1813 Campaign Military Regions

Old North German Campaign Area

The basis of the new campaign concept is the creation of military regions, which will replace political regions.  

The basic building block of the campaign will remain the wargames table.  This already applies to maps used for the stand alone mini campaigns, and those used to transfer battles from the campaign to the wargames table.   They will still apply, but may have to be replaced with new maps.

The problem is the maps used above that play level.  That is to say campaign areas, countries and all of Europe.

An example of the current map is shown above.   You will see that it is a large and quite complicated map.   Each square is a wargames table.  The squares with buildings are major cities, and each would provide a mini campaign.   The only borders shown are historical ones.   They play no part in the campaign, other than to add colour to the narrative.   Although there are nine squares surrounding each city, this also plays no part in the current system.

Part of New North German Campaign Area

Above is the first draft of a new map for part of northern Germany.  

Each square on this map represents one wargame table.  

The map is divided into three military regions.  They are Hannover, Brunswick and Berlin.

Each region has 36 squares, which translates as 36 wargame tables.   There are four buildings shown in each region.   These are military districts, and each has 9 squares.   All are named, but only one has a building.   The buildings are the district headquarters.   One of the buildings is a church with small buildings around it.  This is the major city of the region and gives its name to the region itself. 

For example on the left of the map is the Hannover region.   The four buildings are Hannover, Bremen, Osnabruck and Oldenburg.   All are military districts.   All are in the centre of a group of names squares, which are the towns within that district.   Hannover Region is part of the Kingdom of Westphalia.   The border between Hannover and Brunswick regions is the thick dotted purple line.

Each mini campaign be for possession of a military district, not a region.   So each regions could provide up to four mini campaigns.

My first thoughts are that each campaign area would have three regions.   A French and an Allied army would occupy the left and right regions.    The centre one would be where the campaign is fought.

There are four corps in each army, and one corps would occupy each district.   This would be their peace time deployment, and would allow them to be fully supplied.   It is immediately clear, even without district borders, the area allocated to each corps.  

This map would be used to run the higher level command element of the larger 1813 campaign.  In this part of the campaign would be the logistic problems, guerrilla activity possibly even sieges.

Once a corps entered the centre region that would be the start of a mini campaign.   These would be smaller than the current campaigns and would not last as long.   Each corps would start with limited supplies.  When they ran out the campaign would end, as they would have to return to their own region to resupply and reorganise.

It may, or may not, work.   Now I need to do some play testing to see how this new campaign area system would tie in with the existing mini campaign rules.