This is a portion of the very beautiful map from the most excellent game, Friedrich, which is my favorite boardgame. It can be very difficult and frustrating to play, but it has all the elements I look for in a multi-player wargame.
This is the type of map I have in mind for my own Imagi-Nations campaign, but obviously mine will look very different. However, the point to point movement along minor or major roads is exactly the look I am wanting to capture.
With this snip from the map, I want to better illustrate by example my current working version of the "bot" for controlling enemy movement and the fog of war that the player has to deal with.
I have reworked a sample of the bot in action. I call it a "bot" as it resolves what I think a general high command would face if their country was invaded, without the player having to make a lot of decisions for the enemy side, ones which would have a built-in bias on the part of the player.
Nearly everything shown in the example below has a table or chart to go along with it. I just need to reword my notes and write actual rules for it all. I also need to clean up some of the tables as a few things have changed since my last couple of posts.
One thing I still need to work out is a matrix of possible outcomes as a result of a scouting/main body clash; the axis are accurate and complete information vs no information obtained and no combat losses vs scouts eliminated. I am factoring in the quality traits of the enemy commander in the given main body, but need to work out the various outcomes along both axis, assigned to d6 rolls. This will take some time to get working as I'd like, but the remainder of this bot example currently exists, if in a slightly muddy form.
The above legend applies to all of the images below. These symbols were created using Google Drawings, which is far more easy to use than GIMP 2.0, for very basic illustrations.
The player city really means town, city, fortress, capital city. I needed to designate them for this example, as they do not already exist in the form I needed on the Friedrich map. My own campaign map versions have had a variation on this from the very beginning of the project, some ten years ago.
Player forces can be as small as a battalion, but will usually be a brigade or more in strength. These are designated, in location and strength, by the player during the Winter Quarters phase. Enemy depot locations are diced for, as to number and location, also.
The player scouting forces are each one cavalry squadron (of any kind, heavy, light, dragoon, hussar, etc.). For this example, I purposely went conservative, using only a portion of the available cavalry, keeping the majority intact for battlefield purposes. More scouts is better, but these are mostly lost to the player for any battles between main forces.
The above is the situation at the end of the Winter Quarters phase of each campaign year. The very next campaign turn is the start of the year's campaign season, which can last from 6 to 28 weeks, depending upon the weather for that year (random die rolls). I've gone through a number of histories of past wars and felt this was a good enough spread that had a basis in reality.
Below are the various maps, most with annotations that explain everything that I'd otherwise write in text here. The image just below is the end of the first turn, each following image is the end of each subsequent turn, through the end of turn 6.
I realize these are small to look at here, but clicking on the images should increase the visible size.
There is a bit more work to do, especially fixing the names and tweaks here and there, but I am fairly happy with how things turned out so far.
I very much would like some feedback on this. Other than a few friends who've texted with me about this or sent an email, I've nothing really at all from folks I do not know and/or have not gamed with. It could be that this seems as promising to others as it is to me, or that it's DOA in the minds of nearly everyone else.
This is something I want to take into account, especially as I do plan on sharing the end product, if people have an interest.
I have just learned that Friedrich, and its companion game Maria, are both getting an expansion. The expansion provides a fifth deck of combat cards as well as little labeled boxes and wooden pieces to provide for hidden army strengths. While I may never play either game again, due to now living a fair distance from any other wargamer, I still had to place my pre-order, just in case life and good fortune provide a way.
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