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| Strength | Total Army Size (based around 1500 and 2000 pt standard) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 100% | 1500 pts | 2000pts |
| 2 | 125% | 1875 (2 armies of 940) | 2500 (2 armies of 1250) |
| 3 | 150% | 2250 (3 armies of 750) | 3000 (3 armies of 1000) |
| 4 | 175% | 2625 (4 armies of 660) | 3500 (4 armies of 875) |
| 5 | 200% | 3000 (5 armies of 600) | 4000 (5 armies of 800) |
The turns are very similiar to diplomacy. The difference being the addition of a Decisive Battle Phase which occurs after Movement has been revealed but before Movement is carried out. The Decisive Battle Phase may adjust which units bounce and which units are dislodged.
The Decisive Battle Phase occurs after movement has been submitted, but before movement is carried out. This phase might change which units bounce and/or which units are dislodged.
Decisive battles occur due to decisive moves or decisive holds
The purpose of a decisive move or hold is to modify the standard Diplomacy movement results in your favor.
To determine the strength that you are facing, recall (or recalculate) the strength of the defense that you faced. To calculate the strength that you have, recall (or recalculate) the strength you held or attacked with.
A unit and all of it's supports is considered one group for the purpose of determining where a decisive battle occurs. So if A moves to C supported by B, and D moves to B supported by C, and both moves are decisive moves, then only one battle is fought to determine if A moves to C or if D moves to B.
If you are the victor of the decisive battle, then you have sufficient strength to either take the province or hold the province, recalculate the results of the diplomacy move.
| You might find yourself in a position where the results of one decisive battle effects the participants of other decisive battles. In example, if A moves to B, C moves to B, D moves to A, and E moves to A; A declares a decisive move and D declares a decisive move; Whether or not A is involved in the battle for the province A is moving from is dependent on whether A is successful in taking province B. Decide before the campaign begins, how you want to deal with this. One way is to allow anybody who potentially might bounce back into a province where the decsive battle will occur, to fight in that battle providing an additional strength of 1. Another way is to immediately dislodge any unit that bounces back into the province where a decisive battle is occuring. A third way is to schedule battles in such a way that the outcome of one effects the particpants of others. I prefer the immediate dislodge effect. |
| It's possible for the above system to be abused. In particular, two
allies, by not using supports, can field two seperate armies instead of
just one. If these two armies then work together, they effectively
increased their respective army sizes (an increase of about 60%). Don't
do this.
If you don't think your players can help themselves. Here are some ideas on how to limit the problem:
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The Empire is beset by enemies.
The Empire has the following Units in play:
The Brettonians have the following Units in play:
The Kislev has the following Unit in play:
The Vampire Counts has the follow Unit in play:
The following orders are submitted.
Empire
Brettonnian
Kislev
Vampire Count
First determine the strength of various attacks.
Decisive battles are declared. Brettonia wants Altdorf and declares a decisive battle versus Altdorf. Kislev and Vampire Counts are happy with the result which will occur in Middenheim (ie the fleet will be dislodged) and so declare nothing on this front. The Empire doesn't want to lose Middenhiem so declares a decisive battle at Middenhiem.
Determining battle sizes. Altdorf is fought with straight 1500 point armies. If Brettonia is victor, Altdorf is dislodged. If Empire is victor, Brettonia army in the Wastelands bounces. In Middenhiem the Empire battles with a 1500 point army. The Kislev arrive with a 940 point army and the Vampire Counts with another 940 point army. Since at least one army is involved at Middenheim, Warmaster is used to determine the outcome (the Kislev fleet disembarks an army to take the province). Should the Kislev army be broken, but the Vampire Count army still comes through and saves the day by breaking the Empire Army, the Kislev are still considered the victor and take the province.
Conquered players may still play on as either a Sepoy or a Mercenary.
A Sepoy is a player who fights for the player who controls his capital. The player who controls the capital must give each epoy under him at least one decisive battle to fight each turn. After 3 successful decisive battles, the Sepoy player may revolt and during the adjustments phase after the last succesful battle pick any one province outside the nation of his master (but still controlled by his master) and claim it as his new capital. Placing either a fleet or an army in that province. This is his new capital. Note: the player controlling the Sepoy MUST give him a decisive battle each turn ... it does not need to be an easy decisive battle, however. If the capital changes hands, the Sepoy must either become a Mercenary or fight 3 successful battles for the new owner.
A Mercenaries is a player who picks a second player to fight along side. This player need not control his capital. The player who has been picked may declare an additional decisive battle and have the Mercenary fight it for him (the same as a Sepoy). The only difference between a Sepoy and a Mercenary is that a Mercenary may never revolt. A Mercenary may switch employers (and/or may become a Sepoy).
| Diplomacy is a game that is played mostly in parrallel. This means
it's particularly well suited for long breaks between turns (you run a
turn, then wait a week, collect orders, and run the next turn). This is
one of the reasons that Diplomacy is a good fit for a campaign system,
battles can be fought during the downtime/negotiations between turns.
The declaration of decisive battles (as I've written above) weakens this strength of Diplomacy. In order to recapture this strength, you can follow the following sequence:
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Finding 19+ people to play a game might be well nigh impossible. It should be possible to limit the board (to just the Old World probably, cutting out all of asia). Also allow any 2+ power nations to start with their initial armies on board (potentially also making their home centers worthless). That is, if their is no chaos player, all the chaos centers would start with there respective armies and fleets, but would not generate any supply points if taken. This would need to be tweaked, depending on the number and composition of players.
A new army list is being developed representing Chaos Daemons. If you want to play with a pure Daemon nation, then I suggest making it a two center power. With a capital at the Northern Eye of Chaos (containing an army) and a fleet at the Southern Eye of Chaos. Any Chaos players would lose the Northern Eye of Chaos from their starting provinces and their new capital would be The Kurgan.
There is also an all goblin list. It should be possible to play the Orcs and Goblins using just the all goblin list.
In the Warhammer universe, Orcs can be found in many more places than represented on the above maps. Start an Orc Army in the Pale Sister (Orc Massif), this army is lost forever if destroyed, but does not require a support center to maintain. This army could also be a Goblin army (see above).
In addition, you could start an Orc (or Goblin) army in the the World (WRLD) mountains. Doing both (and running them using the Goblin list) gives a feasible Goblin Nation.
There is nothing written in stone saying you must start in certain positions. You could play the Chaos Powers of Ind, or the Revolting Empire Colonies of Lustria, or the Dark Elves of Ulthuan, or the Brettonian-Like Samurai of Nippon or the Lizardmen of Araby. You could also pick what type of units you want in your starting positions. The skies the limit, it's your campaign (I just wanted to play around with Gimp and make some maps!).
You could also cram the number of players you have into some portion of the map to fix the problem of not having enough players. (i.e. assuming you have 5 players, you could have the Orcs of Karak-A-Karak, the Undead of Tilea, the Dark Elves of Brettonia, the Great Empire, and the Chaos of Kislev ... everything outside the old world is off-limits ... this represents a time when many of the smaller nations have been destroyed by evil forces. The new edge of the map would be GRAE <-> SJOK <-> MTNS <-> EDGE <-> ZIGG <-> MGUN <-> KARE <-> BBLO <-> BLAG <-> STHS <-> NGWO <-> SSCH <-> GRAE, removing the centers at KARE and ZIGG to avoid the O&G getting too strong too quickly). This would give a campaign that might be small enough to be fightable in a weekend.
Multiple players may share a power (splitting up the units) submitting orders individually. Each could declare a decisive battle. Although using non-standard starting positions might be a better course of action.
Some of the ocean spaces are large (to the say the least), these spaces may contain multiple fleets. Decisive battles may be declared in an ocean space in order to gain control of that space (either from a fleet which is holding in that space or moving into that space). Multiple fleets of the same nation stack their strength when holding. This would allow all races slightly easier access to each other. The Oceans which would be "open" would be:
Any unit holding on a capital, holds with an additional strength. This makes capitals a little tougher to take. It also means that the Wood Elves always have a strength 2 army on their capital.
Sometimes a battle turns into a cataclysmic affair. Each side unwilling to give quarter and the loser finally breaking. The loser is forever destroyed. Diplomacy assumes that armies withdraw when they lose. We need not do that. If an opponent(s) have declared a decisive battle which you're involved in and you break and at the time of your breaking your opponent(s) have destroyed more points of your forces than you've destroyed of theirs, your diplomacy unit has been destroyed. Remove it from the map. In addtion, at the start of your turn, prior to being broken (or losing your general), you may choose to withdraw. You immediately lose the battle, but your unit may not be destroyed (you live to fight another day).
There's no reason that the above rules must be used with the Warhammer map. Fight a battle over 100 year wars Great Britian (call it Albion if you like), or the standard Diplomacy Map (i.e. Europe) ... or the Youngstown map (i.e. Earth). There's even one based on GW's game Blood Royale (although it might be kinda freaky marrying a daughter of the Brettonnian King off to the heir of the Skaven kingdom :-).
If there is no Vampire Count player, give the Empire a 4th center at Sylvania. Sylvania is a province of the Empire and it allows the Empire to aide the Dwarves (who need it badly) against their myriad of enemies.
You might wish to play around with the maps ... so here they are in an animated gif which is easier to edit (each animation is a layer):
You probably want to use "Save Target Link As ..." since they are kinda annoying to view in a non-editor.
The goal was to create a quick campaign system that was simple but had significant depth and would require significant strategic interaction in order to do well. Diplomacy's strengths are that it's simple and requires significant strategic interaction to do well. I thought it would make a good basis for a campaign system.
I did this by adding the concept of Decisive Battles to the diplomacy movement system. A decisive battle can be thought of as the arena which your nation is focusing it's forces (i.e. best generals and heroes), for that 6 month stretch of time. One of the principles I tried to capture was that declaring a decisive should never help an opponent, it should only give you a chance to modify unfavorable movement results.
Sepoys and Mercenaries were added so that no player would be removed from the game. It also alleviates the problem of when one player is on the verge of winning, they get stuck fighting a massive number of decisive battles. In this way, players who had been conquered "help out" by acting as Sepoys and fighting some of the battles for them. In case, for whatever reason, two players can't get along (and one doesn't want to fight for the other), I added the concept of Mercenary (assuming there will be at least one other player in the game the conquered player wouldn't mind helping).
I added the ability to build in any capital of a larger starting nation than you, in order to give the small powers more of a chance. In particular, the one center powers would find it difficult to grow rapidly if this was not added. It also gives some of the landlocked one center powers the chance to become unlandlocked.
The campaign should work best if played until one player has the majority of centers. Then the final positions should be calculated. The number of centers you control then defines positions, followed by any player Sepoying, followed by any player playing a Mercenary position.
A few final words about Diplomacy. Diplomacy may be played as a very very cut-throat game (in fact, it's said that's the best way to play). You need a thick skin. Sooner or later, somebody you trust completely will stab you in the back. You will probably see very little point in why they did it. You MUST assume that they did (and that you failed in DIPLOMACY by not pointing out how much better the two of you work as a team ... and how much both of you will gain if he just moves all his armies to the other side of the board ... leaving your armies next to his unprotected home centers). Internalize these simple facts before beginning to play, and don't let them bother you too much when they happen to you.
