In the future with a similar area I wouldn’t mind sending our Explorer unit in and having him deal with things, except that twice during the game explorers (in other Houses) have disappeared.

I also find Lensman in general to have been a more useful metaphor to have in mind than Star Wars (I got to thinking of the setting as Lensman + Dune with wacky inky humor tossed in). Star Wars as a feel really needs one implacable Enemy, rather than two warring ones where alliances could be played off each other and so forth.

Touchy, Jota: Yeah, for this to work (and be balanced) you probably need everyone to roll exactly once per turn, and (at least the way I’m picturing it), you only spend or accumulate tokens during “extended conflicts”, not for single-shot rolls (and when the conflict is over, your token pool is emptied). If you have all that, I’m thinking it’s probably ok to charge tokens for most actions, since that seems to work for Settlers*. In theory you should be getting some tokens each go-round, so you should always have some to spend on your turn, though perhaps not the type you want; if you get unlucky or want to save your tokens for a bigger thing later, you can do one of the free basic actions.

*Settlers, admittedly, has trading with people to get the token types you need as well as getting them via rolling, but I’m hoping the greater control you have over your tokens here will balance that out.