Armada Campaign: Shadowed Horizons

[Kelly]

This year’s global campaign has launched for Kings of War and Armada, Shadowed Horizons, along with fiction to be updated with the results from the game tracker.

While the majority of the focus is on the land side of the conflict, Mantic has set aside a portion of the campaign exclusively for Armada... the first entries in the story of Shadowed Horizons are broken up into [The War on Land] for KoW and [The War at Sea] for Armada.  There is no detailed map specific to the area being fought over as in the prior campaign Halpi’s Rift, but with each installment they are marking locations of importance upon their world map which should be highlighted as the event progresses across the sea and down the mountains.


The game reporting only covers the winning and losing fleets, with point total and scenario book besides, so the data collection set is not as detailed as the prior campaign, but every other piece of the campaign looks a lot more robust than before.

[Easy E]

I am a huge sucker for these types of events.

[Kelly]

The first week’s results of the campaign are locked in, and the next phase of Shadowed Horizons is in progress now…


The player base for Kings of War is orders of magnitude greater than Armada, so it is not really a surprise that the player’s choice and special scenario rules for this phase are designed explicitly for KoW* but they are still including setting descriptions to help with the decision of which scenario would best fit the current progression of the story, i.e. those with islands.



*Though translating movement to speed and unit strength to crew strength to make the new rules fit Armada would be technically be possible, but that would not interact well with most if not all of the scenarios.

[Kelly]

The Shadowed Horizons campaign for 2023 wrapped up earlier this month, and Armada made up almost 6% of the total games played.  So not the best showing, but most of the decisions being voted upon by good-side players vs. evil-side players were explicitly tied to the ground campaign represented by Kings of War and Ambush, and the scenario special rules each week were only applicable to Armada by the barest margins.


That being said, I do not see any reason why Armada would not be included in the next worldwide campaign, and will definitely be prepared for 2024, especially after seeing how much proportional impact each Armada game would have on the totals.