Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Crusades Campaign

Here is a set of campaign rules I have drawn up for our upcoming DBA campaign, based on GW Mighty Empires and to be played on a Mighty Empires map. They are intended to represent the "generic" crusade, perhaps the third one, since there will be several Crusader armies that will likely start as established kingdoms in the Levant. Comments welcome.

Crusades Campaign
Victory Conditions: The game ends at the end of a turn when at least one power has reached a total of 10 territories + cities. At this point the winner is the power with the highest total of territories + cities.
At Start: Players dice for order of starting placement. Low roller chooses their start territory first and places a control marker on the map accordingly. Players should choose their starting territory somewhere consistent with their historical origin (e.g. A Fatimid player should choose a location in Egypt, a Crusader player in Palestine, etc...). The starting territory may contain a city.
Turn sequence: At the start of each turn the powers are ranked according to their territory size, where territory size is measured by the number of territories + cities under control. Tied ranks are settled by a die roll.
The player with the lowest rank has the first choice of opponent to challenge in a battle. The next highest ranked power not yet challenged can then challenge any higher ranked power to battle, and so on until all of the powers are paired up. When there are an odd number of powers, the remaining power has to sit out the turn.
Each battle is fought as per the normal DBA rules including dicing for attacker and terrain placement. The attacker has the choice of playing on a 30” or 24” board size.
After the battles have been fought, the winner of each battle gains conquest points equal to the margin of victory that can be used to expand their territory holdings. All expansion must be contiguous with currently held territory (i.e. adjacent to a territory held or just taken control of). A player player not challenged and sitting out a turn automatically gets one conquest point, representing consolidation activity during a peaceful break. Conquest points can be converted to territorial gains as follows, starting with the lowest ranked power:
1pt- the player may take control of an adjacent uncontrolled territory that does not contain a city.
1pt- the player may fortify any controlled territory that does not control a city.
2pts- the player may take control of an adjacent uncontrolled territory that contains a city
2pts- the power may conquer an adjacent territory controlled by the power just defeated that is not fortified nor contains a city.
3 pts- the power may conquer of an adjacent territory controlled by the power just defeated that is fortified or contains a city.
All conquest points should be spent on the turn they are earned and cannot be saved or held over. Multiple territories can be taken control of or conquered. A player is knocked out of the campaign if their last territory is conquered.
Here is the map:
Cities: Constantinople, Nicaea, Konya, Edessa, Antioch,Tripoli, Acre, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta
Players/Powers
Chen-song- Byzantium
Me- Sultanate of Rum (Seljuks)
Bruce- Crusaders
Jonathan- Crusaders
Mark- Crusaders
Dennis- Syrians
Barry- Fatimids
Terry- Ayyubids

5 comments:

  1. Great idea, Dave! I've often thought of using Mighty Empires as campaign system for a DBA or HOTT game.

    I should say the old "original" Mighty Empires... I don't have the new one and don't really know how it is different. But in the original you could field banners of 500-1500 points (which could correspond to field armies of 5-15 stands or 10-30AP if HOTT) and taxes raised provided gold and one gold bought 100 points worth of new stuff (so, one stand or 2 AP for HOTT).

    The downside was the campaign year was six month/turns... so it would take a long time to play out a year and if you had a battle early in the year that devastated your army you'd be pretty much effed...

    I'm excited to see how this plays out!

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  2. Hi guys, thanks for the comments. Tim, I don't know how similar the new version is to the old one, but it does contain an economic aspect that factors into army size (with mines and other streams of income as well). I did not want that level of detail, I actually didn't go for any attrition either. Three reasons for this- first, players might only show up some time and in this model they can miss a night or two with little effect and no need to work out their economy for them; second, any kind of attrition really burns you if you lose a battle badly early in the game; third, I just wanted simplicity. What I propose is basically a ladder campaign with a map to keep track of score, with a little bit of map strategy to play with.

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  3. Nice looking map, great idea. Ill be watching with interest to see how this plays out, Nice one!

    Steve.

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