More on the Po Campaign Rules

Following on from the last post, I organised the lettered beads into coloured groups, each representing 1 of seven 'factions'. Each commander (between 1 and 6 general officers per faction) had his own lettered bead and a duplicate goes in the 'activation hat'. Thus forces will be activated randomly each turn.

The seven factions are in two main camps:

Austrians and their Piedmontese allies (with occasional British involvement/interference);

Bourbons: Spanish, French, Neapolitans,  and their friends in Modena and Genoa.

I reviewed the 'guideline' rules I'd sketched out a couple of months ago. And they were rather sketchy, based on a couple of hex-mapped campaigns I did for the War of the Austrian Succession. So I spent quite a lot of time honing these into something more usable and considerably tightened up. Tightened up is a relative term here; bearing in mind this is for a solo game, the rules wouldn't pass muster for a competitive game. They still don't cover 5 pages in Arial font size 12.

The rules cover:

• Unit Types
• Activation
• Movement
• Supply
• Replenishment
• Battle
• Sieges
• Events
• Victory Conditions

In addition I have: a turn tracker (a turn now being a week and not a day!); orders of battle; table of commanders; and will have a schedule of towns and who controls them.

Here are a few samples of rules:

Sieges are abstracted, but I might try the Siege Works rules for a bit more fun, time permitting. 

There are 12 random events that can be diced for each month (April-November) with 5 favouring the Austro-Piedmontese, 5 favouring the Bourbons and 2 neutral. Amongst the neutral events is the interdiction of a Supply Train by Pandours - unless it is countered by an Escort! Some events can only happen once, e.g. the death of Felipe V, for obvious reasons. Nearly all the Events are based on real occurrences so they are not so out there that they are not plausible. However, it's just occurred to me that I omitted one that could have happened with all these troops marching around the country - Plague!

Ultimately Victory is going to be about capturing and holding Fortresses. The rival dynasties, Habsburg, Bourbon and Savoy, have got expansionist aims. How very modern! Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.