"GCM" style play.

An idea that's been bouncing about in my head recently. How about if each player owns and uses his same division over many battles? We could create a series of divisions for each nationality, or even each campaign (e.g. 1807 and 1812 Russians) then use these divisions against either other players or against an AI controlled side. We could devise a form of gained or lost experience for actions in battle and a system of replacement recruits for a given percentage of objectives taken in a game. Commander stats could adjust likewise. If the division commander is killed (or "wounded") a dice roll will decide how many battles he'll be hospitalised for or if he's permanently invalided from the army. A new commander risks random stats and also a temporary drop in troop morale.

I can flesh this idea out a bit more if it piques anyone's interest.

This would allow us to play small campaigns, (4 or 5 battles strung together), with better continuity and realism than we have now. Currently we do this with a new and different division every time so little consideration of casualties is given. We could give it a try it with just one OOB initially and see if we like it.

I am going to give this thread a poke and make it return to people's attention.

The cavalry debate has raised the subject of carry over losses and linked scenarios and in effect the good old GCM tool does this. For Naps and the way our group plays I think we need something a bit more complex but I would be up for some brainstorming of ideas if we could obtain a copy of the GCM code from Palmer (I think he has it now) and have a look to see what it could do for us.

I definitely like the idea. In my mind the easiest way to organize a series of connected battles would be to just post something on the forum: here's a series I've made between the French and the Russians, details details details. Here's the divisions that can be played. First come first serve. Probably a good idea to only put in less divisions than our average number of players. We pretty consistently get 6 to 9 players so many do 5 divisions? I certainly dont mind being a brigade commander on occasion if theres lots of people who want to play divisions. If someone has selected a division and cant make it on the day of battle someone else will take command and the absent commander will just have to hope his forces aren't trashed. Anyone who cant commit to three battles and is around to play could have a brigade.

I would very much enjoy this kind of play and would definitely be happy to go through some testing phases while we figure out how to make it operate smoothly.

In the GCM system each player creates (or has created for them by the system) 2 divisions. In Nap this would be 1 French and 1 Allied. Scenarios are created by players signing up in the software, say 15 mins before the battle start time. The software then chooses the sides randomly and allocates players to sides to try to balance things. Maps and objectives are generated randomly. The battle is then fought and the win/lose result and losses automatically processed and carried forward with units within the division gaining and losing strength and experience in accordance with how well they did in terms of casualties inflicted and suffered. The players can also run "turns" on their divisions which introduces small random events like men lost on the march or added via reinforcements and experience raising or dropping, some times commanders gain/lose stats or even get sick and are replaced.

No-one writes scenarios. After the initial coding work and database creation there's literally zero effort needed.

We could add a number of controls I think to make it more like a campaign and less like a random battle generator. We could have an AI side I think with all players who signup being on team X and the system creating a suitably numerous side Y for the AI. We could limit map choice so that we only loaded in all the maps of Germany for example, Or Spain/Portugal so that the maps and place names make sense alongside the sides fighting; no Russians in Madrid therefore, or British in Moscow.

We might be able to fix it down even further by allocating certain players to side A and others to side B every time so that for a campaign the same players would fight on the French side.

I am sure we could build in more.