CATAPHRANT: Lessons learned

11 Aug, 2026

This post is long-overdue. Below is a scattershot of various topics I’ve ruminated upon during and since running CATAPHRANT this past June. A lot of these thoughts are CATAPHRANT/VANGUARD specific (see here for the campaign details), but probably half of them, if not more, are broadly applicable. It will all inform any future campaign I run, of course.¹

Messengers should not be able to ride on trains

We made the decision that if messengers could get to a millipede line, they could hitch a ride and travel at train speed. Similar to catching a ship at a port in normal CATAPHRACT, we thought. But trains go so fast. Messages that we felt shouldn’t arrive until two days later were arriving day-of. This slower speed of messages would also make the pheromone net more useful, by proxy; we found that ants weren’t using it as much as we would have liked. Another solution would be to, instead of assuming a steady flow of ‘civilian’ train traffic or that there is a train available any time an army is at a railyard, to keep an accurate count of all trains/millipedes and where they are at all times. A messenger can ride a millipede if you have it available. We were already tracking the position of the armored millipede, Elder Gustav, so we already had the infrastructure. The tricky thing would be to correctly gauge how many millipedes there should actually be to still present a logistical challenge to move large armies.

Operators should move at messenger speed

In CATAPHRANT we had special spider operators that provided a bonus to operations when you assigned an operator to conduct the operation, rather than relying on ants untrained in subterfuge. We decided these operators would move at skirmisher speed. This was a mistake. It took them forever to get places. Eventually we decided they could hitch a ride on trains like messengers, but it still felt strange that as soon as they left they moved at the same speed as a whole army. I would change this in the future were I to limit operations by operator/spy stable. (I don’t plan to do this. I found that, instead of limiting the amount of operations that could happen at any given time, commanders had the maximum amount of operations going at any given time because the mindset was shifted from “an operation might give me a bonus here” to “if I am not conducting an operation I am wasting my limited resource.)

Instructing armies to return to a safe location should “count” as a headless army; armies on trains or boats should also count

In CATAPHRANT, we had a set pool of commanders, and when a commander died, they were out: there was no replacement. To make logistics easier, we allowed one headless army—an army without a commander—but did not consider armies on boats or trains or an army instructed to do nothing but move by a safe route to a friendly stronghold to count against this limit. This was a mistake. It felt arbitrary, and it was hard to adjudicate. What if the commander believed the route to be safe, but it wasn’t? Could garrisons be ordered to forage on their own? Would a commander gain meta-knowledge that their headless army was ambushed and destroyed forty miles away because they suddenly could create another headless army, or would they be prevented until they learned of the ambush? Problems abound. I recommend either having no limit to the amount of headless armies one can create, or to require a commander to be with any army taking an action. I find myself leaning toward the latter, these days—find a friend and give them an army. Back in my day, we didn’t have fancy things like “headless armies” or “commander queues.” We pestered our friends until one of them joined the game.

Commander caps make sense, but I've grown weary of losing a slot to a dead commander

This lesson is related to the above. I’ve played in two ‘phracts with this paradigm now, where a commander's death is a permanent loss to the faction, and I’ve grown to hate it. The army and the ideology and the movement persists after the commander's death, no? Especially in games where headless armies gain a malus to combat, this is a crippling defeat that doesn’t feel very diegetically sound.

No matter how much characterizing prose you provide, if it isn’t written in the “war goals” section of the sheet it isn’t getting pursued

No matter how obvious “I am the true king of the kingdom, so I and my loyal vassals should control the strongholds that make up the kingdom” is, if it isn’t written on the sheet they won’t take those strongholds. People who play CATAPHRACT don’t care about territory enough, and strongholds—especially in games that do not have stronghold production or extractions or factories or the like—especially in games with weekly crises rolled per-stronghold—are almost totally neutral-to-negative items. It’s annoying to think about them, so commanders will compromise or write territory off.

War-goals should be the overblown, dramatic, nearly-unachievable dreams of an idealist

As soon as they encounter resistance of the slightest kind—and maybe before—players will start compromising on their war-goals. I have seen this in every game I have run from almost every player, and I have done this myself in every game I have played. Start goals large and unjustifiable so the compromised version is the “realistic” version, rather than the minuscule, undramatic version. Players love cooperating. Don't let them.

Objective description doesn’t exist in player conversations, and the referee needs to more consistently orient commanders

In role-played conversations, some players will be far more open with what the enemy commander can interpret/see about their forces, body language, etc., while others will give no description and project power even if their armies are half as strong and at 5 morale. I have found it a tricky line to walk myself, as a player. The ref should have a heavier hand in describing what each commander sees from the other and their armies. Are they disorganized? Is the other commander putting on a brave face while the aides surrounding them look on the verge of mutiny? It is the job of the referee to present the world; I understand more than anyone how complex and exhausting refereeing a ‘phract is, but I find myself wanting more orientation and more description of every scene, every encounter, every day of travel, every messenger’s letter. I think this sense of place—really rooting the commander in the material reality of a situation—is something I need to work on as a referee.

I’d be interested in dramatically raising letter loss chances mid-battle

As distinct from letter interception. Especially in VANGUARD-style multi-day battles, a messenger just getting shot and never making it past the trenches is something I’d like to better model. This also makes the pheromone net better by proxy.

The day off is key

We took Saturdays off in CATAPHRANT and played for four, six-day weeks (twenty-four hours of game time). This was so, so helpful to run a ‘phract and still be able to have a life outside of the game. Relatedly, having a co-ref was life changing. Reffing CATAPHRANT actually took about the same amount of time as UTS, daily, but the product felt better as a result of splitting to our strengths. Since finishing up CATAPHRANT, I joined Haruspex as a player, which has a two-day orders cycle—one day on, one day off—and while I understand their reasons for doing this, I find it offputting. I much prefer one or two days consistently completely off—a ‘phracts weekend—then having to remember if today is an on-day or an off-day.

Get rid of traits

I didn't miss them. They feel vestigial, to me. Give special abilities to detachments and to cool items and to places in the world. Commanders should matter because of their relationships to each other, not because of their special powers.

Faction special units should be given at far larger percentages than you’d think

50-80% of the army is a good rule of thumb, I think. Hell, replace all the “normal” units of that kind of troop. It sucks to have only 2,000 of your Unique Unit in a 20,000-soldier army. Four detachments of 500? You get into one battle and you’re already down two hundred fellas. I understand this is a proportional percentage loss, but even small percentage casualties hurt badly when the initial numbers are not very large proportionally.

Also multiplicative combat bonuses are boring traits for unique units to have. If you are creating a unique unit, have it interact with the logistics-game in orthogonal fashion. Skirmishers are a good example of this, actually. I like them a lot when they're not so widespread.

With DPR’s rules, small detachment sizes are extremely powerful

Foraging is so bad otherwise. A faction with 10,000 troops in detachments of 500 can (comfortably) forage twice as much as a faction with 10,000 troops in detachments of 1,000. I am not totally sold on local resistance in games that let you bank extra forage in garrisoned strongholds, as an aside. There is also a strange incentive there to garrison all troops but a single cavalry detachment—the smallest you have—to isolate the local resistance casualties to a minimum. It’s optimal, but it feels really weird to do.

No foraging felt really good

CATAPHRANT had no foraging, because it all took place inside an ant colony. You had to go outside to forage. Otherwise you had to raid extant supply stockpiles—all inside strongholds. The fact that you couldn’t just subsist off the land you were invading meant supply lines actually were a thing that mattered—resupply runs with wagonlords, keeping watch over an important rail corridor from a colony entrance. That was awesome. It didn’t feel perfect, though; the numbers weren’t perfectly balanced on a map level. There were a lot of stockpiles, but armies didn’t move quickly enough to utilize any of the ones not on the rail corridor, and the stockpiles that they could utilize didn’t have enough food in them, we all realized. By week three of four, pretty much everyone was starving in a way that wasn’t fun. (Well, it was a little fun, especially for me. But if X starvation is fun for the players, they starved X+3; it became a slog.) Larger stockpiles, more-accessible colony entrances, larger canneries—all of these would have helped. There were just too many factions with huge armies trapped in the middle of a food desert. The locusts didn’t have any food problems because their special ability—which let them butcher corpses for supply as part of a battle instead of taking another day afterwards to do so—was really strong, but they also didn’t eat enough food per-locust. It’s very tricky to predict how it’s going to play out from just the starting numbers.

Cavalry isn't worth the squeeze

Soldier ants were just CATAPHRACT cavalry. They ate way too much for how little benefit they offer to an army, especially if skirmishers are accessible (in CATAPHRANT they weren’t, with one exception). Even if skirmishers aren’t accessible, a huge cavalry army just isn’t worth feeding, especially if your goals are offensive. You don’t really want anything more than a single cav detachment. I like that cavalry don’t provide their bonus in assaults, but I think they need more bonuses to offset the 10x supply cost. I’m not totally sure the solution, yet. It might be as simple as changing the combat power modifier to x3/x6 for heavy cavalry? Maybe they can forage while marching. I hope to solve this before running my next campaign (in September or October, maybe…? 👀).