Events

Something I noticed when doing my most recent read through of Gust Front was that a lot of the story revolved around commanders handling unexpected situations. Not unexpected like the enemy charged before we were expecting, but unexpected like bad orders from on-high. Blue-on-blue (friendly) artillery fire due to a virus in the system. The vagaries of artillery in general.

I figured there were a couple of ways to deal with such things. The first is to just use dice rolls and possibly tables to address the random elements of the war. Roll a die each turn - if it's a 5+ you have artillery. Roll a series of dice for events that might give you less forces than you expected, more forces, control over terrain, etc.

The other way was to introduce cards. Each side would have an "event deck". Earth forces would contain things such as Artillery Strikes, Sniper Strike, ACS Arrival, etc. The Posleen deck would contain things like IVIS Virus, Lost Units, Cocked-up Orders, etc. At the start of each turn the players would draw a card from the Event deck and could choose to play it that turn or hold it for later.

I'm personally in favor of the deck mechanic as it adds some interplay. Earthforce might play an Artillery Strike and the Posleen would counter with IVIS Virus, allowing the Posleen player to then position the strikes as s/he chooses.

I feel this would also go a long way towards mitigating some of the issues of scale - event decks could simulate things happening at the higher level and allow the game to focus on the smaller unit engagements. Reinforcements, for example, would generally represent forces falling back from a previous unit (see the 10th Corp remnants reinforcing the 9th Corp in Northern Virginia) or the redistribution of forces based on where Landers were (and weren't).