We did a play by mail of Federation and Empire. and added Loyalty, Morale, and Independence stats to model these properties.
That's not quite what I mean.
The premise is a computer program where you act as Supreme Commander and send out your units. A simple problem is say you send a fleet out to some remote system. As soon as they arrive, they'll send back "we're here, now what?". And, until then, they pretty much garrison the system.
The return message takes several weeks to reach you, you reply, which, again, takes several weeks to head back to the fleet. Clearly, at some point, it's simply not practical to manage at this scale. Which means the fleets need some kind of autonomy to prosecute the war. But if that autonomy is delegated to you, the player, then the "blind" nature of the game falls flat.
So, it's a bit of a trick.
Now, if you had "Lots of players", then having "Fleet Admiral" players might be interesting. 4 players per side, each with their fleets (so completely autonomous fleets) but having to deal with the communication issues of trying to sync up with their other commanders. In that case, you don't necessarily have a "Supreme Commander", rather you just have a very laggy, imperfect communication system that ROUTES through "the capitol", or whatever. So, if you want to send a message to another commander, you either know where they are -- and send it, or you dispatch to command, and they send it (increasing the lag).
Each Admiral will have fleet elements that can be detached (like garrisons as the fleet advances). And, still, you have the same autonomy problems. If you leave a detachment 3 or 4 jumps behind, what are their orders. So, in the end, is that any different from the Supreme Commander version?
Add in the a finite supply of courier ships to send messages, as well as a possibility of losing a courier ship (for example, unexplained failure -- ship just never comes back out of jump), and that can get interesting.
For F&E, that answer is obvious. As it should nearly be in a blind strategic game. Those things that aren't clear (or rather those things you want expressly crystal clear) should be defined in the op orders issued to each admiral, the more disloyal or weak moraled, the more restrictive the orders need to be.
Well it's not really obvious. I mean, in a game "scorched earth" with no consequences is always an option. But, I don't think that would sit well in general. Glassing planets is never received well. Nor do we have a clear take on how long that takes.
Simply, if a war fleet has system domination, can it reduce any ship building/repair capacity in a single week? Is that practical? Can such capacity be repaired? And how long does that take? How long would it take to glass a planet? And that brings up all sorts of ugly details about supply. "Need more nukes, hit 3 planets so far -- running low!"
I haven't read the VC for the FFW board game, but what were the Zho aims and war objectives? Because one thing we have learned from the Rebellion, and simple truth if you look at most any of the mechanisms around ship building and what not, wars are VERY expensive. Destroyed ships have to be replaced out of inventory, they're not coming back via manufacture, not for some time (like 150 weekly turns). So, the forces that go all out can exhaust themselves quite quickly. This is what brought on the stalemates during the Rebellion.
