Tabletop skirmish games with OK campaign map rules?

[OgreBattle]

I've played Kill Team with exp, but that was leveling up your dudes and picking skills, no territorial control. Looking for a game where your campaign involves capturing territories too or doing something interesting outside of "you have more exp for skills and more currency for gear" like maybe influencing how the next battlefield is to your favor.

I heard the Kill Team campaign rules with resources suck. Mordheim looks cool but never actually looked at what you do between battles. Necromunda has a few but I'm not familiar with it. There's also Mordheim and Necromunda video games, those worth looking at too?

[PhoneLobster]

I have never seen good campaign rules for those things.

Mostly because the table top wargame designers from the limited systems I've seen trying to do this just fail on first principles when they come into contact with their first most basic obstacle.

Which is usually snowballing.

These things usually hit snowballing and basically just implode.

But maybe that's just old games workshop trash?

I suspect the prior edition of Infinity did it too. But they also just sorta... made the game implode for no reason with poorly implemented overly elaborate unforced WTFery before even hitting snowballing so...

[Thaluikhain]

Mordheim looks cool but never actually looked at what you do between battles. Necromunda has a few but I'm not familiar with it.

Pretty sure Mordheim had stuff for between battles, similar to Necromunda.

But with campaign map rules, I think the general consensus was that they look cool and totally fail at everything. Not just snowballing, as PL says, but everything else as well.

Though, the old Final Liberation videogame one appeared to work, because it wasn't really a campaign map as such, it just appeared to be. Each territory you control gave you resources to spend on things to put in your armies and attack ork territories with, and the ork defenders then got a set ratio of points to your attacking force depending on the difficulty level.

Other way of doing it is having a referee to make things fair, and thus make a mockery of the entire campaign, but in a cool way. That's sometimes popular.

[Koumei]

About the only way to avoid Snowballing is making it have no effect on the actual skirmish game part, and only used for things like "determining who the overall winner of the campaign is". So you have X territories, and each one probably determines the appearance of the map (like a forest terrain, a scrap yard, something with a river in it and so on), and then winning in a territory puts your flag there and at the end of Y rounds, the person with the most territories wins.

[Chamomile]

If you put a cap on the number of battles in the campaign, whether hard (campaign ends after eight battles, period) or soft (after five battles, units are more and more likely to be permanently eliminated and/or become more expensive to replace), then you can use a reverse snowball mechanic of some kind. Either straightforwardly by giving more points to whoever has fewer territories or, if that's wreaking havoc with verisimilitude, by giving each territory a rating as either deep [red/blue] territory, shallow [red/blue] territory, or contested, with deep/shallow territory giving a points advantage to the home team representing their being more dug in and enemy supply lines being more stretched (you can have this be measured in actual distance to some kind of supply depot or main camp if you want players to have the option to encircle a territory and deprive the defenders of their bonuses that way).

You can also have territories give horizontal benefits instead of pure extra points. For example, each territory grants some kind of special unit, but you can only bring one special unit to each battle. Even if you're fighting for control of your last territory, you still have that territory's special unit. Your enemy can pick from any special unit in the game except that one, but they still only get to bring one.

You could also give benefits to controlling adjacent territories and only adjacent territories, which would put a cap on how big the snowball can be and, if you design the map right, give the side that's losing overall some options where they can attack at an advantage and hopefully retake the initiative. You can also use chokepoints where the contested territory will, if contested at all, pretty much always be adjacent to the same number of territories (probably one) controlled by each faction, which will give a losing faction a chance to stall an enemy advance.

If you have three or more factions, snowballing becomes somewhat self-correcting so long as there's always an equal action economy between different factions no matter what - the winning faction will be targeted by more attacks as the others seek to put them in check, and so long as the snowball hasn't gotten so big that it a coalition can't even win one out of every X+1 skirmishes, where X is the number of coalition members, the snowball will lose ground faster than they can gain it even if they win every one of their own attacking skirmishes. You can encourage this by increasing the number of factions (though this runs into the logistical problem that you need more players) and by making it easy for factions to attack one another either through map design (territories sufficiently interconnected that it's rare for two factions not to have a border with one another) or through special movement rules, like a king of the hill mechanic where one or more valuable territories are one-way attackable by less valuable territories spread out across the factions, if factions can pass through each other's territory to attack factions on the other side with permission from the person whose territory they're passing through, or total free-for-all if your factions are gangs or something, who can get into a regular van and move through each other's turf pretty much undetected whether they have permission or not.