"The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness."
-Louis Antoine, Comte de Bougainville
An Abominable Kind of War, presents the players with a juxtaposition; on the one hand, you have the stylized warfare of 18th century Europe, embodied in the Regular Infantry of the Line, and the dandified officers who were habituated to the finery of the courts of England and France, with a mentality little suited to combat in “a labyrinth of forests, without roads;” on the other, the brutal, almost feral type of warfare unleashed in North America in the form of “an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes, swift as the lightning…” whose “ferocity and insolence…makes[sic] one shudder.”
As the French, you must tame the “lords of the wilderness” and harness their fierce art of war without burning up too much materiel on them; though, should you allocate too little in the way of gifts and supplies for your formidable allies, they will return to their haunts in the wild, leaving your undermanned French regiments alone to face the gathering might of Great Britain and her American colonies. So, can you find the right balance between the ferocious partisan war of the wilderness and the more “civilized” style of war as practiced in Europe? If so, then perhaps the Marquis de Montcalm, with his French battalions, can stave off his more numerous enemies to the south; perhaps New France can survive the tempest of war.
As the English, you, too, have a difficult “balancing” act to master; you must find a way to placate and protect your fiercely independent, but extremely valuable Colonials. Without their numbers and forest craft, you stand little chance of besting the potent combination of “unmitigated savages” from the Lakes, Mission Indians from the St. Lawrence Valley, Canadian bush rangers, and French battalions which will be coming at you in waves. Ask too much of the Americans; do too little on their behalf; treat them with disrespect; they will turn a deaf ear to your entreaties and allow the British Regulars to march off to certain defeat out there, at the hands of a foe who is covered “by the universal forest.”
And, facing both of you, is “an immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees and brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards.” This vast, uncharted forest dominates the struggle. Ultimately, victory will only go to that player who can conquer that savage landscape stretching out before him. It is the “insidious warfare of the forest,” then, which will determine the outcome of this struggle!