Escalation Campaign - Finale and Deep Thoughts
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Warhammer 40,000 – The Escalation Campaign is over. Unsurprisingly Chaos lost. In the final battle I used a different Chaos force than I had been using to represent the Nightlords abandoning the system with the meager spoils they claimed just as Chaos re-enforcements meandered onto the scene. Given the once sided nature of the campaign it was inevitable that Chaos would turn on itself.
The final game saw Renegade Knights fighting against Thousand Sons and (Red) Alpha Legion in a three-way Maelstrom Battle to the death. I really despise three-way battles, I say it every time I post about one but the nature of this style of game tends to always sees one player getting beat on (except this game seemed to be the exception with all players splitting their forces relatively equally)
A poor flip of the cards left me with few options, I should have been using the generic cards instead of the Chaos Daemon ones in hindsight. So I ran forward and attempted to decimate both opponents with my Knights. Focused fire and a blob of buffed up Cultists managed to take out the Atropos after it removed a few units. The Renegade with dual Avengers tore through Arhiman, a Maulerfiend and put a dent in some Sentinels before falling to a bevy of mortal wounds.
The end result is the Thousand Sons managed to win 14-4-0, with the Alpha Legion coming in second.
I learned a few things with this campaign:
1. Each Session was to long. As I collected input prior to starting the campaign several players insisted that they needed 3-4 weeks to paint 25PL worth of models, I gave in and extended each session. The next time I run something two weeks is the max for each portion of the campaign. Once we got past the 8 week mark people started losing steam.
2. Unless you have a DEDICATED group that's evenly split narrative campaigns spilt down the Imperial/Chaos line are hard to pull off. At kick-off we had a almost equal spilt, but unfortunately the Chaos side had more of the players with erratic schedules which meant each week was imbalanced. Future campaigns will be divided into teams based on people who show up consistently with the rest randomly allocated based on what is needed each week. (maybe...)
3. Keep it Tight. I had opened this campaign up to my larger group of players outside of our regular game night. The idea was they could play when they could get games and still participate. Great idea, but in practice they were super interested and excited at kick-off, but never actually posted a game. (Which further skewed the player balance) In the future I'll still leave this open but won't actually include those players in part of the team count for balance.
Overall the campaign was fun and the special rules/bonuses didn't break the game to badly. It seems the twists influenced where we ought most often as the -1 to hit in the city was not popular with the Imperial players who were mostly guard.
