Waddington's Campaign....Part the Third

This was the later version of the game and in my opinion, not nearly as nice to look at!

I have given some thought to the question of terrain and its effects at the level the game is designed to be played at and how this can be best be replicated within the spirit of the original rules. I consciously made a number of key decisions that I consider to be pertinent as follows:

·         Any built up area smaller than a major city would not feature on the map

·         Major rivers, ranges of hills or ridges and forests could be included

·         A category of ‘Cultivated’ would encompass farmland and small villages etc.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is the small fact that if a unit is pushed back and any unit is in the hex it has to retreat into then that unit is destroyed. The effect of this is to avoid having formations that are too deep.

The pieces from the game - infantry in the foreground, cavalry in the rear and the generals on the flank

As it stands at present I am looking at increasing the number of hits required by one by an attacking unit when the defender is in one of the terrain hexes featured above with a city requiring an additional two hits. As mentioned previously, I am looking at armies consisting of a general and twelve units and using a 13 x 9 hex grid with 1” hexes. Initially I may even make use of the supply of Heroscape tiles I have. These are slightly larger than I would like but will have the advantage of being able to not only feature the unit pieces but also for some of the high level terrain. I do not own any blue tiles for this collection but reckon that converting a few accordingly should be easy enough. For the ‘pure’ battle game I will probably impose a DBA style victory condition around the number of units lost or possibly by setting an exhaustion level of some kind.

It makes a lot of sense to design the standalone game in the first place rather than steaming in with the full campaign version – this can follow on once I have the initial set finalised. Interestingly enough, using the Heroscape tiles does open up the potential for making use of my existing block armies in a more portable way than with the full sized Hexon set up. I would need to use single blocks for units and hit markers of some kind if fighting a full on Memoir of Battle type game.

Much to ponder methinks – but in a good way....;-)