mighty empires campaign rules with warmaster

[cjbennett22]

alright, its getting close now so I need to start thinking about the actual rules of play.

I have the mighty empires tiles all set but most still needing paint.  I have all four of the fleets for the four armies me and my brother play with in warmaster.  Elf, dwarf(mostly in my possession), empire and chaos.

How would you transport a warmaster army using manowar ships during a game of manowar.  I THINK I like the idea of "no firing" because the cannon crews cant work with so many extra bodies on board.  So keeping with the firing, 200 warmaster points per battery of cannons max per ship? and then just use some notecards to hide but post which warmaster units are on which ships and at which locations.  Not allowing the opponent to just focus on the ship with the dragon rider and the general on it and allowing large man o'wars to still carry some troops and shoot some in combat.

I know I am going to get rid of the minimums from the fleet lists so you will not NEED to have a greatship in your imperial fleet but I am going to use the maximums.  And I want to use a rule to make sure that each flyer has a man o'war to stay on while not playing a game. 

then finally, boarding actions.
+1 for every 200 points of warmaster on board?  Then treat them all as captured when that ships crew is all gone?  should the warmaster units take some form of wounds when the area of the ship is destroyed?

when moving the fleet through the map, 1 tile per turn like any army, no oceanic sailing so only coastline movement. random encounters on a 6 sided dice roll.  1-3 nothing....4=bad weather (included in current rules)....5=sea monster (randomly chosen with another die roll) (I do not have any yet)....6=pirates(I do not have any yet), 1 squadron for every ship of the line squadron you have in your fleet.  Battle honors can grow from those I think and so experience for your sailors.

1 campaign game would go a certain number of years, each year has 6 turns each turn you can move a tile, not very far in a year.....you would need to build cities out of your tax collections if you do not find and conquer them on the way.  You can start your fleet in any port side city at the beginning of each year so long as the enemy doesn't own a port city closer.

anyone done this?
anyone see any huge holes in my plan?

I want to say that there are HUGE possibilities if I could combine these two games and I think it can be done with ease. (though the scale wouldn't work on the same table but I could get past that if that was it.)

Thank you everyone for reading, I know you are all probably busy with outdoor things with the nice warm weather now.

[Geep]

My personal take on this would be to leave the Man O' War rules as they are, and then simply assign units to each section of a ship (as you say). If assigned units affected the Man O' War gameplay you may find things becoming horribly unbalanced.

That said, I don't know a lot about Man O' War gameplay- give your rules a go and let your actual experiences decide!

If you play that Warmaster units in a damaged section are destroyed, how will you deal with repaired areas (a favourite trick of Dwarfs and magic)? Will those Warmaster units come back to life in those areas?

[cjbennett22]

Sorry about the delay....got busy again and couldn't give the game anymore thoughts until now.

Adding the casualty numbers up wouldn't make sense.  Say you only have a chaos hound on a wargalley, It will nullify the wargalleys guns.  Say you have Chaos chariots and a marauder horseman on a wargalley (is that 200 or less points?), it will nullify the wargalleys guns.  I feel better about the casualties only coming from sunken or abandoned ships.  The ships do not lose any crew counters if the entire thing is a blaze so why should they lose any passengers at all? This will also nullify any problems with the dwarves ability to repair their ships.

Also, the winner of the battle gets to keep the abandoned ships, consider any heroes and units captured for trade per the mighty empire rules later in the campaign.  Any ship captured should make for something during the "winter" months when you collect taxes and buy more army/cities/things.....I will need to figure out a points system for that, ship points need to have a formula to transfer them into mighty empire "gold crowns".  And vice versa, need to build fresh ships somehow.

The boarding action bonus' I will keep, It makes sense to me and even though its an advantage for the ship carrying the warmaster points, its at an equal cost.....it has fewer guns.  I feel it's balanced (lots of ships really only have 1 gun).

p.s. pirate ships should be arriving in the mail today, 2 squadrons.  Need to paint, make the templates and sails and all set to go.  only need a dreadnaught for the dwarves but im waiting a bit to see if another one comes up for auction just to get it for as cheap as possible.  Then I need to become a painting machine to get this game going.  I am in the middle of a DIY remodel, total gut job, of the "bonus room" in the house.....custom 6'x4' craft table is in the plans for the wife's sewing, the kid's homework (they are very very small right now) and my gaming.

[cjbennett22]

looking at the ME rules, 1 gold crown buys 100 points of warmaster.  a "full" warmaster army is 2,000 points?  a "full" man o'war fleet is 1,000 points?

so 1 gold crown buys 50 MOW points?

20 gold crowns to make a full army or full fleet so I think its pretty even.

ex: 3 gold crowns to buy 150 point wargalley squadron.  Ships repair between battles just as WM units regroup and re-enforce in between battles.  But, it would then cost 1 gold crown per ship if one was sunk.

ME also has a rule for owning tiles of woods.  you can only build a ship for every map tile you own with "woods" in them.  So maybe keep to that in the fact that if you only own 1 tile with woods you can only build 1 single war galley ship. 

Nevermind, that wouldn't work, the game will only last 6 years and you only get to build ships once a year. so it would take you 6 years to build half a fleet.....maybe make that a limit to squadrons and put no limit on individual ships, in which case the cost of a single ship goes up?  maybe 2 gold crowns per 50 MOW points?

[cjbennett22]

another rule.  Would this be too much of a disadvantage?

In the mighty empires campaign game there is a fun side note to each battle, your heroes might not actually be killed, there is actually a possibility that they could be captured.  Then you can trade them for gold or something later in the game.  I wonder if this could happen with admirals and wizards?  The problem that I have is that the generals and the heroes could possibly be added to an army at a whim. the admiral couldn't be added if you only have one fleet so and will come free with a man o'war. 

However, how about all battle honors gained stay with the admiral.  Say, even though you lost the battle and and it was pretty close, coming down to the last few ships, he has no admiral and would pay a lot knowing that all of that fleet's battle honors are lost with that admiral?  If he bought his freedom he could get the battle honors back and re-distribute them amongst the crew members.  Once he had a new man o'war to sail on.

Or does that sound like too much of a take away, if you lose your admiral.  The men are the ones with the honors, and experience, not the admiral right?

And for the campaigns, yes, I am allowing a fleet to sail with no admiral.  They just wont have one....but he comes free with a man o'war, so you could have a bunch of war galleys in the fleet and that's it.

Thank you all, I feel weird because I just noticed I am the only one posting here, for a while anyways 

[Geep]

I like the idea of tying the battle honours to the admiral. It may be the crew that has the experience, but it's the admiral they trust- having the chain of command shaken up is a pretty bad thing.

How would you run the capturing rules? Is it just rolling on a table of options when the character 'dies', or does an enemy ship need to snatch the character from the wreckage of a sunken ship/ kill all crew on a ship/ etc?

Man O War is a pretty quiet game everywhere. I've been meaning to try and get interest going in my local group, but haven't had much chance yet.

[cjbennett22]

there are 2 or 3 charts to roll on for your characters for warmaster considering possible wounds and then when you capture them, you just mark it down on a piece of paper and whenever you want you can execute them or trade them for something later in the game.  It is completely up to the players.

What I like is that the table you roll on to see what happens when you want to execute a captured character is mostly geared towards the hero actually escaping because as we all know, any story is geared towards the hero (except game of thrones, but these rules were before that show).

I think I will jot that rule down to remember it later.  I will have to keep that as it could be fun to see how much you can ransom him back to your opponent would fetch.

[cjbennett22]

1 more rules topic.  The beach landing.

I finally played a very small test game just to force my self to think of a few situations I wouldn't have thought of without a game.

Beach landing.  I wanted to think the troops would use the dingy boats to row ashore but how in the world would that be represented on the table?  Imagined as the warmaster army just appears on the shoreline?  That's what I did to go further with the game.  The first thing that popped in my head was "run aground" check, which all 3 ships of the squadron failed and would then roll to SINK, not good!  not that I think that would happen every time but 3 for 3 is pretty dang scary.  I think I need some help for this one.  I would go with the imaginary row boats to the shore but only because I cant think of anything else.  The reason it pops into my head is because of the scenario, "Buried Gold".  that's just how simple it is described in the core rulebook from Games Workshop.  At the least, a deployment zone template should be made for the troops coming off because I don't want anyone getting troops off the boat with a headstart.

Secondly, The Turn Sequence for the warmaster part of the game.  to play the two games together on the same table I have decided that the manowar ships would all be played as normal first, Cannons would be Cannons when firing against warmaster troops with warmaster rules of closest target and LOS with 2 attacks per ship per battery (Imperial Greatship has 3 broadside batteries so 6 attacks at 60 cm, with siege rules to allow for hitting walls and towers and such instead of troops).  easy breezy.  THEN the warmaster game would commence.  I think the best thing would be to make the landing party go last in the warmaster phases,  they give up initiative during the landing.  So roll for initiative with all of the fleets, play them all out.  play for the warmaster beach party and then the warmaster landing party.  Rinse and Repeat!

Thirdly, warmaster points being carried.  I was initially going with 200 warmaster points possible per ship but then the dragon ogres were a perfect fit for the "Pirate" fleet/army to match the dwarf army points.  So then I looked through the warmaster army lists that I have and the largest unit is 300 (high elf dragon riders and lizardment stegadon, I might be missing some) so maybe increase the capacity of the man o'war ships to 300 warmaster points?  Or should I keep it at 200 to cut those Huge units off as they are just too big/powerful to put on a ship?  I personally don't care either way so I would love to hear other viewpoints on this subject.

Thank you all, usually, just being able to type this stuff out on this forum can help me with a decision.  I will post a word document later on when I finalize the rules that I have decided on.  Then you can all correct me and send me back your edited word documents with markups. 

[cjbennett22]

the pics

2 squads of pirates come into the bay of a new dwarf settlement.  They heard there was gold!!!
They were feeling confident with their new chaos allies that would join the fight if their ships could just get them there!

the pirate sailed in as fast as possible, split into 2 squadrons, 1 just outside of the fort's range and the other going straight at the beach to drop off their payload.  Directly in the face of the dwarven defenses!!!

the Chaos troops,fresh off the boats, paused at the sight of the dwarven warriors but formed a line under the harsh whips of their general, the Dragon ogres and maurauder horsemen were first to be pinned down against the waves from the dwarven missles.  The maurauders moved up to the tall grass to take the first hit and took it well, a draw.  The warriors moved up just to act as cannon fodder and the next turn, the dragon ogres unleashed they massive arms! a flanking hit tearing through the rangers and then hitting the flank of the dug in warriors.  The dwarven cannons atop their tower did little to deter the onslaught as they were fixed on the one unit not needed, the horseman.  The dwarven warriors were pushed slowly back to the general's position though his presence on the line did not help in the least.

the attacking pirate fleet squadron was by that time locked in a devastating melee.  The nautilus swung around to the flank just in time to submerge and send off a torpedo, it swung hard right and missed it's target.  Nothing was going the Dwarf's way.  With no working guns and the near heat from the torpedo, the now desperate crew shot forward and rammed a monitor ship.  Flipping it over from the impact, it sunk!!  The pirate fleet was in control!

[Geep]

How'd you find your rules? Fun and fair?

I'm sure this is irrelevant, but one of my favourite Warhammer scenarios with the beach landing one on the isle of Albion- tiny forces, with the defender trying to sink the incoming ships as his main way of causing casualties. It almost always created fun, tense games.

[cjbennett22]

I think the game was too small to tell, I had a lot of wasted ground space.  The land forces were kept to a maximum that the ships could carry.  It brought up the points maximum rule that I will keep at 200 because any other single unit worth more is too big to travel via a ship, will make the campaign games more fun I hope.  It also showed that the naval base should be designed differently, I made it open away from the beach making the dwarf fleet take the long way around and giving the pirates a clear shot to the drop zone.  The beach landing was definitely a go, once off the boat they will give up their initiative and take plenty of shots to confuse them so its fun to try and shoot and confuse the bigger units and let the smaller ones leak out.  That was sure fun!!!  All and all the dwarves had too many stationary defenses with the cannons in the tower and the shorefort so half of their forces almost were fairly avoidable.  I hope in a bit I can scrape a few bucks together and buy some pico armor trenches, so I can really mimic a D-day invasion on the beach.  Also it made me invent some new terrain rules for the beaches with man o'war vs. warmaster units. 

When I want to create a cliff to scale from the ships I can just use the siege rules of warmaster to climb a wall using ladders (free ladders they will not keep after the fight).  a rocky shore will be a rough terrain piece and the sandy beach will just be open territory but I will still put in a half movement restriction.  I thought about adding "Sea Sickness" but just decided against that, maybe try it later.  On a roll of 6 at the units start for a -1 to command or something until they get their legs back.

I still have not made a deployment zone template but think a 40mm x 120mm box in front of the ship will do just fine.  I can measure that for now (1 unit in a line and 2 deep).

Overall, the man o'war ships only attacked other ships and warmaster units kept to themselves so I didn't get to see how that would fair.  during the approach the pirate wargalleys were full of troops so they had no room for gun crews and could not fire.  That could easily put in a lot of tactics for ships though.  When chaos first landed I thought they were all going to be confused and I realized I had not thought about that so I feared that I just found a huge flaw  LOL  but it went well.  Very excited to see it happen again.

This weekend I got a vasectomy so I am pretty sore and moving slowly and to pass the time I am full campaigning it!!!!  Tomorrow morning I start turn 3 and have had 1 fight for the chaos and dwarf fleet each against a random sea monster (I don't have any models so I had to substitute a ship model)  Nothing to report yet but loving it so far.  The dwarf submarines took out the monster after it failed to sink an ironclad!  phew! and the chaos lost a death galley during their fight against the black leviathan (not to be returned to the squadron like casualties to a warmaster unit between fights).  My rules right now are you just losing that 1 ship from the squadron and then later when you want to build your fleet up you do it 1 ship at a time instead of by squadrons, although flying units are by squadron only  :/  (they are usually pretty cheap though).

Final thoughts:
Setting up a 4x4 table for a man o'war game of about 4-5 turns is a lot of work for just picking up a few battle honors and might get annoying and this campaign thing takes up 1 6x4 table, 1 bar table and 1 "L" shape desk while the unused stuff takes up a bookshelf all while I shuffle the box I have my map in where ever I can with the 6x4 table in use.  Lots of resources needed all at the same time.  Oh and so far no random fights for the warmaster banners which is starting to drive me insane, I really wanted one already.

Sorry if this was a long read 

[cjbennett22]

2 years worth of a campaign are in the bag.  Starting the third year now.  Chaos with no fleet as the pressure is on with the ground forces from the dwarves.  The only threat now is the dwarf fleet but it's only port is too far away as last year the chaos razed their entire southern coastal region.  (I need to make some razed markers still).

I do have a fear that I have made it a bit too hard to build a fleet with you only being able to purchase 1 ship at a time, but such is life right?  Usually the navy only has one big go at it and then someone is done.

I love the integration so far and cannot wait for another year of the campaign to be done.  Because then the dwarves can have an all out siege of the chaos capital!!!! 

[Geep]

How fast do the turns go? One ship at a time may be a bit slow if that's one ship every few weeks of the campaign. Maybe one squadron's worth would be better? ie. Often 1 ship, but up to 3 of the little ones (if my memories of Man O War aren't too bad).

[cjbennett22]

not sure what you mean?

for the warmaster side you have an army that meets the min/max requirements and that gets split into "banners" so you can have a lot of different armies acting as banners that only need to be a min. of 500 points and a maximum of 2,000 points.

you then have a fleet and then you can split into all and any different amount of "fleets" to spread out all around the map, but they move just like the "banners".  each fleet moves 1 hex at a time and has to roll for an event just like the warmaster banners.  The mighty empire play goes pretty fast.  It's just the recording of the banners and the naval groups and marking the battle honors and other battle effects for all individual units. etc. etc. during each year of the campaign.

If I was a novelist, campaign games like this could easily turn into a fantasy book!  It's a lot of fun.

Oh, I had totally forgotten about a situation that had ALMOST happened.  The chaos army razed the 2 seashore cities that the dwarven fleets could use during the winter months.  So I was going to just roll a d6 for each ship and on a 6 survive.  Anything else and the ship sinks or is damaged by weather beyond repair for the next campaign season.  But the residents came back to one of the cities and got it going again under the original dwarf banner.  Very fortunate as the dwarf fleet has a monitor squadron at a veteran status and well on it's way to being the best of the best   LOL (chaos strategy vs. dice rolling) 

[cjbennett22]

new rules:
As the dwarf fleet stands alone in my campaign right now I need a new interaction to make a fleet worth while to defeat.

I need some abilities for the stand alone fleets just to make your opponent make some boats.
1.) coastal bombardments.  kind of like a siege, any coastal settlement bombarded cannot collect revenue for the kingdom.  Maybe coastal raids?  Maybe make a chart to roll on for the amount of "damage" caused.  Or just simply allow a fleet to "raze" any coastal settlements but they need to be able to destroy an ocean fort?  cities have shore forts and fortresses have  shore fortresses?  The range of a fleets movement then becomes the problem as they only move 1 tile per turn and 6 turns per year.  Cant exactly raid the entire coast in a year but maybe that's where I need to draw the line?

I'm shooting spit wads here but I really like the ability to raze a coastal settlement outright.  no dice involved and could be brutal against opponents still


-Also, I had to make a chart for the ships to roll on to allow fleets to get stranded at sea during the winter.  All of their coastal cities were razed by the chaos armies.  At the end of the turn you roll to see if the settlement can rebuild by itself and if it borders your kingdom then it automatically is rebuilt under your flag, allow the dwarf fleet to return just fine BUT if they hadn't.......Roll for each ship, 1-4, ship is sunk.  5, ship is badly damamged but still afloat at the start of each turn re-roll and on a 4+ can move as it is repaired.  If the ship has master engineers on it for dwarfs only then 3+ to be repaired.  6, repaired and able to fight on turn 1 of the next campaign year.  This will sink a lot of ships but might not kill an entire fleet.

anyone with thoughts?

Year three opinions......I had to fight a promethean crab with my dwarf fleet....setup was done in 15 minutes, the fighting was done in 5 minutes (turn 2) and the breakdown was done in another 15, then the very next campaign turn the dwarves rolled to fight a fleet of pirates so 10 minutes later I am back to setting up an even bigger man o'war game.  Kind of annoying.  I want to keep the table and not break it down after a game for this reason but I feel that will get in the way of campaigning but the constant setting up and breaking down is annoying. 

Still though, the campaign is going strong and it's very fun overall!