Okay... I've been poking at this for some time now, and can't seem to come up with any great solutions. So, I'm going to try and describe the entire complicated mess, and see what suggestions fall on me. ^_^
I've been working on a module for Federation & Empire. I've finally caught up to all the expansions, and I'm trying for that extra degree of "polish". F&E features a fantastic number of individual ships (easy enough) which you can move and do un-neighborly things with. Bases don't move, but can be built and upgraded and attacked. Planets are effectively terrain features which can be defended and attacked and captured. That last gets complicated. After capture it takes some time absorb into your supply structure. Also, after a while, it can be 'annexed' by the capturing side, making it a more permanent possession. Much the same type of thing is true of 'provinces' (a collection of 5-6 hexes, defined on the map), and individual neutral zone hexes. This is all generally taken care of on paper normally, but I'd like to handle as much of that on the board as possible. I have bases as counters much like the ship counters. However, it'd be nice if, when moving a stack of ships, I didn't have to expand it just to select everything other than the base. I could make it 'does not stack', or put it on another layer, but then it effectively disappears, and it's important to know it's there (and pick it up to put it in the combat chart when attacked). For planets, I went the 'separate layer' route. I made the graphics take up the entire hex, so that it peeks out from under the counters. You can hover over it and see the current status, and you click on it, but it's clunky. For provinces, I was kind of thinking of solving the problem by having the marker live on the borders of hexes. It could get obscured by other counters, but would still be reasonably obvious. But, I don't see a way of letting some counters do that, without letting them all do that (which would be more irritating than helpful here). I can't assign any properties to a layer, so I can't make it use a different grid. A lot of problems would go away if I had a 'reveal map' button that would still show certain classes of counters. Anyhow, just various points that I seem to be stuck on....
