I say this carefully and respectfully, but say it, I will: Designing multi-player scenarios is by far the easiest designing project under the sun. Dealing with an ornery and sometimes dumb AI, and getting the scenario to balance as to gameplay - not too hard, not too easy, always interesting - is tough stuff. But you are already used to doing that and doing it well. The campaign umbrella may not be as burdensome to you as I moan and groan about above, because you have proven yourself capable of rising to the challenge with your single player scenarios. I would give it a go, and see.
In the dim archives of my Free French thread, I discussed why core units and specialisation points are not feasible for the human player who is playing as the Free French. Too few units and too few specialisations. Units cannot be upgraded as one would expect, and specialisation points are quickly earned and spent buying the handful of rudimentary specialisations that are available to this faction. So, yes, all units are auxiliary (and I have another table of basic experience to hand out to all units as the campaign progresses in time) and there are no specialisations for anybody.
No commanders, either. There haven't been any French commanders in OOB yet. (Perhaps ludicrously, I am using Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman as the fictional "L'Amiral Charles Portier," chief of staff for General de Gaulle, for briefings.
)
I'll give you my guidelines.
THESE ARE ONLY MY OPINIONS.
1) The best maps are no smaller than 40 hexes and no bigger than 60 hexes to a side. There can be exceptions, of course; my upcoming Operation Vesuvius map will be 30 X 60 because, well, the island of Corsica is shaped that way and those measurements fit the map template nicely. But no bigger than 60 hexes on any side, ever. Here is why: Think of how many turns it takes for a unit to move the length of a map from one end to the other. If the map of Corsica is 120 hexes long, and the average movement is 3 turns per hex, that means it would take 40 turns just to advance the unit from top to bottom. Now throw in some battles, and realize how many turns we are talking about. If the map's only 60 hexes long, the journey only takes 20 turns. 45 hexes, 15 turns.
2) I am also trying to keep my scenarios to 60 turns or less, and anything above 50 to be rare. It's like why most movies are only about 2 hours long; attention span can be exhausted thereafter.
3) The bigger the map, the more turns, but also the more units. That's another consideration involving attention span. If you have 100+ enemy units on your map, you need to have a similar number of friendly units to fight them. Moving 80, 90, 100 units each turn gets to be a chore, unfortunately. Also consider the AI "thinking" time, sorting out the moves for 100+ units.
4) So, to give you an example, when I sat down today to lay out the Axis order of battle for
Mareth Line, I was following my sources for the eight divisions involved. I was proceeding on a battalion level and when I was done with the third division, I projected and was flabbergasted to see that I would be up north of 140 units. So I went back and culled it back on a regiment level and was pleased to see eight Axis divisions come to
a bulky, but manageable, total of 75 units.* Mareth Line really was a big battle over a wide area.
5) In most scenarios, though, I like to keep the number of units to 50 or under per side depending on the situation.* Here is the key: Think in terms of what you are portraying, the size and breadth of it, and how big the map is; i.e., how much territory needs to be covered by the units involved. For example, I had to cut off any more units added to
Medenine, despite Colonel Y's urgings, because the battle occurs only in a small corner of the map I was using (I used the same map for the much larger
Mareth Line). In one scenario, there wasn't enough room. In another one, that same number of units would look sparse and scattered.
6) Only when you have considered all of the above should you decide whether to base your units on platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, or divisions. It's the number of units that matters; what unit size they represent is quite flexible in OOB.
And all this being said, you are still going to need feedback, your own and from other helpful souls, in order to fine-tune things because this is not an exact science by any means.
We'll see.
