Campaigns - how to prevent a landslide?

[Valkyrion]

I'm having a bit of a hard time thrashing out the details for a campaign me and a buddy are going to be starting and it's to do with being steam rollered and how to stop it.

 

The basic premise is that that it's a 3 faction campaign (Imperium, Chaos, Xenos) and each round consists of a Kill Team, the four sizes of Crusade, and an apocalypse game.

 

At first we thought to ban the use of faction stratagems and command assets, these being unlocked by winning the previous games, but once a player wins a game he immediately gains a huge advantage that will lead to steam rollering. 

 

We then thought to award the victor territory, which pushes them up a scoreboard but strains their forces, so for each territory a player has they must reduce the size of their force for any given game by 5 power. But this ultimately creates a stalemate situation as those with most territories are easily beaten in higher points games. If one player can only field 25 power and the other 100 then it's hardly going to be a fair game is it!

 

Then we thought a league table, like in Football. 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, and that's it. But it's boring and can lead to a team pulling away just as likely as all teams staying within touching distance. That, and the lack of a 'bonus' for a win can end up feeling that games are just going through the motions. 

 

Similarly to the above, we thought about each faction being able to stake a number of points per game, between 1 and 6, but each number only available once. So for example, if the Xenos players stakes 6 points on winning the Apocalypse game, he eventually must play a game where he only gets 1 point. This was more interesting and is currently at the top of our little list. 

 

But we prefer the idea of the games having a tangible effect on the following games - we just don't know how to do it fairly so any thoughts are welcome!

[NiceGuyAdi]

With the idea of territory and forces being stretched, perhaps you could have a system where units, but not troops, have to be allocated To a territory by the faction player.

 

He can only choose units in a territory, perhaps adjective territories as well for each match.

 

So he gets all his strategies and relics, but a narrower list of units to choose from in each match.

[Brother Ramael]

Well, you could use the Crusade system and let the winner get a veteran squad upgrade ( aka the xp rewards) and one bonus crusade relic for for each win; it feels tasty for the winner but it shouldn't be that big on the overall balance, especially in later games.

[Trokair]

Furthermore in Crusade, the underdog gets an extra CP for every two Crusade points that they are behind the other player. So if the discrepancy between crusade rewards that one player has over another gets to large then there is some balance to reduce the snowball potential.

[Brother Tyler]

The passage below is from Tabletop Wargames: A Designers

[MARK0SIAN]

Crusade definitely does snowball very quickly and it can be hard for someone who doesn’t start well to catch up.

 

A friend and I tweaked the rules a bit so that battle scars are automatically removed after the next game, the total size of the rosters went up uniformly for all players, traits were rolled for and units could still gain experience even if they were destroyed. It meant the losing player isn’t having to spend all his RP on stuff like removing scars and can spend it on other things.

 

Some of the crusade traits in the 9th edition codexes are also very powerful and armies that don’t yet have a codex can’t really compete there so if you are using the crusade system I would give serious thought to making everyone stick to the core rule book for battle traits.

 

It might also be a good idea to limit how many traits a certain unit can acquire. For example by about 10 games in I had a unit of vanguard veterans that hit on 2s, were always in assault doctrine, had an extra inch of movement for normal moves, advances and charges and had a 6+ FNP. They were honestly broken and that was with rolling for the traits they acquired. No amount of of extra CP for an underdog can compete with units like that so I’d cap the number of traits any one squad can receive.

[ThePenitentOne]

One of the things I thought was interesting about the Argovon flashpoint was that it went through narrative phases as the game went on. So the first month, the goal was research based, then it shifts to territory, then to archeotech, etc.

 

Asymmetrical campaign goals can work too. If one teams goal is to destroy enough enemies to complete a ritual, one team is trying to capture a given set of territories and the third team needs to destroy a particular territory, you've got a campaign where theoretically, everyone can "win"

 

Having the consequences of a battle determine which battle is fought next rather than rewarding the winner is a way to create consequences that make games interesting without creating a runaway situation.

[bigtrouble]

What about expand the territory idea and create an actual physical map? If a player holds territory, they get some kind of a unique bonus associated with that territory and have to pay the roster power level cost to continue to hold the territory and benefit from the bonus. They would then be able to vacate the territory if they need the troops, but that would leave it open to another player to take advantage of the bonus. You could start players in different places, and as they win battles each round the can advance, if they lose a battle, they fall back, each game size could be a number of territories won?

[walter h]

That was how GW, ran that one campaign. Planetary empires I believe was how they did it. You have game pieces that portray territories. You could do the same thing I guess with a map generator.

[dice4thedicegod]

The best way I’ve seen to run was the flames of war firestorm campaigns.

 

You can attack from/to any adjacent areas with a pre agreed amount of points (1000 or whatever for each player) but you also get firestorm units on the map, representing key assets. If you have these in a location being fought over, you add up to two of them to your forces for that engagement.

 

So a blood angels firestorm unit might be an assault squad. An imperial guard one might be a leman Russ or a couple of infantry squads (depending on what they represent in the fluff).

 

Then there’s a fairly strict time limit on the campaign.

 

This stops the running away due to resources (you are fighting for key areas worth more victory points at the end of campaign turn 5, not extra factories producing more units) and also gives players a constant floor amount of forces in each battle and also reduces book keeping!

[Xenith]

I mean, someone has to win the campaign, right? 

 

Why not have the territory idea, but it doesnt grant any kind of bonus. Just the side with the most territories at the end wins. If one side is rampaging and winning...then there's nothing you could have done anyway. 

[Valkyrion]

Thanks all for your suggestions so far

I like the idea of the asymmetrical victory conditions and crusade throws up an interesting possibility so could anyone who has played lots of crusade tell me if these are too simple (or impossible) to achieve; (core book only)

 

Getting all 12 weapon upgrades across the force

One unit getting all 6 battle traits (alternative if it is too simple - one unit getting all 6 battle traits in addition to one psyker getting all 3 fortitudes)

One force getting all 12 relics

 

Similarly with Kill Team - I've not played enough to know if getting 20 Materiel to the exclusion of all else is easy or not, or if reducing everyones Morale to 0 is impossible.

 

Also, we've decided against Combat Patrol and Onslaught level games as small and large games are just as represented by Kill Team and Apocalypse.

[ThePenitentOne]

If an upgrade that you're looking for is a battle honour, a unit can only have 4.

 

But they can have other augmentations such as strats purchased with requisition points, which then become permanent.

 

Some of the dexes have custom upgrades which are neither battle honours nor strats as well.

[Valkyrion]

p318 says a unit can have no more than 6 battle honours. You can only earn four through experience, but you can give units up to 6 in total. 

thats my reading of it anyway. 

[Oxydo]

p318 says a unit can have no more than 6 battle honours. You can only earn four through experience, but you can give units up to 6 in total. 

thats my reading of it anyway.

That's correct, you earn additional Battle Honours from winning certain mission, but they are usually restricted in ways such as "give a crusade relic to a character" or "give one unit that made it off the field a Battle Trait".

I wouldn't personally use "gain all 12 relics" and so forth as Victory conditions because it forces players into trying to get them all. The Crusade campaign books, so far, have had a secondary resource, Investigation Points for Beyond the Veil, that's used to help your forces. Could be useful for inspiration.

If you want specific player victory conditions, I would start at the 9th ed Codex crusade sections, DA hunting Fallen, BA trying to handle the Black Rage, Necrons trying to get all the epitetes on their lord and so forth.

I'm sure old campaign books have a lot of info you could use as well.

[Spleenex]

One of the things I thought was interesting about the Argovon flashpoint was that it went through narrative phases as the game went on. So the first month, the goal was research based, then it shifts to territory, then to archeotech, etc.

 

Asymmetrical campaign goals can work too. If one teams goal is to destroy enough enemies to complete a ritual, one team is trying to capture a given set of territories and the third team needs to destroy a particular territory, you've got a campaign where theoretically, everyone can "win"

 

Having the consequences of a battle determine which battle is fought next rather than rewarding the winner is a way to create consequences that make games interesting without creating a runaway situation.

 

I think the asymmetric objectives is the way to go. Perhaps you can award additional campaign victory points for completing your main objective earlier? In any case, if I were to run a campaign like this, I think i would structure it so that one team meeting their strategic objectives does not necessarily trigger the endgame. Perhaps you set a certain number of campaign turns or something as the end. That way, if a player/team does achieve their primary objective early, they still have to hold on to and consolidate their gains while trying to prevent others from achieving their objectives. Looking forward to hearing what you land on.

 

[Rik Lightstar]

Depending on the factions people would be taking, you can tie the victory conditions to the Crusade Agendas in the Codexes for any faction with a new book,or the ones in the main book, each player picks a couple of those and scores Campaign Points each time they complete one or more of them in a single game.

 

Rik

[Valkyrion]

I think I'm underestimating how long it might take to reach certain goals.

For instance, how many games of Crusade does it take to get a legendary unit, on average? Even if your unit kills 3 units per game, which is unlikely, it can only get 5xp before agendas, so you're looking at about 10 games, right? 

 

But if we then say we'll just play Incursion and Strike Force size games, and each player plays each other on every mission (for fairness sake) then we're up to 24 games per faction and 36 games in total. 36 games, allowing for real life, will take the best part of a year to do and might well lead to burn out.

 

I think I'm going to have to reconsider how grand this needs to be. It reminds me of a time we played Blood Bowl football league style, with home and away games and 20 teams and after about the 10th game the thought of having to play 370 more filled us with dread...

[MARK0SIAN]

It’s pretty easy to push a unit to six traits in crusade if you want to do that. It’d be quite hard to do across the whole force but so many missions let the victor choose a trait that you can easily funnel a lot of the traits towards one or two key units. And if you’ve gone big on those units like a large squad of Bladeguard they can be really formidable and carry a force of other units that haven’t had as many traits invested into it. A unit could easily have 3-4 traits after just a handful of games if that player has won and chosen to focus stuff into that unit.

 

In a long campaign I’d personally hard cap it at 4 traits max per unit and even then some of those units would be very formidable. To be honest though, one of the biggest issues with crusade I’ve found is not so much that the winners force tends to snowball (which it does) but that the losing player gets so little progress from the matches. I’d focus some attention on making sure the player that loses is still able to make some meaningful progress.

[Cheex]

Our group has run a few Crusade campaigns now (with persistent forces across each campaign), each with different rules so I could see what worked best.

 

The set of rules I liked the most is what I call Strategic Assets. Players aren't fighting over a "map" with "territory" as such, but instead are fighting to control various Strategic Assets throughout the campaign zone. However, you could easily adapt this system to be represented by a map if you prefer.

 

The campaign has a number of Strategic Assets that are divided amongst the players at the start. Each Asset has a Strategic Value, which can be any number from 1-5. At the end of the campaign, the team with the highest total SV wins the campaign, and the player on each team with the highest individual SV is the "champion" of that team. In addition, each player has a "Home" asset worth 5 SV that can never be lost, allowing them to fall back to a reliable position if they're getting destroyed.

 

At each battle, immediately before choosing a mission, each player chooses a Strategic Asset that their opponent controls. That's the Asset that their opponent's army is staging from for that battle. Players then have the opportunity to choose a mission that suits the Assets involved, if they wish.

 

If one player's staging Asset is worth more than the other, then the player with the greater value gains a number of CPs equal to the difference. For example, if Player A is staging from an Asset worth 3 SV, and Player B is staging from an Asset worth 2 SV, then Player A will get 1 bonus CP.

 

After the battle, the victor gains control of their opponent's staging Asset, unless it's their Home Asset.

 

This gives you the choice of either trying to attack a valuable Asset at the risk of giving your opponent more CPs, or going for a less valuable Asset but with an advantage. If you find yourself losing the campaign and only have your Home asset, you essentially get a few extra CPs for free to help you get back into the game.

 

This system prevents snowballing since there is no cumulative benefit to owning more Assets - in fact, the more Assets you have, the more opportunity your opponent has to pick a weaker Asset as your staging point, giving players the opportunity to chip away at stronger players.

 

The next plan is to give each Asset a small bonus Stratagem that players can only use if that's their staging Asset, but that will take a bit more work.

Edited March 15, 2021 by Cheex

[Valkyrion]

Your strategic asset idea is similar to what I had in mind with the staking points concept further up the thread.

 

I don't think you can really reward a player for winning a game beyond whatever scoring system you decide to implement. Crusade and Kill Team has its own means of levelling which usually benefits the victor, so rewarding the player for winning is just double dipping, so I think we'll abandon that thought.

 

Apocalypse is a bit different though, as there's no growth as such, so we're going to do that slightly different - don't know how yet, maybe let winners reroll twists if attacking, or allow defenders two ruses or something.

 

As suggested, I also think the campaign needs a defined end, rather than a defined goal as everyone knows where they stand and a few lucky wins can't then snowball a player too far ahead, so to that end we're thinking of this;

 

in the first round one faction has the initiative and plays one kill team game, crusade game and apocalypse game against each other faction as the attacker in every mission, for a total of 6 games (the other two factions only play three games)

in round two a different faction has the initiative and does the above, and in round the third faction does. 

By the end of round three each faction has played 12 games each

 

We repeat that twice more, each time with a different faction having the initiative 1st, which I think matters due to how units gain XP and scars etc, so in total each player will have played 36 games over 9 rounds.

 

Players gain 1 point per victory, and 5 points if they achieve their yet to be determined goal - one goal per system of games per faction (3 in total) - and the cumulative score determines who is winning the overall campaign.

 

After these rounds have been resolved, whoever scored the least in each system (KT, Crusade, Apo) is eliminated and the Victory Points are recalculated accordingly.

 

 

this leaves two players per system to fight over who is the winner of that system. I don't know how to do that. 

Problems;

Players who aren't involved don't want to see another round of 12 games.

It's unfair on the leading player to bring this campaign down to a sudden death game, especially if he was so far ahead.

If we give the winning player an advantage in game it might render the game moot.

The second place player must have a chance of winning. 

[MegaVolt87]

If it's just the two of you, just use multiple armies each. Switch out the one that's ahead too much with another faction. If you have 4 individual armies that are not allied, it's basically like having a four player campaign. If you have 4+ players with 2 armies each, then you want to start looking at alliances as well at that point, not by players but on a faction/ army basis.

[Noserenda]

Yeah snowballing is an inherent problem with map campaigns and the like. Ive not been able to get any crusade games in but one or two things worked for an Adeptus Titanicus campaign weekend i wrote.

1. Little Bonuses for winning games or achieving campaign objectives. Things like choosing the deployment zone type in the next battle or getting a bonus to priority rolls, or placing objectives first and the like. They give a player agency without tilting the result too much.

2. Separate Honour and VP scores. So Honour represented doing what Legio command asked when it was hard, killing titans and doing secondary missions and was always completely separate from Victory points. Essentially it gave a second campaign victory condition and rewarded in character play. From memory two players were in contention for "Best general" but half a dozen were close to "Most Honourable" :) 

3. Narrative tied to faction score rather than individuals. So it wasnt a complicated mission tree i wrote, the same 5 missions were always going to be played but things were modified by faction scoring, so for example the losing faction is trying to launch missile strikes in mission 3, or the winning side is probing the losers in a recon mission. but these were tied into the whole side rather than an individual, from memory the Loyalist side had the best individuals but overall the Traitors were doing better which both encouraged the stronger players to help the weaker ones and stopped any one player pulling too far ahead in theory.

4. Units gained experience but could also perma die. So individual titan crews got a lil slip of paper to rep them and gained xp and skills out of one of the GW campaign books. In practice the weekend was only long enough for a crew to get one or two skills but even with a longer campaign the chance of dying was sufficient that they were unlikely to ever get game breaking. 

Bit of a ramble there but hope it helped :) 

[sairence]

I like the idea of capturing strategic assets that can give a bonus, but come at a cost if you want to use it.

 

Say you capture a Void Shield Generator and decide to activate it that round. Every unit in your army gets a 6++ but holding and using the generator takes forces, so each battle you start with 50 or 100p less for that round.

 

So effectively, if you decide to use it you play your 2000p game with for example a 1900p army, but everyone has the invun save.

 

The bonus and cost needs to be scaled obviously, but it feels like a good way to give a bonus for a victory that isn't just a straight up buff. And the player can always decide not to activate it and just play a regular game.

[walter h]

Well crusades do take years

Really it is an interesting idea to keep groups busy,and even helping to motivate and get the painting and conversion bug.