| Quote (Rastamann @ 18 Jan. 2006 (16:01)) |
| On the other hand, many such campaigns (operational ones with several armies to move about) won't come to a successful conclusion due to the fact that the players tend to, rather naturally, attack one another with as greater concentration of force possible, therefore producing lopsided battles, where one side has no chance of winning and, thus, loses interest in the campaign. ... 2) prevents battles that are totally unwinnable from ocurring |
What you have looks great so far.
I have played in a few (non-Epic) campaigns, and as you say, the biggest problem is that if the battles are too lopsided, they produce no tabletop games to play, which was the whole point of the campaign.
What we did to alleviate the problem was to determine that absolute limits of an unequal game that we would play (and also the absolute points limit we would play for any game, unbalanced or otherwise). An example might be that you won't want to play out anything where the ratio is greater than 3:2 nor anything greater than 5,000 points (these are just some examples).
So, when a conflict occurred in the campaign, we automatically resized the tabletop game to reflect those rules. Carrying forward the same example, if I came to the engagement with 2,000 points and you came with 10,000 points, he tabletop game would be resized to 2,000 pts to 3,000 pts. So, what happens to the other 7,000 pts of yours? They reinforce after the first day, forcing the smaller force to withdraw. From a campaign stand-point, you force the opposition out of the area, square, etc.
The reality is that the armies do not march around in multi-thousand point blocks, but are spread about. And much like the Escalation mission rule in 40K, forces keep piling on after the start.
Creating artificial reasons to limit group sizes is just that - artificial. Remembering the goal of the campaign, to generate battles with some context and continuity with previous battles, and abstracting out what does not fit is a good way to have your cake and eat it too!
Just an idea.
Dale
Wishing he had a weekly campaign in anything to work on...
