The "feel" for traveller, which is very hard to manifest, is the problem of delayed intelligence. It's hard to know where you're going and what to do when the speed of communication is slower than you are. An operational fleet is always the "last to know" about anything outside of their system.
I admit to not having played a lot of the tactical rulesets against anyone. It's very hard for me to solo play that. And the games are complicated enough to make it difficult to just pick up casually, even on the dining room table. For example, one of the key points in the game Battle Rider is the idea that your ships start out as unknown blobs to your opponent, and only after closing, and lock on, can you reveal what the ships are (most of the systems have this aspect). BR improves on it by letting the Fleet Tactics skill give you extra blobs that represent nothing. These are like concealment counters in Squad Leader. But once scanned, they're removed from the game. When a ship is out of sensor lock, it can create a new unknown blob.
But it's hard to solo play that. And once the ships spot each other, it's game on, lasers flying, shoot shoot shoot until you can't shoot no more. Only through practice, I think, can you get the nuance of the ECM game that underlies everything. But, in the end, they all feel to me, to get washed out. That in the end, as I've mentioned several times before, it's riflemen in a bull ring with no cover shooting at each other.
And that just reduces the game to range and firepower and who gets the lucky hit first.
When reduced to that, High Guard is perfect. It's just washes away all of those other mostly irrelevant details, lines the ships up against each other and blast away. Simply, it's not clear to me that all of the ECM and lock ons and scanners and such affect the outcome enough to be worth the trouble, especially in a larger engagement. One on one? Maybe. BatRon on BatRon, probably not.
Which makes Traveller combat high level, and strategic, at the FFW level. Now the individual ships matter less and less compared to the overall force. Bringing my 10 Factors Of Combat against your 7 Factors of Combat, roll the dice and see who wins. Basically, a Risk style system. Abstract combatants vying for territory.
As suggested by my simple example of the 10 battle riders against the Tigress, what matters most in the game is the number of spinals you bring, not so much the ships that bring them. It was pretty shocking how little the Tigress itself "mattered". In fact, those BR would have a harder time killing each other than the Tigress, just because of its size.
Obviously that's a contrived situation, made explicit due to the combat system, the absolute advantages of TL15 and armor, etc. At TL14, the game changes dramatically. All of a sudden a zillion missiles are meaningful. They don't "kill" ships, they just make them combat ineffective.
But, anyway, at the higher level, the guiding factor is jump delay. Simply, when a fleet arrives in system, the defender can not react for 2 weeks. They would need to send someone out to get help and then that help needs to come back. Obviously, you can have a fleet that Just So Happens to show up a week later, but that's not reactive.
But jump delay limits communications and response times, and it's mostly impossible to do in normal game just due to the limitations of cognition and mechanics. If you have 1 person per fleet, 1 overall commander, and everyone going through a gated messaging system, THEN you'd have a very good feel for what campaigning in the Traveller universe is like. But I don't have 20 friends that probably would like to play that and it likely wouldn't be much fun for many since they may just be stuck in a system, alone, waiting for someone to come to them (either a message or an enemy fleet). Just boring game play.
FFW tries to make do with the plotting. I really should play that some more to get a better feel for it.
One way to do that is to define a line + reserve at each "location", and define rules for movement between those locations.
The locations are simple: the main worlds and the gas giants. I think that simply changing FFW instead of a system per hex, you have a destination box for each gas giant, and the main world. "Points of interest", essentially. Because, in the large, realistically, a fleet can move between the boxes in a weeks time. It's close enough to a week to get from Earth to Jupiter using an M-Drive. The rules would simply be (with perhaps special rules for some systems as a call out) but basically that movement between boxes within a system takes "a turn" (i.e. a week), but costs "no fuel" (because you can run a 6G M-drive with a 9 volt battery). But if you want to go from hex to hex, that costs a turn AND fuel. Combat is within the "boxes". At that point, the combatants can line up their "line" and "reserve", and let fly.
If two fleets move to each others box (i.e. fleet A is at the gas giant, and fleet B at the main world, and fleet B moves to engage A and vice a versa), then they fight "in space", and get to choose the box they wish to be in if they win the combat. The difference between the two is, for example, there's no fixed defenses. Notably, if you attack a planet, it can have static defenses (ye olde deep meson sites) that contribute to the defenders forces. But if you engage "in space", obviously you don't get that. Which suggests that the defender may wish to simply wait for the attacker to come to them. And, of course, you can move from box to box using jump, which costs fuel, then there's no engagement.
There's nuance in some kind of escape mechanic. I would simply point that fueled ships can escape (i.e. jump) after any combat round. Or, perhaps any round that they do not fire, giving the other party a "free shot" as they leave.
Reserve ships "don't fire", so they're always free to leave (assuming they're fueled). Fueling happens AFTER combat. So, if a fleet jumps in tanks dry, they need to clear the box to refuel. There would need to be some rule that riders can only dock if they don't fire. So, a rider fleet would take two rounds to jump. Seems fair enough. Rider, however, don't suffer any disadvantage offensively. There's no "delay" in deployment. They have lot of time to see the forces coming and clear their moorings.
And..that's it. After that just need mechanics to build Combat Factors in to Units that can move across the stars and details about how they are flung against each other. Whether that's some formula based on HG stats, or something way abstract like Pocket Empires is pretty moot at that point.
It would be nice to know how the fleet factors from FFW were achieved. I think FFW with extra boxes per system would be fine.
