Counters!

I've spent the last couple days I've had available playing with the idea of a board and counter game.  I've wanted to do this before, but it always gets out of hand, mostly because I won't stand for less than 7.5 LY per hex as I want each system represented, and at that scale the map is easily 8' x 7' in size!

I love counter games, and probably have well over 100,000 counters in my house, most likely over 20,000 just for Federation and Empire!  I also *love* maps, and have lots of those as well!

So instead of trying to model the entire 1st Succession War, I've started smaller, with the Reunification war.  For those of you not familiar it was from 2575 to 2596, so pretty early and nearly 200 years before Amaris!  In this war the SLDF, which was 270 regiments and 500 warships, took on the 4 major periphery powers in a war that lasted all of 20 years!  With this scale and the way the war was divided, I can split up the map into just the periphery nations, making them much smaller.  I can also have far less counters, which helps.  This would help make the game a reality and get a lot of playtesting accomplished before I started tackling a larger war.

This is also the prototype for the computer version, which I'll do after Interstellar Operations comes out, and it will be far more detailed including unique planet maps for all planets as well as realistic system transit!

Here is a snippet of the CBT thread here:

The map is about 40 hexes wide by 20 hexes tall.  The SLDF went in with about 324 battalions and 200 warships (plus perhaps 50 FS battalions and 50 Warships), the Taurians had about 12 mech battalions and maybe 150 warships, plus another 50 or so infantry battalions, so were outnumbered on the ground by about 6:1.  The Taurians had fortifications on every world, essentially multiplying their defensive abilities by 2 to 6, plus with the guerilla ability of mechs and infantry they can draw out true conquering of planets for many months or perhaps even years.  The SLDF has some reinforcements from the 1st and 2nd Reserve Corps on Terra, and eventually can get the entire elite Star Guard Corps to help out, this would be probably about 40 replacement battalions of green quality and 80 new elite Star Guard battalions that really make the difference.  Flannagan's Nebula also has serious defenses against space attacks, helping keep the SLDF at bay for a few years as they penetrate the defenses.  Probably a total of around 1000 counters.  Historically the game would last about 1000 turns (woah!), but many of those turns could last all of a minute as only 1-2 die rolls may be required.