Realms and Setup

Mighty Empires gameplay is divided into two seasons per year — a campaigning season, and the winter season. The game starts with a campaigning season, but before that begins, there is some setup to do: one must determine what the empires are, where their capital cities are, the content of each empire's starting realm, their armies and supplies. And then each empire needs to deploy those armies, which generally requires having a plan for the campaign ahead.

First, looking for capital cities, I decided that the two westernmost capital spots were easy choices. The mountainous one in the north is good for dwarves. Then there is the the coastal capital spot down in the south east, which is far from the first two and has plenty of space; as coastal cities are also ports, that seemed fitting for the human faction. Finally, the last empire will have to be close to one of the other two; I decided to put it the mountainous capital spot close to the humans, and give it to the Sulatar, since they have some affinity with volcanoes. That leaves the orcs with the south-west capital.

ME Campaigning Season

The summer campaigning season in ME sees each empire march armies or "banners" across the map, for scouting and fighting. Each banner has a strength measured in points (originally meant to be WFB points), which is allowed to be between 500 and 1500 (although it can be reduced lower by casualties).

There can be multiple banners in a tile, and this is the only way to have an army larger than 1500 for a battle. The other empires know where your banners are but not their strengths initially; they can discover this through scouting or, later on, by spies.

Each season is six months, and a banner can scout one tile per month at most. So in the early game each empire will  typically split most of their army down into 500-strong banners to spread out and scout territory (which comes under that empire's control).

Baggage is also a big deal in ME. Each empire starts the game with 2d6 baggage points to distribute as they like. Each banner needs food; one banner can live off each village or fortress tile and 2 off of each city tile (provided there is no siege in progress). If more banners than that group together, or a banner is in a barren tile, it has to consume baggage or take losses from starvation. Starvation also hurts besieged fortresses and cities particularly badly, as there is a chance that the defenders just surrender.

Every empire knows the starting army points of the other empires, because in a competitive game, that is an open dice roll. I guess for this solo game I could decide to waive that, but I am going to be doing a lot of reasoning about what each empire knows versus what I know as the GM, and I might as well not add things to the should-not-know list.

Okay, time to roll the starting realms, armies and baggage for each realm, make their plans and set up their armies.

Sulatar

The Sulatar have worst starting position: close the the strong Storm Lords, less space than the other empires to grow, and a mountainous starting area. They roll fairly well to get 3 villages, 2700 points of armies and 7 baggage to start with.

Their immediate problem is the Storm Lords; they are outnumbered 3:2 and the Storm Lords could be besieging their capital by mid-year. The empire that controls the river crossing has the upper hand here, and there is no chance that the Drow can get control of it early. They should be able to defend in year 1, but it could cramp their growth so much that they cannot catch up afterwards.

But even if the SL throw their entire force at it, they probably cannot win in year 1; and they rolled low for baggage, so they are not too likely to try it. So the Drow should guess that they will not try it, and seek to expand normally but be prepared to fall back to defend if the SL seem to be trying for a knock-out blow.

Sulatar armies & strengths: banner 11 (700pts), banners 12,13,14,15 (500pts each). I am using the red armies 11-20 for the Sulatar (ME only has coloured stickers for three empires); as they are far from the orcs there will be no confusion.

White Fang Orcs

The orcs have the best starting location, far from their enemies. So in principle they can grab a lot of territory while the others are fighting amongst themselves. However they are exposed: there is no serious terrain obstacle preventing the dwarves from marching straight at them.

The orcs roll a little poorly for their realm: only 2 villages and a fortress (and I do not really care about having a fortress so close to the capital in general, I would prefer to have something closer to my border). They then roll terribly for armies, getting only 2000 points. That means they are outnumbered 2:1 by the Storm Lords and nearly 2:1 by the Duergar. It might take two years to make up that deficit if their enemies do not spend their lead fighting each other. With only 2000 points, there are no plans to make — all they can do is split it into 4 scouting armies, grab uncontested territory and hope to be stronger next year.

Since their enemies know that they have only 2000 points and each banner has to have 500 at least, this sadly gives away the size of all of their banners; but it cannot be helped without reducing their scouting — scouting they badly need to grow to catch up.

Orc armies: banners 1,2,3,4 (500 pts each).

Storm Lords

The Storm Lords start with a coastal capital, which has advantages and disadvantages: there is a chance of ships and extra revenue, but they have fewer directions to scout so it may cramp their growth a bit in the first year.

They do really well when rolling for their initial realm though: they get a second coastal city, and 4 ships between them (rolled a 6 for the ship roll for their capital)! Each ship is 1 extra revenue, so their starting revenue is 14, which is as much as the two neighbouring empires combined. That difference will be smaller after the first year of campaigning, but it still makes them the strongest empire starting out. They also roll high for armies, getting 4000 points to play with. They do roll only 3 points of baggage though.

Storm Lords' Armies and Fleet

The question is: go for the Sulatar in year 1? With little baggage, it would be expensive without any guarantee of success. I decide on a more daring plan: go for the orcs instead. There is more fertile territory to gain with a lunge that way, and arriving at the orcs' border in mid-year may catch their armies scattered in which case none can individually resist. Meanwhile the Drow will not know that they actually outnumber the Storm Lords in the east, and are very unlikely to push forward as a result; in effect the armies in this area will be bluffing to seize territory and stall the Sulatar.

Storm Lords' armies: banner 1 (1000pts), 2 (500pts), 3 (1500pts), 4 & 5 (500 pts each)

Hammerhead Clan

The Duergar have the most terrain-hostile part of the map to play in. In ME, armies that do not have a clear path to their capital at the end of the year have to make a winter march, which almost always leads to casualties and often the complete loss of the army. And the Duergar have no clear path from the areas north or east of them back to the capital. Particularly annoying is that area enclosed by the two forks of the river east of them — it is accessible to the Sulatar capital, but not to their own; so the Drow can get close and the Duergar cannot mount a permanent defence there. On the flip side, the difficult terrain to the north and west means they can grab that territory in the first campaign season and then forget about it: no-one is likely to take it away from them.

They roll well for their realm, getting 4 settlements (3 of them fortresses, though I do not like to have so many since you cannot garrison all of  them)  in their mountainous realm (highland tiles have a lower chance of settlements); and roll 3700 points of armies and 6 baggage.

Their plan has to be to scout those areas north and west while there are no enemies about; scout towards the Sulatar while they are worrying about the Storm Lords; and be careful to get all those scouting armies back to safe areas before the winter weather sets in. They can send a larger army towards the orcs who can hardly oppose them until the dwarves get close to the capital (which they do not plan to do in the first season).

Hammerhead armies: banner 1 (1000pts), banner 2 (700pts), 3,4,5 & 6 (500 pts each.

The Flavour

Or the fluff, as some like to call it. Mighty Empires is intended to be used in the Warhammer Fantasy setting, but since I am not using WFB to resolve battles there is no particular reason to stick to that. It also does not fit particularly well with the game itself; dwarves having overland empires, wood elves having extensive empires at all, and orcs having stable empires at all would be odd for that setting. Though, of course, there are few fantasy settings where this would make sense I guess.

I decided to use the Eberron setting from D&D instead. Eberron works better for this sort of game I think, because it has few clearly good or evil factions: instead most races in Eberron have no intrinsic alignment and most are capable of having stable civilisations. An alliance between orcs and humans is plausible in Eberron where it would not be in Faerun or Warhammer. And ME campaigns with players usually have all sorts of temporary alliances happen.

So, let's see who the contestants are.

Sulatar

40,000 years ago, a giantish empire controlled the continent of Xen'Drik, and all elves lived as slaves of the giants. A great war with the dragons shattered the empire, and the elves revolted to escape from slavery. The Sulatar were the elves that remained loyal to their masters. But the Giant civilisation collapsed and the giants mostly regressed to a primitive state, leaving the Sulatar to stand for themselves. The Sulatar believe in no deity but worship elemental fire, as many of the Giants did before them. They claim what they consider their inheritance: the continent of Xen'Drik and its ruined Giantish settlements.

The Sulatar are hated by other elves for their loyalty to the Giants, are shunned as heretics by followers of the Sovereign Host and the Dark Six alike (which is most of the population of Eberron), and are local enemies to every tribe or group in Xen'Drik. As a consequence the Sulatar have a strong martial tradition, with more warriors than hunters. They fight with sword, spear and bow, and their wizards and clerics specialise in fire magic.

The largest settlement in Xen'Drik is the Sulatar's Obsidian City; that is a long way  to the South of where the campaign will be fought though.

The Storm Lords (Human)

Xen'Drik has only one large human settlement, the city of Stormreach. The city serves as a hub for intercontinental trade on Eberron. It is a former Giantish city, huge in scale, the ruins of the old walls towering over the comparatively humble dwellings of most of the settlers within. The city is the most prosperous in Xen'Drik though, and is the second most populous on the continent.

The city is ruled by the Storm Lords. They are the nobility of Stormreach, though that means little more than that they are the descendants of the wealthiest and most powerful of  the original smuggling and pirate interests that took up in this area. They maintain a reasonably stable and fair government in the city, provided they receive a sufficient cut of the trade passing through. The Storm Lords maintain a standing army; for military operations, however, they would turn to House Deneith for additional mercenary troops, often shipped over from Khorvaire.

The city itself attracts adventurers, criminals, traders, and refugees from the Last War looking for a new life. It is very diverse, with only around half the population being human; there is a large gnomish population as well, and elves, dwarves, halflings and half-orcs are all common enough. The rulers are largely human though.

Hammerhead Clan (Duergar)

Sometimes called grey dwarves, Duergar are an unusual Eberron faction in that they are considered evil. However this seems to stem largely from their greed and ruthlessness. They are hardy fighters and miners.

White Fang Tribe (Orcs & Goblins)

Goblinoids are common in many parts of Eberron, and the power vacuum left by the fall of the Giants has allowed many tribes to establish a foothold in Xen'Drik. The White Fang tribe is a typical goblinoid mix: orcs in charge, goblins in subservience, worgs as pets and the occasional troll.

(not my mini, just throwing in an image for flavour)

Xen'Drik

The interior of Xen'Drik is sparsely populated. There are tribes of hobgoblins, remnants of the former Dhakaani empire; orc tribes; tribes of primitive giants; Umbargen and Vulkoorim Drow tribes; human settlements. The continent is also scattered with ruins of Giantish temples, cities and burial sites — often abandoned but sometimes settled.

The Map

The first step in a Mighty Empires campaign is to make the map. One of the best things about the game is the set of hex tiles that it comes with, which enable a random map to be easily made in about 30 minutes.

To start with, you place a random highland tile in the centre of your table.

Then you place a second tile next to it so that the edges match. From then on, you can only place a tile such that it is next to two other tiles and the edges match.

The game advises that you sort the tiles into their types first, which are printed on the back as you can see, and draw from the appropriate stack depending on what edge of the map you intend to expand.

I actually have one and one-third of a copy of ME here — some friends and I back in the day went three-ways on an extra box of the game and split the extra pieces. So the map here will be a bit bigger than a normal game of ME, and there will be a few repeated tiles where there would normally be only one per box (I think there is one in this picture, at the top right and bottom).

A coastline starts when you are extending a river and draw a tile showing the river reaching the coast. From then on you can draw coastal tiles to extend the coastline.

You can also see that I bent the rules slightly in this shot and drew a mountain tile to "start" a mountain range again although there were no mountains edging the tile that I wanted to place. (The rules say that you can draw from a deck if there is at least one exposed edge of that type, and there is in the top left; but I did not place the tile there.) This is one of the weaknesses of the ME map system: mountains often peter out before you have used up all the map tiles. I think the tileset should have had a few more dense mountain tiles. This is more of a problem for my set as I have 1/3rd more mountain tiles, but the mountains are likely to peter out just as early as if I had no extras. As my map will be larger, I am happy to give the chance for a second or third mountain range to appear on the same map, whereas the original ME really expects there to be just one range in the centre.

Hmm, I keep drawing straight coastal tiles — I would prefer that the coastline had wrapped around. I think I need to rotate the map so that straight coast is along the table edge. Rotating the map is a pain with these loose hex tiles. The tiles with white dots on are potential capital city sites, by the way.

A long chain of mountains emerges on the west side, and a long river on the east. Because I drew so many straight coastal tiles earlier, and now keep drawing river tiles without a river end, the original mountains (at the top in this shot) have ended up far from the map centre. That is fine, and shows that although I get to choose where to place the tiles and so can shape the map to some extent, the randomness is having a large effect too and so this is not simply me drawing a map with the tiles as a palette.

And here is the completed map. I bend the rules towards the end by rifling through the coastal deck and choosing tiles to edge the map neatly — this is both a practical concession (I need the map to fit on the table), and it makes for a more fictionally satisfying map if most of the map has the sea as an obvious barrier (otherwise the obvious question arises, why can an army at the edge not go past the edge). Also, marvel at my improvised table: my living room table is 90x55cm which is not big enough for this, so I have some boxes piled at the side.

Although the ME map tiles are great, I may not play with the physical map. I think the tiles are a great way to build a map, and the miniatures are great too. But the map cannot easily be stored, and certainly not once you have minis on it. I think I will probably digitize the map instead. It will be more convenient to play the battles physically and keep the campaign virtial.

Here is the digitized version of the map. I manually composed this in an image editor to match the physical map, which took a while. I have not captured every individual tile exactly right of course; the physical tiles are all different (well, except the lowland tiles which are virtually indistinguishable) but there are many equivalent tiles, so I have just put in a tile equivalent to the one from the physical map in many cases.

Introduction

Welcome to Mighty Campaigning. I am starting this new blog to track a solo wargaming campaign that I am embarking on. I hope to be able to tell an interesting story of fantasy empires clashing in a struggle for expansion, all of which is being wargamed — playing to find out what happens.

The plan is to have a world map with a campaign game going on at that level with different empires striving to expand and conquer; and when armies meet on that map, I will use a wargame system to play out the battle that results.

My purpose for the campaign is really to get back into wargaming and find out the pros and cons of some fantasy wargaming systems. I could do that by just playing individual games, but it makes things more interesting if there is a campaign going on around them to explain what is going on.

Campaign System: Mighty Empires

For the campaign system, I will be using my old copy of Mighty Empires (1990) (ME). I played this a lot when I was younger.

It was intended by Games Workshop as a campaign wraparound to Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WFB), but I have only used it once in that way. I never felt it worked well in that role, though:

•  WFB is at such a different scale than ME — you care about individual heroes, small elite units, count individual casualties — that there always seems to be a strange contrast between marching armies around and then having battles decided largely by one guy on a wyvern against one guy on an eagle.
• WFB takes ~4h for a game, and there can be 5+ battles in a single campaigning year in ME (and a full game is often 3-5 game years), so it makes the game very slow indeed.
• The system intends that you select your WFB army at the same time as getting the army in ME. But then half of your army might die of starvation, assassination or magic before it ever gets to a battle; or it might just garrison some castle and not see a battle for years.

But I did think that ME would make a good campaign system on top of a different wargame system, so that is part of what I am trying out here. Of course I will have to translate between the army points values that ME uses (which are WFB compatible), and whatever battle system I use.

Battle System: ?

Answering this question is the reason for the campaign. I have been looking at getting back into miniature wargaming, and have been unsure what system to go for. I looked initially at getting back into WFB, but it is very expensive to play it properly, and I do not have the space to do 28mm massed battles at home.

I have been trying out Kings of War (playing with cm instead of inches for a smaller scale, as is common), DBA/HotT, and I want to try out Impetus next. So I may well flip between different systems as I go until I find settle on something.

Sieges and Assaults: Mighty Empires

I will probably not use a wargame system to resolve assaults in sieges, however. I have not looked at rules for sieges under any of these systems — most do not cover sieges at all. It can be hard in fantasy for defenders in a siege to get the real benefit of fortifications, since magic and flying troops can often negate it. So I will resolve assaults in Mighty Empires built in battle system for now.