ECW Campaign Update

For those of you who might have been wondering, no, I haven't forgotten about the club ECW campaign. We've had about five sessions, and (after last night) we've just reached the end of 1643.

The summer campaign season went pretty well - there were a couple of small skirmishes, which largely seemed to result in Andy's Royalist forces covering themselves in glory. In late August, Rupert and Essex happened by, and basically relieved both sides of all their spare cash to fund their armies, which made the next couple of turns interesting, to say the least. Carl (who is GMing the campaign) asked for an accounting of troops to be made to him at the end of August - I provided mine in character (when reading, treat pounds as WECW points :D).

What made winter even more interesting was that for both sides, income from a given garrison dropped by half, and suddenly instead of raking in 500 pounds profit every fortnight, we were making a similar sized loss. Just to add to the fun, the recently-fought (using Pike and Shotte) Battle of Newbury was factored into the campaign, which had very little effect except that the King's forces had captured the Earl of Essex. So Cromwell levied a tithe on the Parliament side's coffers, which, sadly, we (the Royalists) didn't get to see any of.

Graeme and the Parliament forces figured out the best way of dealing with this a couple of turns quicker than we did: in Tinker Fox (plus our local rules), raids only cost if you make the roll to attempt it, so it's worth the risk, as provided your raid makes a profit, not only do you get a small amount of extra funds, you deny your opponent the funds from that area for two turns. That aside, we both currently have the problem of not being able to afford to pay all our troops every turn, so over half our orders are spent making personal visits to garrisons to quell their dissention, having agonised over who doesn't get paid this fortnight.

Hopefully, we'll survive the winter (another six turns!!!) without any garrisons turning mutinous, though not paying the garrison at Stratford over Christmas really wasn't in my plan!

On the good side, most of the Royalist army is now Steady, with a goodly few Veteran.

On the bad side, His Royal Highness Prince Rupert will probably be coming by in March to co-opt half our army for the new campaign season. Joy.

All in all, though? Great fun: even if we have basically spent several Monday nights clustered around a map, and on several of those not moved or laid out a single figure at all! The thing that is interesting on that score is that when we do move to the tabletop, the battle has context in the larger scheme of things, which can even make a two units vs two units scrap surprisingly entertaining.