SYW Global Campaign - 1761-1762+, End of Game Summary + GM Thoughts

 

 With Spain and Ottomans not making serious progress on each other, they signed a truce at the beginning of 1761. This left the ruined Russians and Austrians in untenable positions, while Britain, Netherlands and France were truced out of every major war option. Prussia was content to hold its VP lead and consolidate its possessions. 

With all this in mind, the game was inevitably set to end. Timing wise this worked out well as we wanted to launch into our end of term tournament, so I left the leaders to declare any minor actions and negotiate peaces during the final historical years of the war. The ending map situations were as follows:

Europe:
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.. Here we see that Spain has cut its way through france, italy, and austria... No doubt their new holy roman empire will be in need of much consolidation during the coming years, but the resurgent Ottoman menace may help things cohere- as that conflict is certainly not over.

France picked up Belgium but lost Provence. I'm sure they will be looking to get that back through negotiation if possible, but no agreement could be reached by the end of the game

Prussia has successfully disassembled the old holy roman empire and consolidated northern Germany... What that political organization would look like during this period would be fairly open ended though no doubt dissimilar to what history experienced... But dominating and co-opting the nearby naval powers enough to demilitarize Britain was certainly a move that sealed Prussia's dominance in the medium term. Friendly terms built up with Sweden and Poland in the east ensure some stability on that front.

Austria really had nothing left by the end, and despite being the original architect of the British-Austrian-Russian alliance, never really received any assistance from its allies in a way that could offset the incredible land forces in antagonized in Prussia and France. Whether they continued on in name or were consolidated into other Spanish possessions is open to question.

Russia didn't fare much better... They ended the game not having been able to retake any provinces from their enemies and consistently on the losing end of battles. Their fate in the coming years would likely be some kind of balkanization or partition by the Prussia-aligned Poland and Sweden, an ironic fate indeed.

Britain never really recovered from their ill-fated decision to place their main army between France and Prussia unsupported instead of landing in Spain or with one of their allies. The complete loss of the army led to a spiral of under-deployment in the colonies and lack of military support for continental allies. Meanwhile Spain took the opportunity to cut them out of the Med early, sealing Austria's fate. Having lost almost all their colonial possessions and being threatened with invasion at home, they peaced out of the war and the game early, leaving their allies to be wiped out.

The Netherlands never operated seriously in Europe, and by alienating Britian but not then fully embracing the other alliance, their various irritating sabotages were noted by the Prussians enough that they were overrun when the other alliance collapsed. Prussia accepted them as a protectorate in exchange for naval support, so it could have been worse in the end, all things considered.

The Ottomans played it very safe all game. Had they attacked the fairly defenseless Austrian Alliance a year earlier, their position might have been slightly stronger going into the final war. Nevertheless the total collapse of their two serious enemies allowed them to still end the game with fairly good gains. They just didn't have the gas to seriously contend with a reinforced Spain, and Prussia's enlarged eastern allies threatened them enough such that they could not attempt to help Netherlands as they had planned.

Rest of World:

The colonies for the most part followed the fate of the continent.

France took advantage of the early demise of Britain and Austria on the continent to greatly prioritize resources to its colonies, overrunning the largely undefended 13 colonies with a reinforced army. Due to Spanish successes in the Caribbean, they were even able to retake their own possessions there. Britain evacuating India allowed it to consolidate possessions there as well. France's gains in the colonies arguably offset losses on the continent, but in the years to come they are facing a worse financial situation than Britain did historically, while also being spread thinner.

Spain was the other big winner, overrunning the Caribbean and South America. Luring Britain's colonial army into Brazil worked out splendidly, and they faced no further opposition after mopping that up. Their position in the colonies and in Europe is stronger than France's leading one to wonder what other concessions they could extract from France in the Years to comes...

As alluded to before, Britain has been wiped out in the colonies. Not much to say here as they never really had the numbers to compete with attacks from France and Spain, nor any help to send from home after losing their first army in Hanover. They put up a better fight in the colonies overall but some bad luck in Brazil sealed their fate.

The Netherlands operated cautiously and were rewarded to a good degree by eating up the spice isles... But due to problems at home they could not challenge France or Spain directly, and that really capped their expansion potential.

So again to summarize, here were the ending scores:

1. Prussia 4 VPs, 4 capitals taken
2. Spain 3 VPs, 1 Capital taken
3. Ottomans 3 VPs, 0 Capitals taken
4. France 2 VPs, 0 Capitals taken
5. Dutch 0 VPs (+1-1) but they made out fairly well all things considered...
   
6. Britain 0 VPs but lost the most
7. Russia 0 VPs but split into 2 countries
8. Austria 0  VPs, did not survive as a country
   
   This scoring system was adapted from the score card system presented on the Soldier Kings website.

Closing Comments:

So, what are my initial end-game thoughts as a GM?


1.  Running the WAS alliance with the force composition/scenario of the SYW is very dangerous for Austria. Ironically, they themselves chose this, but without very serious planning, and active Spain and Ottomans, it was hard to see how Austria was going to survive from the very start. Having foreseen this possible scenario, I had added events and additional offsets to discourage Prussia-French rapprochement in particular, but it would not have been in the spirit of the game to disallow it completely. Besides, Austria chose its alliance first, so what could really be done? I basically set up a scenario where the Prussia France alliance would be unstable, represented by expanded wargoals neither of France's allies were likely to agree to in the long term... But military sucess on all fronts offset any tensions caused by these conditions.


2. More accurate starting armies made Britain less ridiculously overpowered, but they are still one of the strongest countries you can play in Soldier Kings, if not still the strongest. The evidence of this is fairly simple: they made more missteps and had several crushing defeats more than any of their other allies, but were still able to come back ready for more due to their strong home provinces, navy, and starting treasury. After all was said and done they still came out much stronger than their other allies that had fought better land battles, even if they didn't score well. I would consider reducing the fort levels on the British home provinces in Europe in addition to the changes already made, as they are excessive and unjustifiable from either a balancing or historical perspective. (scotland having a better fort rating than France's iron ring is... ridiculous)

3. The Naval rework seems to have succeeded. Strong navies still helped land invasions without leading them, and the British were still very challenging to fight by sea even in the their worst case scenario. Things were close in the Caribbean even with very strong Spanish rolling.

4. Neither Soldier Kings nor Might and Reason do a great job of simulating late war manpower issues or casualties vs attrition. This is a bit speculative because the country most likely to have them, Prussia, encountered almost no serious military resistance and crushed in most battles with minimal casualties in all cases. So in a sense there needed to be consequences for that. But it might be useful to globally reduce manpower as the years go on for future games.

5. Making Soldier Kings simultaneous and by year didn't seem to have too many negative impacts. It requires steely GMing and very organized team leaders, but at the end of the day the only major element lost was the siege metagaming system, something few people have good things to say about anyway. Might & Reason does a good job of representing the one major battle per year one could expect on most fronts, and the small positioning battles that might shape it. The huge bonus of making this work is that this scenario is now playable in a 2-3 day intensive convention format, which was our goal from the start.


6. Having active Spanish and Ottomans players will always actively derail the game away from historical outcomes. Not too much more to say here... it is undesirable to simply prevent these teams from doing things for large parts of the war, but this unquestionably changes the direction of the war regardless of starting alliances. I would reluctantly consider implementing conditions on their army performances in the opening years that aim to slow them down but do not prevent them from doing things outright.


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A big Thank You to everyone who  participated, some 30 players, and especially the Team Leaders. We look forward to running this event format in person in the years to come now that we know it can work, and will fit into the weekend convention format we have operated for years now.