RE: [FT] Campaign.

G'day,

> I'd much rather start out with established territories,
> but the problem then becomes "how do you decide who gets what?"

The bidding idea sounds like a nifty twist. Just for info sake Derek and
I played a mini campaign between us where we started with some planets.
As there were only two of us we used a rather arbitrary method that
probably doesn't work for more than two people. We divided the board in
two and picked a home system within that area. The for the systems in
contact with the home system in my half we both rolled D10, if I rolled
higher than him it was mine (and we determined its economy using the
standard D10x20), if I rolled less it was unowned. When then repeated
the same in Derek's half of the board, except this time if he rolled
more than me he got the planet etc. This give us each a small starting
empire. For moderate sized empires we thought you'd just repeat the "who
owns it roll" for those systems connected to the ones you found you
"won" in the first round of rolls. For larger still keep repeating until
you run out of systems connected to ones you own... that way empires !
 can be large but there can still be pockets of undeveloped land so to
speak. For multiplayer (were board division isn't as easy), instead of
half the board define x-hexes out as a sphere of influence and check in
there for ownership (that approach works in the fantasy campaigns we
run).

Cheers

Beth