Foreword
The Chaos Elf armies of God-King Uelluádun Úp Eaáhávin descend on the lonely northern Dwarf kingdom of Tag Deg Ma-Kan. High General Tuk-Ag Tuk-Ogu defends the realm with a hastily assembled force. The terrain is at his advantage, but he has no hopes of reinforcements whatsoever.
I'm going to launch some campaigns, both tabletop and virtual, and the basic rules will be taken from the EasyBattle campaign engine. However, there are some options I have been thinking about:
Variant 1 - Fix Resources
An army consists of X number of units, and those units are all the General has for the game. This is especially interesting for asymmetrical situations, where for example a smaller, mobile force has to delay a larger invasion. The General might choose NOT to involve all of them in a fight to spare some, or retain them as a reserve and move them on the table only for the decisive strike - it adds a whole new flavour for a game.
Kind of cool working with Arborleone's Little Wars, for example.
Disengaging rules: set up a disengagement line, across which a unit might retreat and be safe from enemies. This might simply be the edge of the gaming map or the table.
Variant 2 - Recuperation
This is only a tad different from Variant 1 - in each campaign turn a unit does not participate in a battle, it regains one HP or Strength Point. A further added rule may state that a damaged unit may NOT regain its full score, especially if it sustained more than one point loss.
Variant 3 - Purchase
Units in this variant regain their full points if they survive a battle. Reinforcements are purchased and added to the army as per the basic rules.
Lines of Communication
What I especially liked about the Heroes series of games is that replenishing a frontline army required planned logistics. Do you gather reinforcements at your fort, taking more time but concentrating them, or do you use "subordinate" heroes to scour the garrisons and pick them up? Will the reinforcements have enough movement rate left to be of any use before a battle?
Now if we use a zone movement, and more importantly, zone recruitment, like EasyBattle campaigns do, the handling of such reinforcements is a bit more basic. The core rules also state that reinforcements are 'purchased' by the income a zone generates, but spawn everywhere the controlling player wants them, so most of this LoC thinking is moot.
However, adding a bit more complex rules would not hinder the campaign engine, especially if we set a total unit limit.
This way, a purchased unit spawns 1) at the zone the resources come from, BUT only basic units (spearmen, rabble inf etc.) are eligible - basically local militias press-ganged to serve with the main army, like the Germanic Landwehr; 2) at the capitol, to where the resources are directed.
By default, the purchased unit becomes part of the zone's garrison, unless the main army picks it up immediately. This adds some paperwork to keep track of garrison strength (garrisons in the core rules are generated turn by turn by a dice roll), so it is mostly effective if only a few zones are in play.
A moving army could then 'deplete' the garrisons as much as they wish, and the same stands for a reinforcing army moving to the front, one campaign zone per turn.
Merging
EasyBattle rules allow units in a formation to 'exchange' strength/hit points between ranks - this could be done in any of the former variants by merging understrength units, which was done historically as well. Two units of the same type with 2 HP each form a unit of 4 HP. Units' HP could not exceed their base value this way, either making the merge impossible, or capping the merged unit's strength at its full value.
I'm going to publish my campaign rules and ongoing wargaming campaigns here, to cross-post from R&C and also clutter it less with ramblings.
