When countries went to war with one another in medieval times, there were no 'frontlines'. They would each leave token garrisons for home defence, assemble a single army as large as practical, maneuvre towards one another for many miles and often settle the whole thing with one big battle. More usually, a series of battles but hopefully you see my point.

There are artificial restrictions in the campaign game which you need not be bound by - such as army units only moving one province per year, whereas that amount of time is more than enough to march from one end of Europe to the other. You can take it as read that garrisons exist and, should two factions both attack a third in the same year, the defender must decide how many men he can send to each battle.

Or you could ask factions to declare an intended date of attack in advance. If faction A says 'we attack faction C in May' and faction B says 'we attack faction C in August' then C can fight two distinct battles with his full muster in May and the survivors of that battle in August. He might win the first but lose the second due to his losses.

So wars are declared, whole faction armies meet. Having established who has military superiority, diplomatic negotiations would follow over control of territory. Each faction's overall army strength determines the radius of their 'sphere of influence' but the nitty-gritty detail of where the borders lie (i.e. who controls which province where the overlaps occur) has to be settled by negotiation. This could be an interesting element to a multiplayer campaign, using email, forums or instant messenger programs to communicate.


That's the preamble, now the meat.

Why struggle with the technicalities of getting the campaign software to work as you wish it to work, when all you're really doing is record-keeping? Who owns what lands? Who built what buildings? Who trained which troops? What income and expenditure does a faction have and how much is in the bank?

You could do all that in a spreadsheet! Much less work for the gamemaster.

For those that still need a visual representation of what's going on, just turn the game's map graphic into a file format which can be printed out and use whatever you want to mark who owns what lands and so on.

The really hard part is that MP battles can only be fought out with full-strength units. If you've been keeping track of every unit type trained and the numbers of each type, then you need to also track the damage suffered by every unit in every battle. That's an awful lot of work for someone.

Then, once it's done, you can merge broken units but what to do with the 'leftovers'. If you round up, you give a faction fresh troops for free and if you round down, you're penalising them. How is that going to be handled?

It's an interesting idea you have here but why make work for yourself? The limitations built into the game are there to make it manageable and playable for both the player and the AI but I see no reason why you should restrict yourself by attempting to follow them. You don't want any AI interference, do you?

Make up your own rules for how, where, when armies meet and fight and how territory control is established as a consequence. Find a low-tech method of record-keeping which you can use straight away, rather than a high-tech one which may take months to get working acceptably.