Thursday, December 11, 2025

A Cobbled Together Italian Wars Update


In Hungarian we call a person or idea going sideways "writing a tanner's letter", which is a weird expression (it has to do with starting the cursive r letter and ending back up in the same place), but that's what I recently did with my Italian Wars strategic campaign, again.

I started thinking about making a ladder-type area control game and made this map above. Then I thought some more and realized that having multiple factions and armies on the map and keeping track of each (both in size and position) would mean a lot of administrative burden for a single campaign.

So in the end I'll still use the map in one way or another (heck, I just made it), but for the campaign logging part, I'll use... the Succession Wars rules from Maurice. 

That's right. For the 16th century Italian Wars. Sue me.

And there is a clear reason for that. It has victory points, it has army trackers, it has rules for setting up factions. It has it all. It is also a framework that can be transported back in time.

For the actual combat rules I'll just use a heavily modified version of One Hour Wargames, something which I wrote about recently. There is little hassle in setting up troops and it works. My modifications mainly affect the size of units, and including light horse and skirmishing arquebusiers as separate units.

I guess this is the final sentence everyone involved in logistics reaches back to. You don't change a system that works to a new one that doesn't work. And that is the core, also, of all campaigning.

All I have to do now is make a unified version of the modded rules and produce some KiK Block troops for my battles.

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