American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

Does anyone else have problems figuring out what you are supposed to do, roughly, during the scenarios of the Campaign game. I know you are given freedom to do what you wish but sometimes the scenarios seem configured for you to guard a certain point or do X in the scenario. It normally seems to me that I figure this out about 1/2 through the scenario when it is to late. I know that the little paragraph at the beginning is supposed to give you some idea but it seems very vague to me.

I guess what I am asking for is if you just started a scenario in a campaign what do you do?

How do you deciede if you are supposed to be attacking, defending, guarding X point or what?

Just seems like I am not planning on doing the right thing from the get go.

The hints (apart from the campaign situation) are usually the placement of objectives on the map and the victory level. If you start with a defeat and all the objectives are behind the enemy's lines, it's pretty obvious that the designer wanted you to attack. If you hold all the objectives and maybe already enjoy a victory, it means you are the defender. If it starts as a draw and both sides have objectives, it's a pretty open situation.

If you have exit objectives on the opposing side of the map, the situation likely requires you to smash through the enemy lines and gain the far map edge (for whatever reason that the campaign context constitutes). That's especially true if you start with a defeat and a victory requires like 10,000 VP or so--something that can by no stretch of imagination be achieved by inflicting casualties. Only exiting your army can ever get you so many points.

If all the objectives are in the center of the map and you're coming in from one map edge, it's likely that you are looking at a meeting engagement and your opponent is arriving from another map edge. And so on.

Of course it can get more complex, but usually these two factors--objectives and starting victory levels--are pretty good clues.

Gen. Walter, USA
AoS / War College

Not knowing what is going on plus the enemy's strength and intentions is a lot of the fun of playing new unfamiliar campaign scenarios. Given the campaign game format, I've found that following three general guidelines usually works well for me:
1. Forget about the objectives until you figure out what is going on.
2. Conserve your forces at all costs, keep them relatively close together and in position to support each other.
3. Initially emphasize recon to discover enemy strength and intentions.

After that its all about gaining a local superiority of forces on the battlefield and/or avoiding letting the enemy do that to you.

Lt. Col. Ed Lytwak 2/2/XV/AoT/USA



Lt.Col Ed Lytwak
2/2/XV/AoT/USA