Empire Campaign

Thanks Robert.

The Carthaginians actually established a foothold in Magna Graecia around 296 BC having defeated an army of Italiot Greeks. However, they were then evicted following a major defeat in 294 BC by the Romans. It will be interesting to see which way the Romans venture next, assuming they suffer no revolts to distract them.

That said if the Carthaginians seize the initiative, determined at the start of each turn, they may switch back to campaigning for control of Magna Graecia.

Seleucus has a number of options, but crushing Bactrian rebels is now one of the highest priorities I suspect.

Hi Paddy,

Some good questions here. I'm pleased people are finding it of interest.

I've based most of the rule mechanics on the "Empire" boardgame system. As such I'm reluctant to repeat to match of the detail in the boargame, I don't want to breach copyright. However, you could purchase a copy from the Society of Ancients for a very modest cost.

I've just added a few more states but some of these are starting to splutter, so for example Ptolemy will be more defensive in the future. You will have seen I started with players actually commanding states I've since dropped this. For me the overhead of having players commanding states was significant. People were often away and the campaign would stall. This was very apparent to me when I became very busy myself. As a result strategic moves are now generated using a decision tree and die rolls. This is working much better as I just get different players involved when we organise games. Further, no one has too much invested so the games have been less intense, which I prefer. Anyway, I can outline some of these mechanics shortly, I'm just travelling at the moment.

Provinces are only important when calculating victory conditions. In the boardgame there are two dates when this is checked. Halfway through the boardgame and at the end. I haven't put too much focus on this yet, but will need to soon.

Great Generals are interesting. In the boardgame a great commander completes five offensives in one move and all before any of the other player states. So in the boardgame Alexander can sweep east in two decades. In our campaign the only such commanders are Hannibal and Scippo. Yet both have the potential to greatly expand the area of conquest in their respective decades. The boardgame provides mechanisms to increase the chance of an attack winning, considerably. If you used Sabin's Lost Battles rules a great commander is also very useful. In DBA no such mechanism exists. I'm toying with some ideas, but haven't decided just yet.

Revolts are easy. There is a table and I throw two dice and consult the table. I've wrapped a couple of additional rules on top of this so in the most recent turn a revolt occurred in Cisalpina. As it hadn't been captured this triggered a special invasion of Italia. I've also had a revolt in Sicily as the Carthaginians had been ejected I used this as an excuse for a battle between Syracuse and some other Greeks. What is interesting is that as an empire grows so it is more susceptible to a revolt. The Seleucids have suffered this and Carthage also potentially more likely to suffer a revolt.

I hope this helps a little. I will look at writing more in the future.

Nice BUA Keith. Where did you get it?

Cheers,

Very nice indeed. The benefits of overseas travel are manifest.

Cheers,

My own campaign has yet to get to Hannibal so I have been wondering about options for standard DBA.

I have not tried using Empire with BBDBA, but certainly have considered it. I think adding PIPs to low scores may work, so if you roll a one or two increase these or count them as a higher number. Or perhaps allow the die rolls to be swapped between commands a couple of times during the battle. So the low command can become a high command or some such. There was an article in Slingshot about using Empire with DBM, but my Slingshots are all packed away due to moving house.