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Campaign Troop Strength Ideas

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Campaign Troop Strength Ideas Empty Campaign Troop Strength Ideas

Post  Admin Tue Feb 07, 2012 9:40 pm

What Question Well, out of all of the batteries of artillery, regiments of infantry and of cavalry in SOW, how many should we use in our first Campaign? All of them? Some of them? If your answer is "All of them", then just say so. If your answer is "Some of them", then you have to post and answer "Some of them" and tell us which ones and why.

My idea here is that we ought to have one Army HQ, three infantry Corps and one cavalry division - minimum - for this first campaign. Say, 9 infantry divisions and three cavalry brigades. If we say that one infantry corps can have two to five infantry divisions plus Corps Artillery, and each infantry division can have two to five brigades plus Division Artillery, then the Army Commanders can take those infantry brigades and shift them around among 9 Infantry Division Commanders and those divisions among the three Corps. The cavalry brigades can be parcelled out among the infantry Corps, but there needs to be at least one cavalry brigade left in the Cavalry Division. This would require a bunch of oob.cvs modifications.

Being lazy, I say take them all, the entirety of the AoP and ANV, and spread them out; that would reduce the number of modified oob.csv's to zero.

The factors to consider are: how many folks will want to play and on which side. Historically, ANV had one Army CO, three infantry Corps CO's and nine infantry Division CO's as well as a cavalry Division CO and 7 cavalry brigade CO's. Confederate total, 14 Generals. The AoP had one Army CO, seven infantry Corps CO's, one cavalry Corps CO, one Artillery Reserve CO and nineteen infantry Division CO's and three cavalry division COs. Federal total, 32 Generals. That's a lot of players, even if we don't have players as brigade CO's. The obvious solution is for players to be assigned to command more than one Corps and when a battle comes along and not all the players are involved in it, at Corps level, then they can be Division CO's for that battle.

I eagerly await your ideas.

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Post  Digby Wed Feb 08, 2012 10:23 am

For our first attempt I would go MUCH smaller. Lets try a small campaign of limited duration and objectives and with small forces, no more than a corps altogether.

Grand ideas concerning armies of multiple corps are all well and good, but lets try a system first and see if it works without us having to invest too much time into it. A lot of wargame caamapigns fail for various reasons. Over the years I have come to invest less and less time in their mechanics because it can often be wasted effort. So lets go as simply as possinble for the first attempt.

I would suggest a fictional campaign where one side outnumbers the other but must go on the offensive and secure an objective, or series of objectives near the enemy side of the map.

I would recommend again my well-proven map method of battlefields connected by lines of march representing roads or railroads. This is called a 'nodal map' and an example of one is here:

http://miniaturewargames.homestead.com/MagnaGraecia.html

Each line of march connecting two battlefields requires the same unit of time to traverse which we can call a day, to keep things simple. When a force crosses a battlefield (the numbered squares on the map on the example website) to position itself at another line of march, this also takes one day.

If the defending army has to cover, say, five objectives each worth, say 20 points, then the attacking army has to secure at least 60 points of objectives to claim a modest win and 80 points to claim a major win. We can devise a system of points deducted for losses incurred as well, making it essential to fight tactically and carefully.

Rather than going for the traditional open map with markers moved across it, the point-to-point nodal map I propose has several advantages:

1) Everyone will know exactly where they are with no disagreements since every unit will always be in a battlefield space. The exact location within that battlefield space is not important. Armies will be placed randomly on the map relative to their points of entry when a scenario is created. A player need only be informed "Your division is in the Waterford Town square" and that's all he needs to be told to know excactly where on the campaign map his troops are.
2) Each battlefield space is a single map from the SoW:GB game, whether its from the base game, Pipe Creek, Antietam or one of the other official add-on maps. The SoW maps are 'allocated' to their campaign positions before play commences and every player knows which battlefield map is in use at each node. This makes it easy for players to know in advance what the terrain will be like and to plan positions accordingly. For simplicity North on the SoW maps is also always North on the campaign node maps. We would need to agree which add-ons the groups members must buy in order to play in the campaign, of course, as this determines what maps we can use.
3) Campaign mechanics can be very simple. Infantry divisions or brigades can move 1 line of march between two map nodes in a day. Cavalry brigades with horse artillery can move 2 (that is move along a line of march AND cross a battle map to its far side in a day). Supply trains/depots move 1 line of march every 2 days (so half the speed of infantry). The longest line of supply a unit may trace is 6 units long (so 3 lines of march and 3 battlemaps). It cannot advance ahead of its supply train or depot unit further than this.

We wouldn't have any form of complex resupply and ammo rules beyond the above. Being within your supply range will allow ammo and food to be resupplied and a certain number or percentage of losses to be replaced. Being out of supply in this simple system isn't allowed. We could introduce more complex systems later, such as allowing units to voluntarily going out of supply in order to make a forced march with the intendant problems with ammo and replacements being reduced.

We can also use the Berthier Campaign Management System, which is designed to introduce fog of war and handle supply systems if you wish:

http://delyall.tripod.com/berthier/berthier.html

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Post  Admin Wed Feb 08, 2012 11:24 am

Excellent ideas, Digby! I hereby appoint you Assistant Campaign Creator and ask that you prepare a nodal campaign map using only the SOW Maps that are available without having bought any expansion. That would be the Gettysburg maps - the four smaller ones - the large G'burg map, Kansas, Alpine and East Cavalry. Plan on the forces being Longstreet's Corps versus Union II Corps (Hancock's) and VI Corps (Sedgewick). Please map up the nodal map, the campaign objectives and arrange it in such a way as to give the Confederate forces several alternative routes into Federal territory, to keep them guessing. If you judge that there ought to be fewer or more Federals, then make it so and let us see it please. Thanks ever so much!

And I downloaded the Berthier program and it looks like it would serve our purposes later on for more complexity. Still hoping that I can find a program that will do enough so that I can play in a campaign myself.

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