Real Time Strategy

One of the campaigns I did was Joan of Arc. I really wanted this one, for two reasons. First, because Joan of Arc was astounding. With zero training & background, she led an army to victory after victory. This is incredibly rare. In fact the only example I can think of offhand was Joshua in the Old Testament. (So maybe they both pulled it off because God?)

The other reason I wanted to do Joan was because thanks to English propaganda, most Americans with a smattering of medieval lore only know about the English victories at Crecy and Agincourt. (Well done, propagandists.) We are barely aware that English resoundingly lost the war. So I wanted to show how the English DID lose the war.

The narrator is “Sir Guy Josselyne” who is actually my ancestor. I mean, I don’t know if Sir Josselyne actually accompanied Joan, but he was a real guy. The Josselynes were minor Norman nobility. Eventually they fled France to England during Richilieu’s persecution of the Huguenots (the Josselyne’s weren’t Huguenots but sided with them).

The first scenario is “An Unlikely Messiah” and I kind of want to apologize for it, since it’s an escort mission. In my defense, escort missions were still pretty new in 1998. But also I wanted to show you traveling across the French land, while English thugs devastated the countryside, and French rallied to your call, so I think I pulled that off.

The next scenario “The Maid of Orleans” I wanted to have some fighting. So Joan has to juggle two tasks at once. First, she has to get supplies to Orleans, second she has to destroy an English castle.

Two other goals in this was first, to show the Burgundians in action. Because frankly, the only reason the puny English of the 1300s could even threaten France was due to Burgundian support. Second, though I don’t say this outright, I wanted the players to figure out that their knights absolutely devastate longbowmen. This is because longbows are so vaunted in literature and of course figure prominently in Crecy & Agincourt, that people get the idea that longbows are actually better than knights. Well, yes there are conditions under which longbows can defeat knights (as at Crecy) but generally speaking knights can just run down longbows and wipe them out – and I give you every opportunity to do so in this campaign. For the third scenario “Cleansing of the Loire” you march down the river knocking down the English castles, which of course that sort of action is fun. Plus you are literally facing one of Shakespeare’s most popular characters – Falstaff. So that makes it double fun. Sieging is always a hoot.

The fourth scenario “The Rising” is overall a bit like Cleansing of the Loire except this time you are killing town centers instead of castles, so it’s more of a war of extermination. The ultimate goal here is to get to Reims so you can get Charles VII crowned as king.

In retrospect, perhaps this was not the greatest way to run this campaign. For one thing, Charles VII gobbled donkey goober and having him be the climax of the scenario is lame. In hindsight, I think I should have had his coronation be at the START of this scenario, followed by some kind of action. Ah well.

The fifth scenario is the Siege of Paris, and its purpose is to get Joan captured and executed so we can finish up the war with the last scenario. It is kind of another escort mission, except you have a huge army (which is cool) and you get to save French villagers making you feel like a liberator (I hope). But then Joan is captured Oh NO and the scenario ends.

The last scenario is a lot of fun (The Perfect Martyr) because now Joan is gone and we don’ need to keep her alive anymore. All we need to do is wipe out the enemy. It’s a simulation of the battle of Castillon in which the French fired cannonballs into massed ranks of longbows, showing how obsolete the latter had become.

In retrospect, I would have liked to include the battles of Patay or Formigny in the campaign (more French victories) but Castillon actually ended the whole war and lets us finish up on a high note. And 6 scenarios is enough.

Please note that I didn’t design the scenarios in detail, I just assigned them with an outline. So everything BAD in the scenarios is my fault. Everything GOOD is Greg Street’s doing.

Anyway those are my thought processes as to how I made this campaign in Age II.