Re-unification – an epic, themed WRE PBM

[Dutch_guy]

1) Play a full reign: To allow people to get into character, players will play for the entire reign of an Emperor. To stop this being too onerous and to allow more players to participate, I propose players ensure the faction heir is in his 50’s when the faction leader dies. To this end, players may want to save every turn so they can reload their last turn and chose a new heir if the designated one was too young or too old when the Emperor dies.

This sounds good and as the title says : Epic.

2) Have fun!: Players are encouraged to role-play the game and exploit story-telling opportunities. They need not always write from the perspective of the Emperor – they could follow a specific general who catches their eye or even an ancillary. They could get their generals to do something quixotic if it is in character for that general (or seems like fun). But they should not to leave successor players in very difficult situations (e.g. by disbanding the entire army or withdrawing entirely to Britain etc) and should work towards the general theme of the campaign, re-unification.

agreed.

3) Re-unification: The overall theme of the campaign will be re-unification of the Roman Empire. To this end, players should aim to conquer all the ERE starting provinces and hold every last one of their starting WRE provinces. I am not sure if holding all WRE and ERE provinces alone is sufficient for a WRE victory, but it is close. I will check later on and produce a specific list of the provinces needed to meet WRE victory conditions.

Again, this sounds epic. I can imagine it to be great fun reading - or perhaps writing - about the great final battle before the gates of Antioch...

4) Respect the frontier: As a corollary of the re-unification theme, players are not to try to hold any provinces that were not originally parts of the WRE or ERE. They may pillage them, but should not leave a garrison there. The idea here is to work within the frontiers of the Empire. Historically, there were presumably reasons for the frontiers being where they were – logistics, guerilla warfare etc. – and a WRE campaign that is won by just picking up some weak barbarian provinces would be too short to get an epic PBM going (someone won in 380AD on VH/VH).
5) Friends, Romans, countrymen!: Players should not exterminate any towns that start under Roman rule (WRE or ERE). The theme is re-unification, not fratricide. Players may exterminate barbarian towns, but may not hold them. Even these exterminations should be done sparingly, for role-playing reasons (e.g. to avenge the loss of a city or army) – not as a quick exploit to pre-empt the AI building up its armies or to get some easy money.

I can see this producing some good ingame moments, especially if that frontier tribe eventually becomes a superpower, we'd be hard put.

as for the last 4 points:

6) Don't kick the underdogs: Players should not wipe out the weak non-horde barbarian factions – IIRC, Celts, Berbers, Allemanni and Saxons. This is to better simulate the ever-present “frontier” and the threats posed by smaller tribes neighbouring Rome.
7) No Vandals here!: To try to keep the economy tight, players should not disband any buildings for cash. They may freely dismantle religious buildings in order to manage religious discontent or convert populations to a favoured faith.
8) No dirty peasants: No peasant units may be recruited or retained. They are too cheap as garrisons and anyway, that is what the limitanei and foederati were for.
9) Game settings: The campaign will be on VH campaign, M battles. Large units. Timer on. Patched to 1.6. I think we should probably adjust the settings to reduce the rate of spawn of rebels and pirates, as they are tedious to fight – I’ll look into this.

Well exept for point 8, I usually play this way anyway, so no big deal to make these above quoted rules official -

So I'm in, though preferably as ...say player number 4.

Do want to play, but spare time is getting harder to come by now a days so I don't want to disturb the earlier fase of the campaign.

That's all for now, If I get any flashes of inspiration I'd let you guys know.