This document should really be read after you have completed the campaign otherwise it may spoil some things for you.

This is the first campaign/scenario that I've ever created.  I've played Steel Panthers for years ever since the original release by SSI.  I never got the urge to create a campaign or scenario before, until I started playing other user created campaigns created by the likes of Wild Bill and realised how much better they were than the random computer generated campaigns.

The atmosphere that I wanted to introduce into this campaign is one of desperation concentrating on a small force that allows the player to hopefully become more intimately involved with his men.  Every loss is dearly felt as you have so few men to begin with.
Not giving repair points between most battles was another method of trying to introduce panic into the player as any forces lost are not replaced easily.  The only drawback I found with this is the free automatic rebuilding of damaged infantry units.  Since this campaign is best played with a force made up mainly of infantry then this aids the player and reduces the need for repair points.

During testing I got wildly differing views and opinions on the campaign.  One friend of mine loves the huge tank orientated battles and spent about half of his initial core force on tanks (I think he had 4 PzIV or something like that), well he lost a couple of tanks in the first battle and never recovered.  He completed the campaign but he had huge difficulties in some of the battles.  Another tester picked a purely infantry based force and pretty much breezed through the campaign because his men were automatically repaired.  Since that test I altered the campaign to make it slightly harder.  I tried to introduce some way of giving more infantry destroying power to the AI.  In the end I ended up in slightly bolstering the AI troops and giving slightly more artillery as well in the hope that this might aid in the suppression of the Players infantry.

Ideally I'd hope that the player would take 3 or 4 platoons of infantry and the rest of the points spent on some artillery and light/med armour.

My thoughts whilst designing the campaign were to make battles 1 and 2 reasonably easy so as not to weaken the player too much for the third battle (defending the village agains the Soviet attack).  The 3rd battle is to (hopefully) give the player a very rough time and hit his forces hard to cause some serious casualties.  The result of the 3rd battle whether the player loses or wins will carry him to the 4th battle where partisans raid the camp.  I had to be careful designing this scenario as I couldn't be sure how many men the player would have left to defend the camp.  Ultimately I think that this scenario is relatively easy and as long as the player holds a line of infantry he should be able to survive.
After repairing the core force the 5th battle is another battle that shouldn't be too difficult, merely preparing for battle 6 and 7 which should be difficult depanding how many casualties are taken etc.  Originally I wasn't going to have Bulgarian forces in the camapign but then I thought that it would make a change of scenery for the player to be faced with a Bulgarian force using German StuGs against their makers. :)

Well those are my shared thoughts on the campaign, it was fun for me to create and took me a while to design (my fiancee was glad when I finished it!).  The camapign is loosely historically based as the 7th SS actually did take part in the battles portrayed although the forces I've created are by no means accurate.

I hope to create another campaign soon but next time I really want to take a nation that hasn't got a campaign created for it yet.  Top of my list I think is a campaign taking control of Japanese forces in South East Asia, that should be interesting.  Or another possibility is playing as Italians in Sicily defending against the allies.  We will have to see how well this first campaign of mine is received and if people enjoy it.  Please send any comments you have (good or bad) to kurtbjones@go.com.  I'll read everything and would love to hear and views or opinions.

Thanks for playing the campaign!!!

Special thanks go to Lu Pham, Steve Avery, Wild Bill, Andrew Spencer and Ykinoma who helped do a huge amount of testing on the game and without whose help this campaign would never have been properly finished and edited.