Quick, 2-player, linear campaign system

Thanks a lot Vic, very interesting! and useful!

Great suggestions, Stevie!

I like your term for the evasion mechanism, I'll use it

The reinforcement mechanism you suggest is intriguing. I had considered using reinforcements beyond 12 elements to replace existing elements, but mostly for flexibility - i.e. changing the composition to adapt to the campaign on the flight; in the end I left that out out of simplicity.
I like the idea of the opponent picking which elements arrive as reinforcements, but since element choice is quite flexible it could lead to the opponent choosing fairly useless troop types except for very homogeneous elements; and while the historic angle would be fine for "generic" or easy to recruit troop types (such as Auxilia, Psiloi, Warband or Bows) I'm not sure that it makes sense in a campaign, for instance, to let a player force the enemy to carry around Artillery, a Litter, or a single Pike element without the possibility of rear support, which, while can be pretty useless against certain types of enemies and therefore picked as ballast by the opponent, cannot be thought of as hastily recruited locals, quite the opposite.
It also forces a player to provide elements for all army options - whereas, as written, players can play the campaign without needing elements for options they won't use.
I toyed with the idea of restricting reinforcements outside of a player's home space to generic troop types and only allowing for specialist elements at home, which would sort of represent these restrictions, but didn't arrive to a formula that I was happy with or that could work well for a wide variety of periods and regions, so I ended up dropping it.

In any case, I think your proposal could work well with the Seasons rule, since that provides regular reinforcements to both armies and would diminish the impact of the opponent choosing ineffective troop types. I think that's a good candidate for playtesting! I'll add it as an optional rule until I get the chance to test the reinforcement system more thoroughly.

I'll update the document in a few days to incorporate your suggestions and a a couple omissions I noticed.

Vic - these look really good. I’ll try them out.

Thanks for your interest! I'll be happy to receive any feedback if try it.

I think that's an excellent suggestion. I proposed that the attacker kept the initiative to avoid disadvantaging the attacker too harshly compared to a system without the chance to withdraw, but it is indeed too punishing for a player who is trying to earn time to reinforce (which, with the current rolls to recover losses, will be often after a lost battle), so I like your system a lot. I'll incorporate it in the next revision.

This way, there's a higher incentive for an army to withdraw as the potential benefit is higher - but doing so can still result in an undesired battle with some disadvantage for the player who failed at withdrawing. The only thing that might be a bit concerning is that highly mobile armies can be almost sure to succeed at withdrawing against a slow infantry army, so there isn't much risk involved in that case - but withdrawing still means ceding a space to the enemy, so there's a cost, and I think it's a realistic advantage for a very mobile army versus a heavy foot army.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion!

The other aspect that I'm fairly sure will require tweaking is the roll to check if a destroyed element returns. Requiring a 6 for the loser and a 5-6 for the winner gives a tangible advantage to the winner, and is intended to punish battle losses, but it's probably too strict - I alternatively considered 5-6 for the loser and 4-6 for the winner, which would result in fewer losses but would also reduce the edge the winner has over the loser in terms of casualties.

What do you think?