Appreciation for 1912 The Balkan League campaign

[mdsmall]

There seems to be very little discussion in this forum about the DLC campaigns for SC WW1 so I thought I would post this appreciation about the 1912 Balkan League campaign. I was a play-tester for this campaign shortly before its release but had not played a game to the end until a few days ago.

There is a lot to like about this scenario. For aficionados of SC WW1, you are fighting over terrain in the southern Balkans which is very familiar from the World War One game, but with minors like Bulgaria and Greece as majors. The map is at a smaller more detailed scale, and cities like Tirana and Adrianople which are minor objectives in the full campaign are major objectives in this game. (I would say that Salonika is a major objective in both games). The terrain is complex with lots of mountains, islands and three (or four) different coastlines. The few rail lines are critical for supply and reinforcements and the difficult terrain means you have to pay close attention to supply, especially for the advancing Balkan League powers.

The campaign has a built-in see-saw: the four Balkan League powers (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) start with a bang and the Ottomans are weak and distracted by their war with Italy (which is off-map). But that war concludes and the Ottomans are soon able to start rebuilding their forces. They have a much larger potential reserve of manpower than the small powers of the Balkan League, so unless the Balkan League is able to consistently inflict casualties, the Ottomans will eventually grow to outnumber them. The minor victory conditions for the Balkan League are demanding: they have to capture Tirana, Salonika and Adrianople (and not lose Belgrade, Sofia or Athens) by the end of the game. The game runs for 66 turns from October 1912 until the end of June 1913. The mud and frosts of winter divides the campaign into roughly two distinct seasons.

BiteNibbleChomp, the developer, has put in some subtle but clever FS penalties which add an important balancing element. The Balkan League powers lose 75 FS points (equivalent to NM points) each turn as of November 1, 1912 due to war weariness, while the Ottomans gain 50 FS points per turn after January 1st, 1913 for controlling each of the three minor victory condition cities (plus Skopje - which they will almost certainly have lost by then). These amounts do not sound like much, but when added to the FS losses due to combat and control of resources , they can make an important difference by the end of the game. I found in my recent game playing the Balkan League side that Greece, in particular, takes a lot of casualties and its FS levels were dropping in a worrying way - which encouraged my opponent to take a few risks to try to capture Greek FS objectives and drive down their level even further.

One of the fun features of the campaign is that is has a significant naval and amphibious component. Both the Greeks and the Ottomans have a reasonable surface fleet with a variety of ships from torpedo boats to pre-dreadnoughts. The Greeks have considerable incentives to stage "micro-landings" on the Ottoman islands in the eastern Aegean, in order to inflict FS losses and capture ports. They can, if they wish, even stage landings on mainland Turkey and try to capture a port to use to ship in reinforcements. For the Ottomans, it is important to use their navy to keep open the possibility of resupplying the Salonika front by sea, once the rail link from Constantinople to Salonika is cut by the Bulgarians. The few Ottoman ports on the north coast of the Aegean also become strategic objectives in the context of this campaign.

The Ottomans in turn can mount retaliatory amphibious landings which can be very damaging if the Balkan League player becomes complacent. In my recent game, my opponent playing the Ottomans launched an ambitious effort to send two detachments to capture undefended Greek offshore islands. He was undone only by the fact (which neither of us had realized) that islands which occupy more than one hex provide a spotting ability for the owner - thus I was able to spot his amphibious transports heading for Crete and was able to sink them. However, he pulled off a true Hail Mary pass by putting an Albanian detachment on an amphibious transport in the southern Albanian port of Vlore, sending it north and having it stage an amphibious landing which captured Cetinje - thus triggering the surrender of Montenegro and the disappearance of their five units beseiging Scutari. Until I saw this manouvre, it had never occurred to me that my opponent might do a naval move in the Adriatic. It did not completely up-end the game since he was not able to control a port and could not reinforce his position there. But it relieved the pressure I was putting on his forces defending Tirana for many turns. (Technically, this manouvre was only possible by walking through a couple of kilometes of neutral Austro-Hungarian coastline - so there may be a future patch to prevent this. But it works for now.)

Our campaign concluded with a Balkan League minor victory on May 1, 1913 (turn 51) when I captured Salonika and thus controlled all three cities required for a Minor Victory. However, my success was greatly enhanced by a mistake early in the game when my opponent (playing this campaign for the first time) left Adrianople guarded only by a HQ unit which I was able to destroy. Using the fact that all units have weak ZOCs, I could then slide a Bulgarian division into Adrianople and secured this major objective much sooner than would normally be the case. From my other play-tests, it can take many turns for the Bulgarians to take Adrianople, given that it is protected by four fortified hexes which require all of the shells from their two artillery units to destroy.

At the end of our game, I was driving towards Constantinople with the Bulgarians who had the advantage of more powerful divisions, two artillery units, and better generals who had gained a lot of experience over the course of the campaign. The downside is that supply drops off for the attacker as you get close to Constantinople and the Bulgarians had to concentrate their forces into that peninsula, leaving them vulnerable to nuisance amphibious landings around the three nearby coastlines (in the northern Aegean, Black Sea and Sea of Marmara). I would be interested to know if other Balkan League players have succeeded in a MP game in capturing Constantinople - which would secure a Major Victory.

In all, this is a fun and challenging campaign about a classic " small war" which deserves a wider audience. Congratulations to the devs - and to BNC in particular - for designing it.

Michael

[BiteNibbleChomp]

Well said mate, really appreciate it

- BNC

[OldCrowBalthazor]

Ditto! Really had fun testing this repeatedly. Very well designed scenario. I have always been interested in both the First and Second Balkan Wars. Waited for decades to see a game of these. The only other one I tried was TOAW4 1st Balkan War, and this SC version surpasses that by a long ways.