Technical Campaign Discussion (but not rules Q & As)

As a divisional commander, can you give orders to brigade commanders (or units) in someone else's division in the same way please?

Martin (J)

Nope. You can only give orders to the units you can see in the recipient page. Those are all the units in your chain of command.

These orders must be done via the courier system though? No pointy-clicky-go-herey?

Good news is the critical Spanish command gap has been filled.

That's right, it is only done through the courier order system.

This turn has thrown up a surprising number of battles.

Reynosa has been "done" - sort of.

We have Ojos to fight, hopefully this weekend.

After that Ney's VI Corps is attacking at Torrelavega again.

Last of all we have a battle involving British troops (shock! horror!) further south... somewhere near Salamanca.

The battle in the south is at Alba de Tormes, 15 miles south-east of Salamanca and involves Victor's I Corps in pursuit of a retreating British army under General Graham which is trying to cover the withdrawal of a rapidly disintegrating Army of Extremadura under General Belvedere which is out of supply (having had its depot at Madrid captured last month).

I am looking for a suitable map for this battle and may use the Murfreesboro one, or one of the random maps. This region seems pretty flat and open farmland but the river Tormes runs north immediately on the west edge of town. The Murfreesboro map is therefore a pretty good fit, and we've never used it before.

I have built the Second Battle of Torrelavega scenario but testing is showing the same bug with non-fighting Spanish troops. I simply can't fix this at the moment. I was hoping to have Torrelavega available as a back-up scenario to Ojos on Sunday in case we can't get enough players, but I have set that aside and am now building the Alba des Tormes scenario. This will be most of Victor's I Corps vs Graham's British Corps plus the demoralised Spanish army of Extremadura which is out of supply. I shall probably play the entire Spanish army as it will not make a fun command for anyone to play and if we use it fully it'll mean the game needs more players than Ojos. The Spanish can fight but they'll have limited ammunition and low morale although there will probably be a more determined rearguard unit of some kind.

We'll be using the new Murfreesboro map which is perfect in terms of town position, road network, rivers and the general flat open landscape. It's a VERY open map.

I'll get a thread up for this scenario as soon as I can.

Where we are now.

I am putting the campaign on pause over the Christmas holiday and will schedule our next attempt to fight one of the queued-up battles for the weekend of the 9th/10th January.

We have 3 battles to fight:~

1) Ojos, south of Gerona where the Spanish Army of the Right is attempting to drive back French VII Corps and raise the siege of Gerona.
2) Alba-de-Tormes SE of Salamanca where an enthusiastic French I Corps has run amok and pushed a mixed Anglo-Spanish force all the way back from Villalba and Villacastin.
3) Second Battle of Torrelavega where Ney's VI Corps, having licked its wounds at Santander, is attempting again to clear Acevedo's Spaniards of Asturia off this critical road junction.

These games require a minimum of 10, 8 and 7 players respectively.

All are ready to go. Sadly the bug that hit us at Reynosa recently and Miranda last year is back and is affecting Torrelavega. We had 7 players gathered yesterday but couldn't play Torrelavega. I am still investigating this with Kevin's assistance, so far I simply cannot find a pattern at all. Some OOBs it doesn't affect, other, smaller less sprite-intensive ones, it does.

If we can fix this then its just possible that we could get 7 people together for Sunday 3rd January but I won't fix the date until I can get a properly working scenario.

Meanwhile all armies have sat down around their wintery campfires to boil kettles of snails or eat ripe hams. Some English soldiers offered to play football with their enemies on the snowy fields outside Alba but as they only had cannon balls to kick around this didn't go down too well. In the mountains the festive guerilleros have been hanging a new kind of French "wassail ball" on their trees!

Good news is Spanish infantry non-firing bug is found and fixed. Bad news is, it means another version of KS Mod before we can play another campaign scenario without us all fiddling about adding individual files. I think Kevin is close to releasing another update anyway.

I'm going to set a date for Torrelavega for Sunday Jan 3rd, which needs 7 players. If we get 8 we can play Alba de Tormes.

Out of curiosity, what was the source causing the bug?

An extra space in rifles.csv that was added to the name of the main Austrian musket which most of the Spanish troops used. In 99% of cases I'd copied the full name including space into my OOBs so most Spanish infantry fired okay, but it would seem that in a few random cases while editing or building OOBs I'd noticed this space, wondered why it was there and deleted it, assuming it was my mistake.

Turns out that process changed the weapon name from a legal allowed musket to one that rifles.csv didn't recognise, so all those battalions were unarmed. This was why the bug never affected the French or British, or anyone's artillery or cavalry. In addition, in all the main Austrian OOBs issued with the KS Mod, the space was there, so those were okay.

Kevin has removed the space in rifles.csv and done a global replace in the Austrian OOBs and I've done the same in my Spanish ones (it was affecting quite a lot of units who'd never fought, so was always going to be a nasty trip-up for us in the future). The next version of the KS Mod will have it all fixed.

Considering Kevin is a French team player I thought this was very noble of him!

I have some days leave from work this weekend and will get all the early April turn updated OOBs and sitreps out to everyone then. Spring is in the air! Warmer weather is here. The birds and bees are busy. Young men's thoughts turn to killing all the enemy scumbags!

And I'm in Austria

And about to suffer your first major defeat.

If you can look into the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not speak then to me

He just did!

P.S. Don't go to Moscow. Very cold. Nasty foreign Johnnies.

Why would I go to Moscow?! My good friend Alexander's birthday perhaps?

All OOBs updated. Anglo-Portuguese information sent out. Now working on the French. Delays due to several nights of SoW MP games (and a small matter of diversion caused by Fallout4)!

All OOBs and updates have been sent out., If you are a campaign player reading this and you haven't had an e-mail from me regarding the early April turn, please get in touch.

I'll give this turn just under 2 weeks, so orders must be in with me by midnight Sunday 7th Feb, UK time.

If we have a battle generated of course the turn end gets delayed a lot. This is not to be used as an excuse to fight!

Making good progress with the player orders and correspondence so far but have yet to see any activity from:

French

Ney
Verdier
Soult
Victor
Joseph
Junot

Allied

Cuesta
Acevedo
La Romana
Llamas
del Prado
Villava
San Juan
Moore

You only have 10 days gentlemen!

5 days to end of turn deadline.

Hi everyone.

I am going to place the campaign on pause for a while. I would like to carry on with it in the future but for now, with the more limited time I have to give to this hobby I need to try something that requires less of my time to administer.

I have also seen over the preceding months that there are issues arising from technical aspects of the campaign that are barriers to its success and I want to use the ideas I have had in recent weeks to run a new campaign that will overcome all of these issues.

Namely:

1) Shorter battles. Our SoW MP games have grown to very long times because they are big and need around 10+ players. This causes much lost time in getting ready, failed starts and much lag. I have had to -0postpone some games as well  if we didn't get enough players and that's an inconvenience to all, especially those who attend sessions to play in the campaign games and are not interested in attending for a stand-alone scenario put on in its place. We have actually driven away some KS players because they cannot allocate 5+ hours from their day to play the campaign games. This is clearly not desirable so I plan on battles that will use fewer division-level formations, players and minutes.

2) Smaller battles requiring fewer players. I envisage a number of smaller engagements of division vs division size or perhaps 2 divisions a side. This means we can play these with only 2 players, or smaller groups of 4 to 8. Less players means less chance of lag.

3) More fun setting. The Peninsular campaign has generated much great roleplaying and amusement but the battle results are still critical and losing one can be a bitter pill to swallow. I plan to construct a campaign that makes the loss of any one battle less critical.

4) Less admin work. This means less time for me spent keeping things going. A simpler map and map movement system is part of this as is a simplified communications format.

A discussion of the new campaign is here. Please post in that thread if you have interest in joining so I can judge the potential number of players.

Thanks very much.