[llamabeast]

I guess my suggestions for making it relatively hard to travel in space are only reasonably if there are several provinces per planet. Then you have battles for the surface of each planet before entering the transports and moving on to the next. Space blockades would be strategically crucial.

If you only want one province per planet, you'll want to make it easy to move between them, otherwise it'd be cumbersome as you say. Seems a pity to me, to lose out on the option of orbital blockades, but I guess there are pros and cons.