Solo campaign rules for Napoleonics

I end up playing a lot of my games solo, just because it fits better into my schedule. Same goes for campaigns. I can set it up, play a turn a night, a week or a month, and no one complains. I can also fudge rules as needed or just quit if I get bored.
For battles, I don't have much problem. I use Field of Battle, which has enough fog of war built in to keep me happy as a solo player. But for campaigns, I was looking for something more, especially when using my large map. Here's a sample of the map taken from my last campaign using counters.

The map has a road system and each unit moves one city or town per day. What I wanted was a system that allowed me to play one side, while keeping me somewhat in the dark as to the location of the enemy forces.

Here's a playtest/theory of what I came up with:

I assumed there would be three main "enemy" -- in this case Prussian -- corps operating in the theater. I took some plastic poker chips and put black dots on one side of three of them, mixed them all up (face down) and laid out a line of them across the entire map, each on a town/city space. This represented a rough "piquet line" of cavalry vedettes, local militias, rumored enemy activity etc. I then took three blue chips to represent my own French corps and placed them on the map. As I moved my corps, the red line of chips would always move to try to keep between my corps and the objective (Berlin), including folding around my flanks.

When one of my corps came in contact with a red chip, I would flip it over. If there was no black dot, it was discarded. The next turn, the nearby red chips would move to try to fill in this gap and block the path to Berlin. When I found a chip with a black dot, I took three white chips and put a black dot on one of them and mixed them up, then deployed them in the next three adjacent spots on the map (toward Berlin). The red chip with the black dot represented a true cavalry screen and that an enemy corps was nearby. Once the white chips were placed, they would move to attack the French corps, as would any nearby red chips, if I didn't move my corps to attack first. So I knew there was an enemy corps nearby, but still didn't know the exact location. Meanwhile, the other chips on the map continued moving.

Once my corps found the white chip with the dot, a battle would be fought at that location. If any red chips came into contact that had a black dot, really bad news -- because it meant one of the other corps was nearby as well (another set of three white chips would be deployed and move to the support of the other corps -- maybe they make it in time, maybe not.)

To the north, the red chips were starting to fold around one of my other corps. I couldn't ignore them, because if it turned out that one of them had a black dot, it meant an enemy corps was well around the flank and heading for my supply lines, so I had to stay pretty spread out until I had a better idea of where everyone was. 

A few other general thoughts after a rough playtest:

I think I could add an additional white chip with a dot into the general mix as a potential "reserve" corps that could show up. So each white chip draw would have one black dot and two chips drawn from a general pile, with the general pile having an additional black dot piece mixed in.

I may also add in some sort of "special" white chip that would maybe represent a smaller force or cavalry screen -- so you rush to the area where you think an enemy corps is, only to find out you've been hoodwinked by a smaller force (no battle, it just evades).

After a lost battle, the corps would retreat 2-3 spaces and I would redeploy all the red chips again, resetting the board.

It's not perfect, but as a campaign commander, it at least leaves a lot of things in the dark as to the exact location of enemy forces until the decisive moment. It also forces you to react to the red chips penetrating behind your lines and keeps you from consolidating all your forces at one spot and just bulling forward.

In the quick test last night, all the flanking northern pieces turned out to be dummies, but it did delay a French corps from moving forward. If one of them had turned out to be real, it would have put major pressure on the French to withdraw to protect their supply line. (usually if a supply line is cut, all the troops in the battle are modified down one level and I usually give bonus troops to the other side, so the penalty is pretty harsh).

Playtest No. 2

Tried another round last night with the additional white chip. It actually came up once, but the Prussians were on the attack deep in French territory. The white chips move to attack if the French don't attack first -- the first chip there was a black dot, so the Prussian corps was there. Flipped the other two, and one was another black dot representing the reserve corps. Because it wasn't in the same space, if it were a tabletop battle, it would appear as reinforcements (or at least potential reinforcements during the battle).

I experimented by upping the number of red chips to start, but it ended up being too many. Before the French really had a chance to figure out a general idea of what was going on, a horde of red chips was in the rear, which forced all the Frenchies to move backwards to deal with the potential threat. If I cut it back down to what I used the first time, I think it will work better. The first time, I made a single line across the map; the second time, I used all the red chips, which was about 25 instead of 18-20, which made a big difference.

Anytime a corps is exposed and the battle is fought, I decided to redeploy a dotted red chip along with four non-dotted others in the same general vicinity along the front (this prevents the "warping" of corps from one end of the theater to the other in record time).

I think with the addition of a few special chips in both red and white, it can really jazz up a solo campaign. 

So far, this system looks very promising. Just enough fog of war to be challenging for a solo player without endless rolling for decisions or other burdensome mechanisms.