leadership structures (including posting fake event cards suggesting that the Dark Angels were traitors and their results secretly counted for disorder and not order).

Speak for yourself, some of us used to be in the Triad's Yahoo Group.

Waaaaghmaster wrote:

As far as the cards go, I didn't really like the whole idea of giving them out at in-store events and making it be up to the person the card was handed to whether or not it was played. I think it would have been better if they'd done all of them as planned events. (just my opinion).

I've always felt that it was a shame that GW didn't do any more campaigns along the lines of EOT (we won't discuss the WFB version that was a train wreck because it didn't even attempt to hide the fact that the end result was fore-ordained) I made a lot of friendships during those couple of months that have existed to this day. Although we didn't know each other prior to the campaign, it ended up that all three members of the "triad" lived within about an hour of the battle bunker in Glen Burnie, MD. We got together in person several times during and after the campaign.

The problem with handing out cards as prizes for events is again the player number imbalance. More Imperial players on average means you are on average more likely to hand the card out to Imperials, who then would obviously play it if an Imperial card or not play it if Disorder card.

The WFB version had a ordained 2nd stage, in that Chaos was bound to make it to siege the city. What the 1st stage was meant to do according to campaign organizer Gav Thorpe was determine in what shape the Chaos forces would arrive in. However the player number imbalance (who thought Chaos vs. Everyone Else was a good idea in RL player number terms?) meant Chaos was outnumbered and beaten so badly in each of its 4 separate task forces (1 for each Chaos god) that they were reliant on that story railroading to make it to the siege in the first place. If not for that railroading, Chaos would not have made it past the 1st stage. That is how badly they were outnumbered and with no campaign mechanic like the threshold effect to allow them to overcome that numerical difference, they were stalled at the first obstacle. Even then when they made it to the siege, their poor performance in the 1st stage, meant the siege lines were far from the walls of the city. Then the ongoing player number imbalance meant the besiegers were just pushed even further away from their initial start positions. "In Empire, defenders attack you!"

 Platuan4th wrote:
Speak for yourself, some of us used to be in the Triad's Yahoo Group.

Man, I completely forgot about that group.

Iracundus wrote:

 Gert wrote:
That sounds like it was a lot of fun for the Disorder side.
I seem to remember that the Konor campaign didn't actually represent any faction well that wasn't Imperial and GW just did whatever they wanted with the "lore" additions. Like the one planet Chaos actually won was suddenly a Death Guard world instead of just Chaos because Death Guard were the new Big Bad and I just sat there with my Slaanesh Iron Warriors thinking "wut".

I think that campaign was a sad joke, and utterly opaque so not surprising it didn't get much overall traction with the player base. I also personally suspect the only reason Chaos even won any planets at all was due to GW wanting some suspense in the story, and there would have been none if it had been an Imperial clean sweep of all 5 planets in the star system (which I suspect was the case due to no clear mechanic to give less numerous non-Imperial factions a chance). The Imperium had won the first 2, so I think GW "gave" Chaos the next 2 by just declaring Chaos won them. I saw no particular reason why Chaos would have suddenly come back from behind to win 2 planets in a row after losing the first 2 decisively. This left the final planet seemingly up for grabs, though predictably the Imperium won. No raw numbers were given or available for analysis so the entire system was opaque beyond a bland progress bar, and thus potentially susceptible to GW fiat.

I get the feeling that GW isn't going to design a campaign these days that doesn't presuppose an Imperium (or more specifically Astartes) win. They've decided that's the narrative they're going for.

Ah both Storm of Chaos and Eye of Terror were my early heartbreaks in Warhammer. Both were backtracked. SoC the most of course, and EoT were deemed inconclusive.

Having a hard on for chaos, I would have liked to see them gain some narrative victories rather than the static situation we got for years (decades). Same with Timurkhan and so on. The codexes and army books are narrativish in their style. They could stand to make a thing happen here or there in the meta setting. Heck they could stick to only writing it into the special character fluff from army book to army book.

oh well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Waaaaghmaster wrote:


(including posting fake event cards suggesting that the Dark Angels were traitors and their results secretly counted for disorder and not order).

This is the most amusing thing I have heard all week.

 triplegrim wrote:
Ah both Storm of Chaos and Eye of Terror were my early heartbreaks in Warhammer. Both were backtracked. SoC the most of course, and EoT were deemed inconclusive.

Having a hard on for chaos, I would have liked to see them gain some narrative victories rather than the static situation we got for years (decades). Same with Timurkhan and so on. The codexes and army books are narrativish in their style. They could stand to make a thing happen here or there in the meta setting. Heck they could stick to only writing it into the special character fluff from army book to army book.

oh well.

The current Rift situation is almost like a Chaos EoT campaign win. GW could have run with this decades ago but the upper management had balked at changing the setting even slightly, even though this was what Andy Chambers seemed to have promised in the WD article in the lead up to the campaign starting.

Iracundus wrote:
However the player number imbalance (who thought Chaos vs. Everyone Else was a good idea in RL player number terms?)

If everyone plays fair and every game is played with one side for chaos and one side against it doesn't matter how many players you have on either side.

But 'fair play' is where it all falls down, I get the impression if they repeated it today more than one player would be pumping out enough automated account creations and submissions to invalidate the rest of the field. GW would have to try and head them off with limited account activation codes given out in store/white dwarf. Doesn't stop false reporting but I guess it's a win-win for GW if it sells more magazines/gets more footfall in store.

I'm currently pondering on how to flesh out a campaign mostly based around the Octarius Sector (as a though exercise, not obviously running the campaign), and a few key narrative points.

The Imperiums main goal is to maintain the Cordon Impenatra as the primary objective. Simple really, if they fail to do so then the consequences would be grave. This would be the global goal for the faction.

I'd then have the continents of the world themselves represent an Ork Warlord vying for power to become the new Overfiend, except one, either North America or Europe... This would represent Ghaz making a breakout towards the imperium. Ork victories within Octarius would accumulate towards retaking their empire, but also allowing for competition to see which continent becomes the new Overfiend. Yet all Victories in Octarius build Waghh points that acts as a force multiplier to the Ghaz expansion as well as obviously retaking the Octarius sector.

Tyranid are trying to simultaneously hold the sector (biomass) and expand on two fronts. One towards Terra (This could be a racing expansion mechanic against the Ghaz Ork Faction), whilst the other expansion is towards Macragge and the Tau Empire to further accumulate biomass. The more games they win in their pursuit of biomass, the quicker the expansion can occur towards the imperium, another force multiplier effect. The narrative consequences for the ultramarines and Tau Empire is losing a substantial amount of the Ultramar Empire, and for the Tau, they could lose the 5th sphere expansion. In addition to this, the Ultramarines can choose to take advantage of the situation and attack the Tau, and vice versa. The community could unite the factions, but they can also go to war with each other.

Khorne would be a rogue faction, namely trying to accumulate as many victories, against as many foes as possible, but also gain an advantage in games where there are losses, for Khorne does not care for where the blood flows.... Main aim is to be involved, the more they are involved, the more their objective can be met. If they reach a threshold of involvement, and maintain a 65% win rate (can't lose all games as they will be wiped out), Angron will be summoned in the sector and a new Daemon world will be born. The main factions opposed to this, and will reduce this probability are Grey Knights obviously.

There's a lot more to consider in terms of involvement of other factions - The Eldar and Necrons, involving more chaos factions.

I think I'd have the Deathwatch as a 'super faction' that all victories reduce the Ork Waagh points or Tyranid biomass points depending on who it is made against. They would also have special interactions with all xenos races when fighting against them, depending on the xenos faction goals.

A.T. wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
However the player number imbalance (who thought Chaos vs. Everyone Else was a good idea in RL player number terms?)

If everyone plays fair and every game is played with one side for chaos and one side against it doesn't matter how many players you have on either side.

But 'fair play' is where it all falls down, I get the impression if they repeated it today more than one player would be pumping out enough automated account creations and submissions to invalidate the rest of the field. GW would have to try and head them off with limited account activation codes given out in store/white dwarf. Doesn't stop false reporting but I guess it's a win-win for GW if it sells more magazines/gets more footfall in store.

The problem was that it wasn't designed as "Chaos vs everyone". Each Faction in game was run as a separate reporting entity because GW expected Orks, Skaven, and other "evil" factions to choose to fight against the Empire as mercenaries for Chaos or, like EoT, to run their own side campaigns. The reality ended up with every single faction jumping on Chaos and curb stomping them and any loss fighting a not-Chaos army didn't help Chaos like in EoT, it only helped that Faction. There's a reason Grimgor and Manfred suddenly became so prominent in the WD fiction for EoT despite being relegated to minor players in the actual book(they even had Archaon's LT hand Grimgor his arse in a fight yet Grimgor headbutt Archaon and won right away in the last phase fiction?).

 Platuan4th wrote:

A.T. wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
However the player number imbalance (who thought Chaos vs. Everyone Else was a good idea in RL player number terms?)

If everyone plays fair and every game is played with one side for chaos and one side against it doesn't matter how many players you have on either side.

But 'fair play' is where it all falls down, I get the impression if they repeated it today more than one player would be pumping out enough automated account creations and submissions to invalidate the rest of the field. GW would have to try and head them off with limited account activation codes given out in store/white dwarf. Doesn't stop false reporting but I guess it's a win-win for GW if it sells more magazines/gets more footfall in store.

The problem was that it wasn't designed as "Chaos vs everyone". Each Faction in game was run as a separate reporting entity because GW expected Orks, Skaven, and other "evil" factions to choose to fight against the Empire as mercenaries for Chaos or, like EoT, to run their own side campaigns. The reality ended up with every single faction jumping on Chaos and curb stomping them and any loss fighting a not-Chaos army didn't help Chaos like in EoT, it only helped that Faction. There's a reason Grimgor and Manfred suddenly became so prominent in the WD fiction for EoT despite being relegated to minor players in the actual book(they even had Archaon's LT hand Grimgor his arse in a fight yet Grimgor headbutt Archaon and won right away in the last phase fiction?).

And they say Infinity War was the most ambitious crossover ever...

You mean Storm of Chaos, bro.

In my humble Orky opinion, the best "Global Campaign" was The Eye of Terror campaign for 1 and only 1 reason. GW acted like GW and mandated that Orkz, nidz and tau could go fondle some grots in the corner while the big boyz (Chaos/imperium) duke it out.

Telling Orkz "Feth off you little NPCs" tends to end with epic results for the Ork players and a whole heaping helping of Humble pie for the Imperium/Chaos players.

So what happened?

So lets put this in perspective. Orkz were still using their 3rd edition Rule Book, still a ways out from their 4th codex and this global campaign kicks off. Da Orkz were allowed to either fight for the Imperials or for Chaos but couldn't really impact the overall campaign at all (same for nids). After a bit of bellyaching the ork community had enough and decided to make a stand. Under some genius Ork players direction the Ork community rallied together and formed "DA GREEN KRUSADE!" Unable to participate in the main battles the Orkz declared a WAAAAGH against the Scarus System which would eventually be renamed the Skar-uz sector and proceeded to ransack the entire sector in the name of Gork or possibly Mork. Planet after planet was targeted for destruction and was in fact taken over. At the end of the Campaign the Orkz had seized most of the sector including the forge world Mordax prime which was renamed Moredakka Prime. Not only did the Orkz go above and beyond, in the end GW had to recognize their ridiculousness and put out a bit of fluff regarding Abaddon hiring ork mercenaries who took over the sector and eventually had their "Krusade" labeled as an official WAAAAGH! which ups their threat level to the imperium from a minor annoyance to a Segmentum level threat.

I just love the irony that supposedly the most disorganized faction in the game came together in a moment of revenge to become the MOST organized faction and proceeded to change the outcome of a global campaign just for the sake of thumbing their nose at the imperial and chaos players.

GW's global campaigns were absolutely my favourite parts of hobby, it was a fun way to interact with people and it was cool to feel part of the story. Dark Shadows over Albion and Medusa V were my personal favourites.

I feel like if they are doing these sector war things why not just make one bigger and turn it into a campaign.

So to theory-craft possible models for future campaigns:

One interesting issue is scale. You can fight at the city level, the continent level, the planet level, the system level, the subsector level, the sector level or the galactic level.

What makes this even more interesting is how various specialist games fit into the scale, as well as 40k's own game sizes. At the city level, you're looking at Necromunda, Kill Team and 25 PL games. But a single faction winning say 5 such games, could lead to continental battle with Incursion- Strike Force armies... Or you could assume that those 5 victories achieve continental control and jump right to planetary scale with onslaught armies.

Once you go beyond the planetary scale, you're into roster systems, where each planet has a roster for the controlling army, which allows combat at the system or subsector levels. This brings in Titanicus, Aeronautica, and for old-schoolers, BFG.

Advancing to higher scale, you're looking at Rosters by system.

Obviously, this is more advanced than global campaigns have been. But they COULD be this detailed in the current online era if there was interest.

I think, for example, that rather than cramming 2-4 campaigns into a year,GW COULD choose to do annual campaigns, where the campaign books unlocked access to web-based tracking tools for players and campaign organizers. Minimally, each GW store would function as a campaign node- that is, they would be their own campaign organizer, but they would also support other campaign organizers for local groups. FLGS's have the option to opt in and become a part of the action too.

So annually, you set a max scale. Subsector, I think, is a good max scale- subsectors are big enough to affect the ongoing narrative, but not so big that they can break the universe. If you actually get to sector scale, that DOES have the capacity to break the universe.

So at this level, your Kill Team and Combat Patrol resources are introduced in the first quarter, with the expectation that some players or gaming groups could theoretically escalate to Incursion and continental control across multiple planets in multiple systems within a given subsector by the end of the quarter.

This has to be supported by player incentives, resources to scale- both commercial and web-based/ free, as well as stores, play spaces and player organized campaigns that have store support.

Second quarter escalates the game to the planetary level with resources for 40k at the Strike Force level, escalating to Onslaught battles for planetary control at the end of the quarter.

In the third quarter, 40k support continues, but Titanicus and Aeronautica play an increasingly important role. 40k support is at the Onslaught and Apocalypse level, with system control being the end of quarter goal.

And finally, fourth quarter sees the battle for control of the subsector'

This only really works once all the dexes are out; you can't do this with armies spanning multiple editions. It is a system imagined for a persistent edition to drive gaming activity in an absence of the edition churn model that has sustained GW for its first 30 years. It is one possible evolution of the game into something bigger and IMHO better.

Signs are that GW has been flirting with this idea for two editions now; infrastructure like game size mechanics in the core rules, various models of campaign resources tested and rolled out, regular metawatch and balancing attempts and even the roll-out of Apps and Warhammer Plus- as problematic as they are in their current form- all support the idea that GW is exploring options and engaging in strategic planning for the next decade. They aren't PROOF of this, of course- they merely support the idea.

Anyway, that's my two cents on what a global campaign COULD look like.