So, I was thinking about this the other day. Specifically blind play, with players taking the roles of the Admirals. Admirals would have one or more fleets under their command. There would be a ruling Admiral that would be able to give orders to the other Admirals, who agree up front to basically try and do their best to fulfill (so there would be a single, central commander on each side).
However, the other Admirals have local control over their fleet, as well as any others that are in their operational space. And those fleets would run on orders.
But there would be two key components.
First, the players ideally would not be allowed to communicate outside the game. And, two, orders move at speed of travel.
The other aspect, is that Intelligence would automatically propagate. That is, it's simply assumed that there is traffic in and out of systems to report fleet movements. If an enemy fleet jumps in, there's some handy courier there to jump out and report it. When the fleet leaves, there's another one ready to pop out to tell of their leaving.
The question then become at what speed does that information travel. I was thinking Jump 2 (since I expect these to be scouts). Information on X-Boat routes would travel at J-4, but only along the route, and only to the next system. But once that information from the X-Boat landed, the info could still be propagated at J-2. One could argue that X-Boat traffic won't happen from an interdicted system.
Simply, I consider Couriers to be ubiquitous, and Space "uncontrollable" enough to prevent it from happening. So, every fleet movement and action starts a J-2 Ripple of information in the space pond.
The refs basic job is simply routing the messages properly. He also resolves combat. The other best part, if the ref messes up and misroutes or fails to route a message, c'est la vie. Intelligence is only so reliable
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What this means is that each turn, the players will get a new update, telling of fleet movements and combat actions, based on the system that they are in (or just arrived into).
Players would have direct control only over the fleets they're with, everything else is done by Courier. While fleet movements are "public" knowledge, orders are targeted. So, if a player wanted Fleet B to do something, they would have to know that the fleet is in System X, and direct the message to that system. In theory you could send orders to systems blindly "Send orders to Fleet B in System X, Y, and Z to come home". Maybe have a special rule that any pending orders are lost in an interdicted system.
But that way, orders can be awaiting a fleet when it arrives. If an order to Fleet B arrived in System X on turn 10, the enemy fleet entered on turn 11, and then jumped on turn 12, when Fleet B arrived in turn 13, the orders would not be there.
Could even have a roll to decrypt the captured communications.
This is in contrast to the "plotted movement" of normal FFW. You can plot movement, in that you can give a fleet an order to "Jump to system X, then Y, then Z". But the key point being once they are "out of orders", they sit waiting for new ones. Seems like it might work better to be able to update the orders of a fleet that's only 2 weeks jump away than have them linger for 5 turns like in FFW. If you keep sending out orders to system where the ships should be, then it's effectively just like FFWs pre-plotted system.
The overall commander on each side could be a fighting commander, or simply sit in the capital giving out orders. But, arguably, it would behoove them to get closer to the front just to improve the time lag.
Could also have J-4 Fleet Couriers. Give each side a select few of those.
I'm just curious how it would play out. How the central command would feel seeing everything happening, too late, and in slow motion. The fleet commanders sense of isolation as they try to prosecute their own little bit of the war.
Dunno if anyone would want to play that. Dunno in practice how much it would be different from a normal FFW game.
