It has been a bit since I've been able to sit down and blog, but today we have a snippet from the upcoming Tactics game: Campaign progression.

The progression system is built so that it exists separately from the two campaign systems: The idea is that you may want to use one, two or all three components depending on your needs. One of the challenges is that a Tactics campaign has less of a fixed format than what I did in Parsecs. You might command a few units that participate in a range of battles, you might fight your way through a narrative campaign or you may even command an army but without being tied to specific units. 

Each battle you play you will earn Campaign Points (CP) awarded both based on a random roll as well as Victory Points earned during the battle. CP can be spent to buy both advances to specific units as well as other benefits. So lets take a look at what you can do:

Unit upgrades

These are the most traditional, offering you the chance to get better units in a campaign. These are used when you keep a roster of units. Upgrades include gaining veteran skills (there are 10 squad skills, 8 sergeant skills, 6 individual, 6 gun crew and 6 vehicle crew skills), retraining a unit (to get a new veteran skill), upgrading an individual figure to become a hero or making a non-leader figure into a leader.

Roster changes

If you play with a roster of units you can spend CP to refit a unit (such as swapping out the equipment loadout), customize a unit with options that are not included in the army builder., replace a unit with a new unit of the same type (f.x. replacing an armoured car with a tank), add units to your roster or replace destroyed units.

Battle advantages

This allows you to bring in support options using the support mechanic in the book, such as engineer or fire support. You can also buy initiative, luck or finesse advantages. These are all single use benefits that can tilt things a bit. Luck lets you roll for two sets of attacks and pick the one you would like to apply while Finesse lets you tweak the clock in games (for cases where you need things to end sooner or last longer). 

As you can see the CP system of course works best if you use a roster of troops that can gain improvements, but one of the benefits of doing it this way is that you want to swap forces (for example to play some battles from the other side or even swap to a different battalion in the big war or whatever) you can keep your CP pool and spend them on the new force.