Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Horus has betrayed the Emperor. The Grand Campaign has ground to a halt. A newly promoted princeps find themselves on the front line of a war that will split the heavens in two.

I wonder if anyone else has any ideas for how to develop campaigns for Titanicus, in terms of things like whether crew should 'stat up' like a necromunda gang or should there be things they can earn over time?

I'm also curious as to hear peoples ideas for both Multiplay and solo campaigns (I really think both are possible).

It's definitely possible. I know Specialist Games is planning something but an AI is also possible for the game.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
So an AI would be something similar I was working on with Star Wars Armada. Just a basic checklist of "if this do this, if not check the next one" which would allow orders to be given, movement decided, etc.

Campaign wise you could have players start off in warhounds and work their way up or do a slow drip escalation campaign where the weaker side gets more stratagem points to play with

Speaking generally, I think the best way you can handle a campaign for a game of this sort is titan repairs. in a civil war like the heresy time and supplies between walks may be limited. give yourself a certain stockpile of resources for repair so that if any titans go over the requirements (you can also use it as a pool that can be used to requsition new titans from) the idea being to make the chalalnge of the campaign all about acheiving your objectives with minimal loss of material.

BrianDavion wrote:
Speaking generally, I think the best way you can handle a campaign for a game of this sort is titan repairs. in a civil war like the heresy time and supplies between walks may be limited. give yourself a certain stockpile of resources for repair so that if any titans go over the requirements (you can also use it as a pool that can be used to requsition new titans from) the idea being to make the chalalnge of the campaign all about acheiving your objectives with minimal loss of material.

Ahh you are talking the Mechwarrior Mercenaries style of play.

If a unit suffers a crippling hit it makes them scared and weaker in future games. You can repair them but they may have to sit battle out. Hmmmmm could work. Could also add in salvage for both sides and requisitions

 Lysenis wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
Speaking generally, I think the best way you can handle a campaign for a game of this sort is titan repairs. in a civil war like the heresy time and supplies between walks may be limited. give yourself a certain stockpile of resources for repair so that if any titans go over the requirements (you can also use it as a pool that can be used to requsition new titans from) the idea being to make the chalalnge of the campaign all about acheiving your objectives with minimal loss of material.

Ahh you are talking the Mechwarrior Mercenaries style of play.

If a unit suffers a crippling hit it makes them scared and weaker in future games. You can repair them but they may have to sit battle out. Hmmmmm could work. Could also add in salvage for both sides and requisitions

kiinda, Mechwarrior mercanries is, as you may not may not know, based on an old Tabletop game called Battletech, whose campaign rules are similer, the goal here is to enforce the idea that Titans are rare and expensive machines, and enchourage people to retreat rather then fight to the death

BrianDavion wrote:

 Lysenis wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
Speaking generally, I think the best way you can handle a campaign for a game of this sort is titan repairs. in a civil war like the heresy time and supplies between walks may be limited. give yourself a certain stockpile of resources for repair so that if any titans go over the requirements (you can also use it as a pool that can be used to requsition new titans from) the idea being to make the chalalnge of the campaign all about acheiving your objectives with minimal loss of material.

Ahh you are talking the Mechwarrior Mercenaries style of play.

If a unit suffers a crippling hit it makes them scared and weaker in future games. You can repair them but they may have to sit battle out. Hmmmmm could work. Could also add in salvage for both sides and requisitions

kiinda, Mechwarrior mercanries is, as you may not may not know, based on an old Tabletop game called Battletech, whose campaign rules are similer, the goal here is to enforce the idea that Titans are rare and expensive machines, and enchourage people to retreat rather then fight to the death

Yup. Never was able to play but I loved the PC games.

Yea. It would be interesting. Hmmmm set up risk, reward and make it HARSH.

Campaigns are, to me, the pinnacle of wargaming. They are also very tricky beasts. The downfall of many campaigns or systems:

- Snowball effect: one player becomes powerful because of his units' experience, territory gained, bonuses gathered, whatever. This player proceeds to roflstomp the others, becoming more powerful. Then the others give up.

- Inverse Snowball effect: a player becomes weak, his forces depleted, his resources spent until he can no longer muster a viable fighting force. But he needs a viable fighting force to secure resources to replenish his force. Tough break.

- Paper Mountain effect: your beautifully crafted system of supply, repairs, transportation and troop assignment turns the whole thing into Sim Logistics. Also, that 300 point scout party running into a 2500 point main force is not going to be an interesting battle to fight.

- Real Life effect: your campaign can't move on until all players have fought their battles. One player needs to go on a four week trip. By the time that player is back, people have moved on to different things.

- Alsace-Lorraine effect: you have limited players to fighting their neighbours on a map. After three rounds people are sick of fighting the same opponent over the same patch of dirt.

- Event Horizon effect: your campaign has no end in sight. Once you're in you just keep falling, and falling, and falling...


My advice would be to start small, have a clearly defined scope and an end-point marked on the calendar. One of my favorite campaigns ever was a three-player affair where we simply took it in turns to write a scenario, building on the previous battles to craft a narrative. Simple and fun.

I think that initial "campaign" efforts should be along the lines of resupply and refit.

You might be able to add some Legio Wargear or perhaps even Princeps Seniores traits, but the system is to granular to affect stats like BS or WS without seriously tipping the scales.

 schoon wrote:
I think that initial "campaign" efforts should be along the lines of resupply and refit.

You might be able to add some Legio Wargear or perhaps even Princeps Seniores traits, but the system is to granular to affect stats like BS or WS without seriously tipping the scales.

agreed.

One (admittedly lazy) experience rule might be re-rolls. For every # XP points your Princeps gets one re-roll per battle. Or even just flat one re-roll per # XP if you don't mind the bookkeeping (ie. you turn XP into a currency that is spent on re-rolls).

 General Helstrom wrote:

- Paper Mountain effect: your beautifully crafted system of supply, repairs, transportation and troop assignment turns the whole thing into Sim Logistics. Also, that 300 point scout party running into a 2500 point main force is not going to be an interesting battle to fight.

Not normally. On occasion, though ... 300 points of Dwarf Slayers vs 1,500 points of Skaven led by Queek Head-Taker. The Slayers manage to defeat the Stormvermin unit in combat, and the Skaven run. The resulting Panic checks mean all the other Skaven run, too. The post-battle sequence results in the entire Skaven army destroyed without trace in the mountains. With that sort of imbalance, I'd say the smaller force's objective should just be survival. Perhaps get within a certain distance of the opposing command titan and then escape off the board.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In general, though, my preferred option is to just do it free-form; have an opening premise explaining why all the players' forces are here. After that, just play some games. Have a map if you like to inspire some creativity when it comes to scenarios, but not one that controls the way battles are arranged. After a few games, you'll hopefully get some vendettas between individual titan crews, and you can perhaps then introduce more behind the scenes ideas.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 General Helstrom wrote:

- Paper Mountain effect: your beautifully crafted system of supply, repairs, transportation and troop assignment turns the whole thing into Sim Logistics. Also, that 300 point scout party running into a 2500 point main force is not going to be an interesting battle to fight.

Not normally. On occasion, though ... 300 points of Dwarf Slayers vs 1,500 points of Skaven led by Queek Head-Taker. The Slayers manage to defeat the Stormvermin unit in combat, and the Skaven run. The resulting Panic checks mean all the other Skaven run, too. The post-battle sequence results in the entire Skaven army destroyed without trace in the mountains. With that sort of imbalance, I'd say the smaller force's objective should just be survival. Perhaps get within a certain distance of the opposing command titan and then escape off the board.

That sounds like 5th Edition WFB

What you're saying is indeed the point - you should have a plan for these sorts of thing if you're writing a campaign system that allows such skewed matchups. 300 vs 2500 points can be a very interesting battle if both forces have achievable objectives. Alternatively, you could cover this with some kind of auto-resolve mechanic in the campaign itself, or by giving the smaller force the opportunity to avoid battle at some cost, for example a loss of supply and a forced retreat move towards friendly territory.

In general, though, my preferred option is to just do it free-form; have an opening premise explaining why all the players' forces are here. After that, just play some games. Have a map if you like to inspire some creativity when it comes to scenarios, but not one that controls the way battles are arranged. After a few games, you'll hopefully get some vendettas between individual titan crews, and you can perhaps then introduce more behind the scenes ideas.

Yeah, if you have a good group of narratively-minded players this is tons of fun

4th edition WFB, actually, using Mighty Empires (the board game from 1990, not the set of plastic tiles) as the campaign system. It was developed for 3rd edition Warhammer, but there was a conversion article to allow it to work with 4th.

1st edition AT had a pretty complex system, with experience, a battle generator, troop movements and such. The system was robust enough I made a modified version for use in an RPG campaign.

Have folks looked at the Armada Corellian Conflict rules for inspiration? I've never played/read the rules, but it always seemed to be a well balanced format...

Apostasus wrote:
Have folks looked at the Armada Corellian Conflict rules for inspiration? I've never played/read the rules, but it always seemed to be a well balanced format...

From what I've read of it, Corellian Conflict is a neat idea (multiple small battles leading up to a big one) but suffers from the snowball effect. Win battle = your fleet is relatively unscathed = you get the most points and spend them all on upgrades, becoming stronger. Lose battle = your fleet is badly mangled = you get fewer points and you need to spend the bulk on repairs, leaving you weaker.

Anyone recall 40K Planetary Empires?

Seems like those could be of use here...

If they were still in print :(

I think my ideal campaign system would have the following aspects to it:
1. A campaign map across various worlds, with each world producing an amount of supply. Some worlds may also have special rules, such as weather effects, up or downgrades for the forces of the player controlling it and so on.
2. A supply system. This would be used to buy new units as well as maintain current ones damaged in battle.
3. Preferably an experience system which would allow for units to grow and develop as the game went on. At the very least, it should be required to keep track of engine kills (which would hopefully be rare as players would sooner withdraw than risk losing forces.

In terms of experience or upgrades, they would have to be really situational. Things like "Choose one weapon. The princeps may allow that weapons hit roll to be rerolled once per battle." or "This princeps may push their reactor without cost once per battle" and so on. They can't be too broad or they would be too powerful. But lots of little re-rolls would be neat and not have too big an impact I don't think.

It does risk the snowball factor so there should definitely be some sort of balancing factor to that. One thing I've looked at using previously is either a maximum forces per location (so you can't hold a location simply by dumping forces into it) or requiring garrisons in some capacity meaning forces always get spread out.

Ecrivain wrote:
I think my ideal campaign system would have the following aspects to it:
1. A campaign map across various worlds, with each world producing an amount of supply. Some worlds may also have special rules, such as weather effects, up or downgrades for the forces of the player controlling it and so on.
2. A supply system. This would be used to buy new units as well as maintain current ones damaged in battle.
3. Preferably an experience system which would allow for units to grow and develop as the game went on. At the very least, it should be required to keep track of engine kills (which would hopefully be rare as players would sooner withdraw than risk losing forces.

In terms of experience or upgrades, they would have to be really situational. Things like "Choose one weapon. The princeps may allow that weapons hit roll to be rerolled once per battle." or "This princeps may push their reactor without cost once per battle" and so on. They can't be too broad or they would be too powerful. But lots of little re-rolls would be neat and not have too big an impact I don't think.

It does risk the snowball factor so there should definitely be some sort of balancing factor to that. One thing I've looked at using previously is either a maximum forces per location (so you can't hold a location simply by dumping forces into it) or requiring garrisons in some capacity meaning forces always get spread out.

I've been thinking about divorcing the "supply" situation from the territories. Instead each side will only be allowed to replace a number of destroyed units per campaign turn, representing the limited available reinforcements from higher command. Territory control would translate to small tactical bonuses instead, like the experience bonuses you described. Also, territorial gain would be the way to gather campaign victory points and eventually win the campaign. This way you prevent the snowball effect while still encouraging preservation of forces and aggressive play, I hope.

According to the requests for our campaign materials:

The campaign itself consists of a series of connected battles, those are pre-determined before the start (and often corrected according to the changing strategic situation). The battles are not that relevant - missions from the rulebook or even a completly house-ruled scenarios are just fine.
What matters is the forces generation and post-combat sequence.

1) Force generation. Campaing starts with this: each player states his forces for the whole duration of the campaign, by selecting a number (2-5) of engines and their classes. Each class has different flexibility:
- Warlord have to select a fixed armament.
- Reaver can select one additinal weapon; It can also select a single Stratagem.
- Warhounds are free to chose weapons before the battle, and also can select a single Stratagem.
- Instead of a titan, player can chose a banner of six knights. Knights are free to chose their weapons before the battle, and also can select a single Stratagem.

2) Post-combat sequence. After the battle ends, and before another one begins, players can try to capture valuable salvage, peform repairs and rearm.
- Salvaging. First, all destroyed titans check if they can be slavaged and repaired - this also includes the sucsess of titan crewmen ejection upon it's death. For each non-exploded titan player makes an command check - if sucseeded, the crew survives and the titan can be recovered on a d6 roll of 3+. If the test is failed, titan is recovered on a d6 roll of 5+, and can not take part in the next combat, awaiting for the new crew.
If the recover test is failed, the opposing players may try to recover the engine on a d6 roll of 5+ - but they only strip the weapons.
- Repair. Each surviving titan rolls a number of repair dice, equal to it's size, and adds 1 to the results. All repair actions are carried as usulal, and on a roll of 3+ (bonus included) a lost Structure point can be restored; plasma reactor cooling and raising non-burned void sheilds are automatical.
Knights restore d6 lost structure points - possibly, restoring a destroyed knight on the process.
- Rearm. Before the next battle, titans can change their weapons, possibly mounting a salvaged trophy.

3) Convetional forces. These act like knight banners, but the squad is represented as a single model (thouhg nothing stops you from swarming the table), and have a Unit Strength (use dice instead of cog counter) to represent the actual number of models in the squad. Conventional forces can only enact "First Fire", "Full Tilt" and "Charge" orders, and are not capable of smash attacks. Infantry and walkers can enter the buildings, staying on the roof.
Forces are formed in a Detachments; each one gives a Stratagem point.

Just thinking of weather effects, how robust are titans at venting heat? In Battletech your heatsinks work at a lower % efficiency in desert but then work better in snow.

Just thinking it would be cool to have your reactors go up one each end phase in a desert but go down one on an ice world

Those conventional forces Command Terminals seem like they're trying to stuff too much into a single card.

It seems to me that breaking them into smaller - or at least homogeneous - bits would make them easier to play.

At that scale, I wouldn't bother worrying about what a dreadnought is equipped with - just stat up the talon as a whole with an "average" stat line.