End of an Era

We have finally completed the Empire Campaign.  Final positions and Victory Point totals:

And in last place we have the Persians with twelve points.  We ruled that a conquered power would wait until it accrued the maximum points it could over five turns before rolling for a resurgence, and guess what, the Persians failed anyway.

Next comes Carthage with 14 points, along with Rome (that counter fell off the map before I could scan it - a sign of things to come?).

And the winners are the Macedonians, on 16 points (basically, the value of the combined Successor states).  The result is even tighter than it looks, because if the Roman attack on Macedon had worked, the red tide would be on 16 points and the Macedonians on 14 - that's how close it was.

As a battle generator for tabletop games, this one is a winner.  It produced something like 100 games for us over a period of more than four years.  It would have taken less time except for me becoming more and more erratic on club nights, due to life and work reasons, but we still ground our way through to the end.

I think the main reason it worked is that there were no players.  To be precise, nobody ran any particular power, instead, whoever happened to be present after a battle would roll for the next one.  Since the game is pretty much set up for events in this way, it worked beautifully.  Sure, some players had pet loves (Gordon for the Persians, Simon for Carthage, or Willie for the Successors) while others had pet hates (me for Rome, and Willie too), but the way we ran it meant that it could keep stuttering along regardless of who was actually present.  As it turned out, this was a good idea, because it meant that we could keep it going even when I became a bit less reliable.  It also worked well for multi-player games on club evenings; in a sense, it didn't really matter who turned up, so long as the figures were there, and so was the map.

So what next?  Well, Gordon made a comment in the car travelling back one evening about just going on through ancient history, so that is what we are going to do.  I have a cunning plan on how to do this, but I'll leave the details for another day once I have them straight in my head - I'll maybe make them into a separate blog page for the sake of clarity.  Empire worked really well on the grand strategic scale with one turn being ten years, but I for one am missing some of the detail that a less exalted style produces.  I'm hoping to marry the lessons in organisation and playability learned from Empire with a more granular approach  - see, I do know some gaming terminology.

So I suppose it's a case of 'Watch this space'...