Monday 5 September 2016

The little country in which you do not live

 "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." - Sun Tzu

I thought I'd put together a few thoughts about the campaign that we recently didn't really finish. Not in a move by move, chess analysis type way, but overall impressions.  In fact to get the detailed stuff right out of the way first: I didn't win the campaign simply because I lost the Battle of Sobotka.

The first general point is the obvious one that there is a dichotomy between one aim of a campaign being to create tabletop battles and another aim being to win the thing. The latter rather militates against the former because no one wants to fight unless they think they'll be successful; and lopsided battles don't provide much of an evening's entertainment.

I think in our particular case this was exacerbated by the version of Piquet being used (James' patent mid 18th century version) rather favouring the Prussians. I'm not saying this is wrong and it's by no means unique. For example Beneath the Lily Banners for the Great Northern War makes the Swedes fairly unbeatable in my experience. I'd be interested in whether the tabletop ruleset for which the campaign was designed were as one sided. On the other hand if the Austrians take the obvious route and don't fight it's very difficult for the Prussians to win, because the Austrians have all the victory points to start with and because of where and when their reinforcements arrive.

The campaign rules also reward splitting up into small - ridiculously small - forces and using them to delay strategic moves in what didn't seem to be terribly realistic ways. I wasn't sure whether the alternate move sequence favoured the Prussians, who moved first, or the Austrians, who moved second. The out of supply rules caused a certain amount of debate as did various other bits such as retreating after battle. James has - with input from Peter and I - rewritten everything. Hopefully this new version addresses all the previous issues and doesn't introduce any new ambiguities.

 "Laws should be constructed so as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge" - Aristotle

2 comments:

  1. I would very much like to see the changes in the rewrite.. I have never played the campaign system myself but to see all the changes in detail would be most rewarding......

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    Replies
    1. Mr Highway sir, long time no speak.

      Further details will no doubt appear at some point on James' blog. One restriction is that the original campaign rules were professionally produced and so they aren't ours to disseminate, even in an amended form.

      The main areas of change will be to make it a three-way campaign; to switch to simultaneous submission of orders requiring a process for movement priority; adjustments to make 'blunder battles' more likely ;rules for automatic resolution of very unbalanced encounters; and other things that I've forgotten.

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