Well, first lets look at what is a campaign? Is it a war? Yes, and no. A war from beginning to end can constitute a campaign, and no, in that a campaign may be sub-divided into sections of the war. Lets use the Civil War as an example: A sub-division of the civil war can be sectioned into the 4 main political events that led to the South ceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. It can also be sub-divided into the 7 major battles during the buildup and expansion of both the North and the South leading to the capture and denial of resource rich farmlands and plantations that produced much of the South's war income. It can also be sub-divided into the last 3 major military offensives that led to the capture and surrender of Richmond to the Union army, thus ending the war. This sub-division can be; and often is, arbitrary, and personal depending on who is doing the analysis.

So a campaign has sections? Yes.

A campaign involves political as well as military battles? Yes.

A campaign covers how much territory and involves who? Well politically, the civil war was not just the North against the South, but also industrialists of the north vs the agricultural farmers and plantation owners of the south. As well as the English that supported the Union and the French interests that supported the South with money, supplies, advisors, troops and weapons for the war. We can also include local indian tribes that found their own personal interests in siding with one or the other in the war. In addition of course there is the military battles of Lee and Grant.

For our purposes for Sins of a Solar Empire, we could say, that Campaigns are multi-staged battles, involving political and military interests of two of more parties.

Can we use the Map Editor built into the game as a Campaign editor? Yes, and no. It can give us maps of territories and a given number of opponents. But all parties, including the opponents start from scratch. That will work if we play a whole war. But what if we decide to play only the last 7 battles that denied the South their resources and led to the French pulling back their support of the South? In that case we have an already very full and detailed map, with forces strung out in different areas. Also it means that there were resources to be denied to the South when the North captured them. In this scenario we are not starting from scratch.

For our sake, there are several things to look at that both fit what we need and dont. The editor in game is nice, but it doesnt meet all our needs. We need an editor that can distribute forces and their numbers in specific areas. We want to have a large contingent of the Southern army guarding the rich plantation lands where the South's major portion of their income comes from, for the sake of example, let us say 70 percent comes from these Half a dozen states of the Confederacy. Galaxy Forge will do this, but our in game editor doesnt.

Also, currency, metal and crystal, are all mined in game in infinite quantities once a planet or asteroid is taken over. This doesn't reflect a limited resource area, or a inconsistently producing one, say the difference between lands denied to the South and are no longer available, or exhausted resources in an area that forced the South to relocate their forces. For Sins this would mean having our HomeWorld produce XXXX units and then being exhausted. The same with asteroids and other planets. Also, no matter where i am in the system, or systems, each planets' resources are available to me, instantly, and it allows me to produce ships and factories anywhere where i have a world.

In the example with the North and South, wouldn't it be more interesting to have the South move away from an area, because of dwindling resources, tabacco can no longer be grown, tended and harvested in a countryside rife with battle and raiding bandits. The resources dry up. Same for the North, as their industrial machine that requires massive amounts of money and raw materials slowly dwindles to a halt due to lack of those resources to continue to operate. In addition, those roads of commerce did not allow them to make what they needed or wanted just anywhere. If a Southern town was overrun, the populace displaced and the local tobacco fields burned, that area became a dead entity to the South, a non-producing site. In game we need some of this to force movements and concerns for things other than, "They are Vasari, they must die!" If we are motivated to defend our metal fields because they only produce so much, and after that are useless, then we will have to find other areas of resources. In addition if we need to get resources to our starving armies, boots and food and blankets, ammunition and gunpowder, or raw iron and steel and coal to our faltering industries that are producing weapons, or foodstuffs, cotton and brandy to our ports to export to France for money to continue the war, then we have to move them. In the game of course, we dont have to move anything. Resources are infinite and will continue to produce unless the pirates or the enemy takes over the planet, in which case they now have an additional unlimited income. Trade ships cross borders of hostile planets regardless of whether they are destroyed or not, they dont stop, they dont turn around or find an alternate route, they simply continue and continue to die as well.

There are other concerns as well, like the strengths and weaknesses of individuals, or of machinery or chains of supplies.

In the civil war a contingent of Union soldiers, caught behind enemy lines in the beginning of the war, were cut off and could not get resupplied. Good functional competent soldiers who ran out of bullets and flour and salt and beef, many starved in the woods, or were shot by Confederate populations when found. Grant a genius of a war statistician was placed toward the end of the war against a Southern Statesman turned General, who's heart was certainly with the South, but not with the war, Dawson, who revered God and the Confederacy, but couldnt abide the cruelty of war. He was a good man, but not a good soldier, Grant, trained at Westpoint faced him and broke his lines with almost no difficulty at all. Lee on the other hand, a instinctual leader and strategist was relegated to guarding the South's resources a good distance from Richmond on the need of course that the South could not afford to lose any more income, or they would lose the war. Lee, by that turn of political necessity, was not fully utilized until the closing days of the war, and then perhaps too late.

In our game, if i have a inconsistent style of play, it is likely to stay that way, if i play multiplayer in the same way, i will be disregarded by my teammates rather quickly. But whether brilliant or dense, my playing style will likely not vary much.

If however, i were Grant in one scenario, with his training, and intelligence and ability, over-powering numbers might mean much less than they do if i play my normal style. If I were Dawson, pitted against the North, i might find myself continually trying to make up for the shortcomings of my abilities, the poor strategies and inconsistent supply trains coming in to maintain my troops. The troops themselves are brilliant and inconsistent as well, a small raiding party of Confederate soldiers played havoc along the northern bordering states, burning homes and supply depots, stealing valuables and continually nipping at the northern flank. In one instance of victory of the north against a rather strategic point in the south, the union army got rip-roaring drunk, and the larger contingent of Confederate soldiers making their northern strike were able to pass by under cover of night, and less than a mile away from the drunken sleeping camp of the Union soldiers.

In game, i have no brilliant troops, and dumb ones, no French repeating rifles and Advisor trained troops that perform at twice the capacity of a standard trained battalion. My ships are all identical, if i spam a hundred of them, they will all act identically. There are no advanced strategies at play, no advanced weaponry to bring to bear. My ships take damage until they explode. My turrets of my Halcyon Carrier will continue to operate at full efficiency until the ship explodes. I can't take a hit 4 times and the gun is disabled. I cant take a strategic hit to the engines and disable the craft, although for all intents and purposes it is mostly functional. I cant take a missile barrage into the command tower of a ship and kill the bridge crew, leaving intact most of the crew and engines and ship, but the intrumentality completely mangled into slag and debris.

Capitals level, and the levels give me additional ranges or damage potential, but they are constant. They do not fail individually, or there are no critical hits that will disable a craft and leave it functionally intact, as with our dead bridge crew example. In addition there are no flaws. My beam weapons will fire perfectly every time they are activated. I will not get a coil jam, that overheats the gun and renders it useless, until it can be repaired. My crew after 3 consecutive battles will not suddenly fail at their tasks because of exhaustion. I do not run out of fuel, or ammunition, or foodstuffs, or air, or potable water. I do not have half my crew lost in a forward torpedo volley that kills the bridge and forward sections of my ship, and leaves the other half unable to do anything other than limp away on secondary solar engines, or escape in escape pods, left to the mercy of the attacking ships guns.

Right now i play a game, and the game is a skirmish, a sandbox, it starts from zero and plays until i either win , or lose. Sometimes on a small map that can be an hour or so. When i hit quit, the map, and my ships, my experience, my hard earned and hotly contested worlds vanish. When next i start a game it is from scratch again. There is no, General Lee, who has led me through 12 battles on 24 worlds who was injured, but there in the next time i start a game. I dont have the CSS Ship Virginia! that old battle scarred hulk of a warship that has been through countless battles over countless maps and achieved a level of 27. Her crew is honed, but not all of them, over 70 percent of her crew has been replaced in the battles over the course of months. Approximately one third of my crew is intact, two fourths of the remaining have only been seasoned the last two battles, the remaining are raw recruits with little more experience than man this station, point this gun.

It would be nice to have Crews that carry from game to game and map to map. Nice to have scenario's where i move from a 37 world opening buildup expansion at the start of the campaign to a mid-sized richly resourced but poorly defended middle 18 world map, to the ending, where Richmond falls, a 7 world map. With my same ships, not new ones with new names, or even not new ones with the old names. But the battle scarred hulks that have gone through battle after battle and now, limp along, with braces and tourniquets and crutches. My ships dont hobble along, they dont have failing engines that have xxx amount of life left to them. Or bulkheads that have been patched and are now at 50 percent strength. Or French/Indian crews that are hard put to understand the orders of a Southern Ship Captain.

So what do we need?

Sectionable campaigns that can be played over a day, or a week, or a month, or several months.

Maps that will load one after another without leaving the game, or even if we have to leave the game, are sustainable when we return to them. (The current map editor and save game mechanism will give us the sustainability, but not the linked maps)

Troops, Soldiers, Generals that continue from game to game.

That are individualistic, have strengths and flaws.

Failable technology and machinery, guns that fail after they have been hit 7 times. a bulkhead that will rupture after repeated blows but is self contained and only loses -- what? -- a galley? an engine room? the officers quarters? the ammunition storage lockers?

Limited technology and machinery, metal mines that dont mine forever, crystal mines that dry up, rich industrial complexes that fail for lack of available raw materials.

We need supply lines that will fail, because they cant cross enemy territory without capture or without being destroyed. (right now the trade drones will move from planet to planet, but will not think twice, will not go another way, will not sit and wait because the world they were destined to go to has been taken over, regardless of whether we have a small contingent there hiding, waiting, biding their time, to act. Right now if something comes into the well, the ships know immediately, there is no sneaking about, no hanging out in a corner,under cover of trees and darkness while the enemy moves by, or camps and we sneak away unseen.

We need fallable politicians with good hearts, and scoundrels who look the other way when bribes come in.

We need good competent soldiers and incompetent ones.

We need weather, solar storms, that produce so much radiation, that a ship cannot enter an area for 48 hours, 20 minutes game time. We need ships that need supplies to keep going, fuel to run, foodstuffs to feed the crew, air to breathe. We need cranky new englanders who will turn the other cheek when an insult is offered, and a loose southern laborer who will fight at the blink of a crossed eye.

Some will say we dont need a campaign, and some will never play it if it was made. Others will say, the story is not grand enough, or sympathetic enough, or short enough, or long enough and turn their noses up. Others will say an editor might be just what we are looking for, used by those who want it, so they can craft their own, small and large battles and stories. And then turn around and do it again. Differently the second time. And an editor need not be as expansive and all consuming as i would like,   haha. It could simply be some additional tools to link maps, an algorithm to save stats from map to map, crew name lists that can be saved in a text file and re-inserted on new game start, or a button that asks, "Do you want to load the last scenario, or a New One?" Ships that need more maintainability than the perfect always functional always 100 percent ships we have now. Give me a greasy half blasted bucket of bolts with a half seasoned crew  and half working guns and engines and i will take over the universe! 

1.  So, a Save Editor. (We have one, but we need one that will do more than what we have)

2.  A Map linker,

3.  A Crew manifest.

4.  A Fallible and Maintence Needing Ship.

5.  A Ship allocation mechanism, to put fleets of vary sizes where you want them. (Galaxy Forge) Or randomly, in uneven numbers so the start stats for different players are not equal.

6.  Erodable resources.

7.  Randomly functional equipment. (If i spam 20 frigates it would be nice if 3 of them had engine problems, two had weak hull re-inforcements, and ten were not completely fueled)  

8.  Randomly efficient crews, where some ships perform to expectations, others do not. (an algorithm to produce percentages of efficiency)

9.  Greater and lesser technologies, that can be added or removed from ships. A Lee commanded ship with greater firing power, or greater manueverabiltiy than others of its own class. It means making the ships and their equipment and guns individuals, not templates. With different ships of the same kind having different equipment, some obsoleted, or confiscated from the enemy, or patched together with half the functionality of a brand new gun of the same type.

10.  ??   Anything else?

What do you think we need?

I put my vote in for a campaign editor, so we can make our own scenario's. The rest with the fallible ships and map links, etc... is just my longing for something deeper and more complex and more unpredictable. Please dont take it as a complaint against what Stardock and IronClad have made or of the Game. I love it. I just wish....it was more... thats all. 

Anyway, i wrote a 15 page paper for History and this was on my mind. Made me think of the Game when i was writing it.

Take care and keep modding!!

-Teal