To keep everyone interested the idea is that if a player invades a territory, the other players take the opposing army. After all, they have the incentive to win!
Each player is provided with 100 Gold and Food at the start, together with notebooks to keep track of their armies and territories (as what the costs of each are so they can manage their resources better). They were also given small notepads to pass messages to me (e.g. Spying missions) but can also be used to pass messages to each other. Such as Russ (after Mark suffered a Famine in his territory) sending him a note asking if he could borrow some Gold - with Mark holding his last 4 coins in his hand.
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| Trading underway. Mark loses more ships to pirates! |
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| A typical battle - Mark getting whupped by Warband. |
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| Zeus makes an appearance and is about to smite the opposing cavalry |
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| One of my new elephants makes an appearance in an all-out scrap for ownership of Mauretania |
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| An ideal set up - campaign map to one side, battlefield to the other. That what makes DBA so good for a campaign. |
Lessons learned
1. The rules are too complex. I don't think all the idea of lending troops etc. will work and I'll just junk all that. They need to be cut down a lot (a couple of pages) to cover the basics.
2. The random events work well but I think a dice roll rather than cards for the events will work better (with the more serious events being less likely to occur). Mark got hit with a Famine card on Turn 1 which mullered him completely.
3. The economics need tweaking. Having to pay for the cities and armies pretty much wiped everyone out (except Ian who'd had a good trading session - unlike Mark who lost 3 ships and made only 30 Gold). So I need to take down the food cost of cities and armies or boost the Food production from each territory. What did happen though was - as envisaged - the players soon grasped that a rush for territory which produced food was vital. So tweaking rather than overhaul is the answer here.
4. Trade became very popular. Ian did a little hop to Neapolis and back from Carthage and netted a whopping 80 Gold profit. Mark (in Sparta) found that he was undertaking higher risk journeys for less reward. So we decided that trade benefits should reflect the risk - the further you travel, the more you make (5 Gold per sea entered per ship) BUT the ships must get back home again to pay up. Giving it more thought, I also think that players can choose whether they bring back Gold or Food from their trading (see below). I also think that ships should be ordered in one season but delivered in the following season.
5. Food became a big issue after the first turn. I allowed the players to trade Gold for Food to meet the shortfall but actually this was a fudge. People can't eat Gold! So for the rules this will change. After the 'tweaking' players must pay their Food requirements with Food. If they don't have enough then they have two options. Simply trade Gold for Food with other players OR let armies / cities die. This will encourage stockpiling and may limit army growth.
6. Recruitment - I limited players to just recruiting 2 bases from each territory or city they own per season. This means that cash rich players can't suddenly buy 3-4 large armies (as they'd have to be trained and armed which takes time). But the more territories you own, the more troops you can field.
7. I need to balance up the Food / Gold allocation for each unclaimed Territory with the troops defending it. As rule of thumb, poor areas (e.g. Sahara) will have less troops defending it (say 4 + d4) while larger, richer territories will offer more goodies (Gold and Food) but will as a consequence have more troops defending (say 8 + d6). So players will know that they will have a fight on their hands if they want the best territories on the map. We debated whether players should know where the best places are. I wanted to keep this secret (to encourage spying etc.) but in hindsight it makes sense that the Empires would know what was worth going for and what wasn't. It will also encourage a race to the better territories (which may mean having to buy fleets to get the troops there quickly rather than having to fight through 3-4 territories to get there...but which means no trading while the ships are in use AND that if the army loses they have to be shipped home with another chance of losing ships and men.
8. DBA is certainly ideal for fighting battles for this campaign. We got 3 battles in of an evening and (without a lot of faffing about by me) could have got a couple more in. What I do need to do is have the defending army of each territory pre-rolled and ready. In addition, rather than looking through 10 boxes of figures for the 'right' units we'll have a stock box of spears, pike, blades etc. that are used for both armies so we can set up a battle immediately.
9. To facilitate this, each territory will have its terrain pre-designated so once battle is joined we have the right scenery to hand to plonk down and get it on.
10. I also realise we'll never get 80 turns out in the following month. To speed things up I'll need players to move simultaneously and then address conflicts as they arise. The 3:1 rule I will adapt to 2:1 (so if a player takes 12 units into a territory defended by 6, then they will automatically take the territory and (instead of the previous rule where all defending units retreat) I will make it that d6 units will retire into a random attached unclaimed territory. If they can't retire into an unclaimed territory, they are assumed to surrender.
11. Talking of tribes moving, I will add into the Random Events the possibility of invasion from an adjoining unclaimed territory. So there is always the possibility that a large army can come steaming in from an unexpected source and cause havoc (as did happen). As mentioned above, I think we'll use 3d6 to roll for an event. The Big Events will happen on rolls like 3, 4, 5 and 16,17,18 and the minor ones in between. This means that minor events are more likely to occur than the major ones, but the majors will be troblesome to say the least.
12. Mark used the Plague ship rule and managed to inflict Plague on Carthage (until we realised that he wasn't suffering from plague at all!). But its a fun rule and we'll keep it in.
13. In terms of invading territories, the Spy rule worked well for Russ (except that he lost the battle). But we're going to create a rule that players have the option to withdraw from battle without fighting if they turn up with less troops or an unsuitable army. We discussed the penalty (such as losing 1d4 units) but this meant that you might as well fight the battle anyway. So I think we'll go with losing 1 of the slowest moving elements in the army (i.e. to simulate the invaders being run-down). So if you go in with Light Horse, Cavalry and Spears, you'll lose 1 base of Spears if you withdraw.
14. Given that we'll have variable army sizes, we will work to the 1/3 and General rule. As soon as an army loses 1/3 of its strength OR the General dies, the battle is over.
The guys were kind enough to say that this can work well - with the tweaks mentioned. So 'll re-do the rules over the weekend and we'll be in good shape for February.