Thread: Structure of the campaign

Interested in seeing what everyone thinks. I assumed that a campaign would be every man for himself, but it seems that some have mentioned a more structured version, say Imperials vs. Chaos. I am going to try to have a group of us run/administer this if we can get it going, and no promise that "majority wins" in this. I think the GM's should consider what would work best, but that being said I think we should heavily weight community opinion.

So, that being said - in the coming campaign - if you are interested in taking part, how do you think it should be structured? Every man/army for himself? Or more of a group effort (e.g. Imperials vs. Chaos, or broken down further to have possible Cron/Ork/Nid forces on their own)? Feel free to expound on the reasons for your opinion below. Just as some food for thought, some pros/cons of the options:

"Every man for himself"
-Allows a deeper layer of involvement, with resource expenditure to develop and upgrade territories (as possiblebut not definite components of the campaign). This is harder to account for in a "team" concept.
-Your success is truly your own, each man's success dependent only on himself.
-Allows more options for match-ups/battles since in a team concept you cut in half (or thirds, depending on how many factions we have/allow) your possible opponents.

"Team concept"
-More easy to absorb player attrition (or even incorporate new entrants) if needed
-related to the above, but players with personal emergencies or other conflicts would have less negative impact on the campaign progress
-Probably slightly easier on the record keepers
-Possibly easier for newer/less experienced players to take part without risking being blown off the map if you hit a string of tough results.

Grouped all the way.

-There should be 1 IoM side. Not 10.
-The ability to absorb player attrition is the difference between this thing going past 1-2 months or not. We tried the whole "every man for himself" before and it fell apart very quickly when people didn't show up/quit. There was also no way of adding new players. It also felt way more like a tournament then a campaign.
-Having new/fluffy players on the same side as veterans and having them feel their army/side is winning the war is a good thing. It also keeps people like me and Nick Rose in check when we can't win the campaign single handily.
-It would be nice to have the option later on to switch sides. This is just an important option to have whether due to players quiting, or sides being unbalanced, or after 3+ months people want to play something other than orks!

I have always played "every man for themselves" in the past, and that was what I originally envisioned, but I see a lot of wisdom in the grouped factions the more that I think of it, and hear from others. Assuming we do go with grouped factions though (nothing is written in stone yet), the issue I see is that on the one hand thematically/fluff wise you really need at least 3 factions to make sense. Say something like:

Imperials
Destruction (say Chaos, Crons and Nids)
Xenos (Eldar, Tau, Orks)

... The problem though being, with the preponderance of Marine/Imperial players, having enough wanting to run other armies to have the other two factions balanced numerically against the Imperials. But fluff-wise it was bad enough having the Eldar daemon-summoning prior to the most recent book, but grouping them in the same faction in a campaign really does murder the fluff somewhat.

How about we rebid for teams each campaign round?

I thing a team format would be best. Also that way we can maybe incorporate 2v2 games on occasion or a big multiplayer (multiteam?) game at some point