The idea is for a space 4X game. I took a look at Warrior Knight army management which consist in having 4 pawns on the board with a matching list of army cards off board. I intended to do the same using ships and fleets as it would be much more convenient to manipulate than using tokens on the board.
Now that mechanic comes with some of it's issues and I am looking for possible solutions:
First, having less fleets than areas to defend creates the issue that you cannot protect every area with a fleet which makes you defenseless if you have a large empire. Solutions so far that I found are:
- Make areas strong enought to defend by themselves
- Require more than 1 turn to conquer an area to give the time for the player to move in a fleet to protect it.
Second, a limited amount of fleets/armies has the same issue has a limited amount of actions. So as the empire grow, the combined actions of opposing smaller empire is bigger than the number of actions of the large empire. So eventually the large empire would fall. So it artificially restrict the expansion of the empire preventing it from expanding beyond a certain size. Which makes winning by player elimination impossible.
Sometimes it could be a desirable effect in games. And sure if areas are harder to capture because they can defend themselves, large empires are less likely to lose everything even if all actions are directed towards them.
One way to sove this would be to allow fleets to act multiple times, since my nb of actions increase with empire size, larger empire would just reuse fleets they already have in play. This way, even if the nb of fleet is limited, it would not restrict larger empires.
Any other suggestions are welcomed.
That was my initial thought, make system harder to capture. And make it a 2 turn capture: 1 turn to clean up the space defenses, and one turn to invade the planet.
Else, one thing I thought is that larger empire should be able to rebuild their fleet faster than smaller empire. So even if they both have the same max fleet, there could still be a significant difference.
Range unit is impossible because each area is too large to attack adjacent hex. But if I use 2 turn invasion, it gives the player a chance to move into adjacent hex.