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.