Kleiner Feldzug: Afterthoughts

The Capture Of The Prussian Fortress of Kolberg On 16 December 1761 by Alexander Kotzebue

In commenting on the last post about our KF 1757 campaign, Keith from The Wargames Room asked:

"I have myself wondered about running this campaign, or something similar. Do you think any aspects worked particular well? With hindsight would there be things you would change?"

Overall, I'd say that Kleiner Feldzug (KFZ) is fun and a good simple tool for playing a campaign. Just be aware of its limitations.

Of course, it has the same limitations of most campaign games that one uses to generate miniature battles. Most especially, players may maneuver effectively and generate the sort of battles that real generals long for but wargamers seldom like--ones where one side has a definite advantage, anywhere from the "slight edge" to the "completely insuperable". Some battles that the defender intended from the start to be an "economy of force" engagement can be dealt with by the "Resolving Small Battles" rule, but one may end up with an engagement where the attacker outnumbers the defender by 2:1 or where the defender establishes the sort of position that will cost the attacker half his army to break. Campaigns don't usually produce the "each side gets an equal force" games.

KFZ is a very simple game, and some of the players wanted much more detail than it's designed to supply. For example, the raid and recon process is VERY abstract; light and irregular troops go out, do stuff, and you just get the end result in terms of information and/or SPs lost. Players often wanted to know how they could better guard against these events, and the short answer in game mechanics terms is, "you can't". Likewise, some players wanted to take these "small wars" troops and do other things with them, bring them to the battlefield, sabotage bridges, hold mountain passes. My bland answer was that they were able to do the abstract business of raids and recon and that was it, but if you want to create a whole additional game model that enumerates these forces and gives army commanders the ability to assign them more specific missions or detach them to work with specific force commanders, one has that option. The only limit is one's imagination.

Another arm that doesn't make a real appearance in KFZ are the engineers and sappers. Players wanted to specify that forces staying in one place would take the time to dig in (something that many SYW armies would do given even the least opportunity). One can certainly allow that, but one has to work out what that will cost players and what benefit they get from it.

Another issue I had to deal with in adapting the game as written is that it's designed for sequential moves. Prussia moves, then Austria, and so on. So each side has to wait for the other side to decide on its move and submit it, and for the umpire to resolve it and post the results. 

Not only that, but KFZ is built for one-on-one play; turn one player into one player per army, and now each player is waiting on the next (or you have to wait until one team can all agree on their joint move). That means loooong delays either way.

I know from experience that it's hard to hold email campaigns together, and if players have to wait for each other to get around to thinking about the game, make decisions, and write them up, the game will start haemorrhaging players rapidly as people get bored and drop out or take even longer to get their head back into the latest turn.

So I had to tweak the structure of the game to allow all players' moves to be resolved simultaneously. This wasn't too much of a challenge until the armies started sending off small cavalry forces that moved swiftly and made me resort to very careful sequencing and to make some additional calls on how the supply rules would work.

Likewise, one has to make some decisions about how to implement information gathering and dissemination. In the original game, with only two players, each knows where all the opponent's troops are at start and knows where all the enemy's armies are (if not their composition) at the end of each move. I decided to leave that more or less intact, but one could take the opportunity to introduce a bit more fog of war and restrict players' knowledge of the location and strength of friendly and enemy forces absent proximity or information sharing. The latter should be exceptionally difficult for Prussians within Austria, as Austrian irregular forces created almost impenetrable barriers around Prussian armies. To reflect this in our game, I gave the Austrians a second raid/recon option for any Prussian forces inside Austria, but I had to cut this back to an extra recon only--giving the Austrians two raid options was far too powerful.

The raid option uses the attrition mechanism, and this we found far too devastating. Yes, armies should be discouraged from force-marching, but the Prussians *have* to move through mountains if they're going to move into Bohemia somewhere other than Pirna and Zittau, and the cost (50% chance of losing a SP for every unit and a 16% chance of losing two) proved to be far too devastating. I gave those subjected to attrition a 50% saving throw for each SP indicated to be lost, and that gave result that still curbed over-ambitious marching while not being unreasonably crippling.

Speaking of crippling, probably the most contentious event in the campaign was the surrender of Prague and the loss of von Browne's army. I made it very clear to the Austrian commander what *might* happen, but he convinced himself it couldn't really take place. Then the D6 came up 1, and the fortress surrendered. I wasn't prepared to give the Austrians a do-over just because they had ignored a very clear warning, especially because they could have fought the besieging Prussian army in the field but didn't want to take the losses that the very canny Prussian commander was clearly going to inflict on them by clever management of terrain and deployment. But it's something to consider: what event is going to be too bitter a pill for players to swallow, even if warned of it ahead of time, and how should one deal with it? Just take that opportunity for disaster away from them? or make them face up to the possible risk as well as the perceived reward?