Hi,
as I have never played an HPS campaign game, I can only offer my experience from board gaming, where we did a variant on this based on the La Bataille-series from CoA.
We made up a strategic map of N France, Belgium and part of Holland and Prussia, made a general "Order of Battle" for all nations from where the Overall Commanders for each side made their own division of forces into both historical and non-historical Corps and detachments etc.
Then all agreed on general victory conditions, mostly based on the following parameters:
- The general force ration Allies vs French
- Geographical objectives (politically influenced, such as Paris, Brussels etc)
- LOC to important rear areas (all) and sea ports (Britain)
- Time span, when a decisive battle had to be fought in order for the French to press the Alies for peace before their newly mobilized forces could be brought to bear. Then France would have lost anyhow.
The strategic campaign moved blindly over the strategic map with an umpire actualy carrying out the movements and reporting back to the commanders any events, possible sightings etc. Each turn was one day and that made coordination cruicial, as large bodies of troops otherwise would become fatigued by waiting while being alerted etc.
Dumps and magazines also limited how much you could concentrate forces without consuming supply, which could be very hard when you engaged in battle to find out that most of the reserve ammunition was too far away and that the troops were exhausted because of being out of supply..
When troops clashed and the both sides decided to engage, the Corps commander of the affected troop assumed over all command, unless Nappy or Nosey were present themselves. The other players (Corps commanders of other corps, Nappy et al) became subordinates to the engaged corps/ wing commander.
Battles were fought on the normal La Bataille maps, not only the 1815 ones, but the others too. Losses were recorded and divided into casualites and stragglers. Depending on the general outcome of the battle, a larger or smaller number of the units (brigades etc) gained experienced, as decided by the umpire.
When doing tactical battles, your own unit counter(leader) also played an important role, as your "performance" was recorded by the side's overall commander - you got "bravery points" for taking parts in assaults, rallying units etc and also "cowardice points" for not succeeding rallying troops, having units break while being stacked with them etc. This added a very fun parameter, as you had to balance between survival and trying to get a good final ranking!
A dead hero is a useless hero... In that respect, you could win the game even when being on the losing side.
As the tactical battles were blind, you normally had a very vague idea of the size of the enemy force, which led to many interesting small unit actions.
I assume that this will not work automatically with tese games, but if one had 1-2 umpires willing to do some paperwork and keep the records, it should be possible to construct a corresponding campaign using the HPS games and their battle editors.
Alow for recovering stragglers by rest, adjust values and OOB accordingly when setting up the next battle, that should work.
Will take some teething problems initialy, but it would be fun giving it a try!
Fld Lt Lars Magnus
SS Bn/ 1/ III/ AoG/ CSA
|