Campaign Phase

Campaigns are played in a series of turns, much like 40k. The campaign turns can be as simple as each player taking a turn to move and battle with their armies across the map to far more complicated turn phases including stages for orders, scouting, battles, reorganisation and a lot more. How complicated you want your campaign to be is down to you but the more complicated it is, the more dedicated the players need to be to see it through to the end. You might like the idea of the players having to micromanage their armies but if they don’t, they’ll soon lose interest in the campaign and it’ll come to a premature end.

The two most important factors in the turn phase are moving and battling, without these you can’t actually play a true map campaign but there’s so much more you can add into the turn phase to make things interesting. These include ….

• Turn order / Initiative
• Supplies
• Orders
• Scouting
• Moving / Actions
• Battles
• Retreat
• Reinforce / Admin

There’s many more phases you could include in your campaign turn, but these are the main ones. Quite offer, 40k campaigns differ quite largely from fantasy campaigns when it comes down to world building. Fantasy campaigns often have rules in place for building your empire by gathering resources, building settlements and raising more forces. This is because it’s typical for a number of different races to ocupy the same map battling to extend their territories and build their empires.

This is normally handled by having a specific empire building phase which is played after a number of battle campaign turns representing the winter season where the players can collect taxes from their settlements, raise and reinforce their armies ready for the next season, build new settlements or improve the one’s they already have along with other activities such as espionage and magic. Whereas with 40k, normally a single race will ocupy a planet and be fighting off other invading races, so they tend to concentrate on the fighting side of campaigns although it’s entirely acceptable to have an empire building phase in your campaigns if you want one and we’ll be looking at that later on.

Before we can even look into the mechanics of moving and battling over the campaign map, we need to look at the order players take their turns.

Turn order & Initiative

Can you help? Have I missed anything? include your thoughts in the comments and I'll get them added to the page.