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I was just thinking that the PC games Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander would make for some great 6mm games on the tabletop.

You'd have one strong Commander unit who could build factory buildings on the table, secure resource nodes that you roll to scatter around the map. Or there could be set scenarios too with preset resource layouts. Then these factories spit out bunches of battle ready tanks, aircraft, walkers, and more every turn.

What rules do you think would work well for this? I'm considering just writing my own. It'd have to be simple, I suppose the tanks and walkers could all be put on bases of 2-4. I'd rather base it off established, fast playing rules first than make my own.

Also, what miniatures do you think would work? There's lots of miniatures that would work for commanders, since you can use 25mm scale robot miniatures, same for some of the giant experimental units.

It'd also be a bit unique in that losses would be replenished quickly in the field via resources gathered from resource locations. Every captured resource node brings in a certain amount of resource tokens a turn, you could use coins, poker chips, little glass beads or whatever to track them.

Power/Energy could also be brought in, where you have to build power generators, and shuffle limited energy tokens between buildings that need power at the start of every turn.

Hmmm not sure whether people would really bother playing with minitures that they can play on a game for a cheaper price and in real time not turn base combat.

While It could be cool to have some figures I don't think it could really go anywhere profit wise. Maybe a boardgame but not a convetional battlegame.

I'm not going to sell it, I'm looking for input on a home made version.

And it won't be exactly the same as the computer game, just similar in concept. Bringing the idea of in field factories and resource nodes into tabletop games.

Also, tabletop games play in a certain social way that's completely different than PC games. It's way people play the 40k Tabletop game, and the 40k PC/Video games at the same time.

Well the closest miniatures you could that I can think off are dark realm miniatures andrayadn which look similar (I think, haven't played TA in a long time).

I think it could work as a game, there are RTS games which are similar to wargames and cost a lot less but people like having modesl in front of them.

I agree with the OP - I've always been a fan of the games but I'd never thought of a tabletop skirmish version.

Implementing the resources idea would be interesting indeed - for example spending mass points to build permanent energy producers at the expense of units and so on. Great idea overall!

That's funny, I just started making a game based around the "feel" and scale of Total Annihilation. I always loved that game.

Right now I'm trying to figure out the scale. How large is a basic tank in 6mm scale? How large is a titan?

It's pretty small. 6mm is less than half that of 15mm, so to compare to FoW tanks. Basic tanks come in at around 1" or so. Walker type bots would be slightly smaller.

Superheavies could go from that up to 2" aka 15mm. Which is nice since you can basically take some of the exotic 15mm scifi vehicles and turn them into super heavies.

Titans will probably on the scale between a superheavy and something the size of a GW Dreadnought.

Commanders could be represented by something the size of heavy gears, or 28-32mm heroic scale miniatures.

And, of course, there would be no infantry.

My initial designs for this concept have so far involved massive numbers of 'tokens'. I have a collection of several hundred five-cent pieces being used as 'mass' and squares of paper as 'energy', just to test things. Because they're stackable, they represent buildings well - I'm presently using dice as units.

I've settled on the idea of 'buying' the starting base with a pool of points, because the initial 'building' stage is far too boring to play out. Additional building can be done in play, and the challenge is making it streamlined so that players don't have to spend ages micromanaging.