Ideas are cheap, so here is mine.
Lately I have been enjoying Homeworld Remastered which got
me thinking about what would make a great new space strategy game.
There is a shamefully limited offering in this genre, see Homeworld, Sins of a Solar
Empire, Conquest Frontier
Wars, Nexus the Jupiter
Incident for some examples. Limited they may be, but on a whole most of
these games treat space battles like naval battles with extra dimensions. This
is serviceable, but can be visually confusing. In the example of Homeworld, it
is hard to see what is happening once a battle begins. Generally the capital
ships will be separate, forming a rough battle line, but they can be split on
various levels from the z-axis. The fighter craft will be intermixed between
the lines. Given enough ships this can make for a very confusing battle. With
ships all over the place it can be hard to see if your forces are winning or
not. A strategy game should not do that. Good strategy games offer clear
feedback if you are winning, losing, or drawing. If you cannot tell what state
the battle is in, you cannot make interesting choices to try and alter the
state. At that point you are not playing a game, you are just watching. The
spectacle of watching a battle unfold however should not be neglected. Space
battles have their own majestic quality. so there must be a vibrant color
palette in both ship and space.
What are the conclusions I have drawn: 1. Current space strategy games draw
heavy influence from naval simulations. 2. Strategy games need to always convey
the state of the battle. 3. Battles in space must be visually engaging.
With this in mind I want to suggest a different influence for games set in
space. Instead of a naval influence we should instead look to the battles of
Napoleon. With a naval influence the number of ships involved in a battle tend
to skew toward the low end. Maybe reaching a 100 capital ships in a lively game
in Homeworld. These numbers are far too insufficient. I want battles to number
in the tens of thousands. There was near to 200,000 soldiers involved in the
Battle of Waterloo. We should aim for similar numbers of space craft. This of
course brings up issues of controlling so many units at once. If we take
inspiration from games modeling this period such as Empire Total War or
Ultimate General: Gettysburg you
can see we do not handle individual soldiers, but collections of them, maybe
100-300 at a time. In this same way we should organize our ships in squadrons
of a similar number. The games I mentioned tend to only deal with about 30-60
thousand units in a battle, so we may want to increase our unit size to around
a 1000 ships per collection. Now that we have split our army into neat
collections of ships we can have both a large number of ships in an engagement
and we can far more easily move them. In Homeworld you may have to move and
organize around 50 capital ships at any one time. In my model of collections of
a 1000 or more, we can easily have players controlling 25,000 ships and still
moving around less pieces than in the Homeworld example. More ships, easier
control.
To the second point, we need to make sure the game always conveys the state
of the battle. To solve this problem look towards Scourge of War: Gettysburg or
Sid Meier’s
Gettysburg. Both games track how effective a particular unit is doing, both
in dealing damage and sustaining damage. If a unit is taking more damage than
it is dealing it is losing, the inverse, it is winning. So to should our game
always have available this information. Either as a number prominently
displayed, or as some visual element. Secondly, the nature of a Napoleonic
style battle is many units in neat lines maneuvering against the enemy. With
such rigid formations we can avoid the issue of ships intermingling like they
do in Homeworld. This also has the added benefit of always showing a clear view
of the battle which is important for both determining who is winning (the
state) and what moves to make next (the heart of a strategy game).
Finally, we need to ensure our battles are interesting to watch. This is a
bit hit or miss in the examples I have given. Homeworld has a lot of ship
customization, but SIns of Solar Empire and Nexus have little. If we look to
the armies of
Napoleon’s time we can see a great variety in uniforms. Lots of bold
vibrant colors. So to should our ships sport such dashing design. We should
have a great deal of customization of fleet colors and fleets should lean
towards bright colors, instead of dull navy gray.
To summarize: 1. Draw inspiration from Napoleonic wars, not naval ones. 2.
Enforce collections of many ships and rigid formations. 3. Emphasize bright
colors.
Now that we have solved some of the problems of the genre, at least on
paper, let us look to differentiate the title a bit. As mentioned, Napoleonic
battles should be our inspiration. To that end we should emphasis a rock,
paper, scissors balance. In a battle of that time there were generally three
types of units: line infantry, cavalry, and artillery. In this relationship,
infantry is good against all other types as long as they can be kept at optimal
range, artillery beats all other types at long range, and cavalry beats all
types at close range. We should model our fleet on those types. Average speed
ships with average ranged weapons that fight in massed formation (infantry),
fast agile ships with melee or close range weapons (cavalry), and weak long
ranged ships (artillery). This simple balance make it easy to understand how to
place you units to optimize their potential. Most space strategy games do not
have a concept of cavalry or artillery. They tend to focus on ships that all
engage at or near to the same range, but with different weapons. The idea of
melee in space is pretty unexplored. Homeworld: Cataclysm
has a ship that pushes other ships away from a battle, but I know of no other
game that models very close range fighting. It would be a cool idea to explore
some in-universe explanation for this. Artillery in space is also little
explored. Sins of a Solar Empire features long range missile platforms, so we
would probably have ships equipped for long range missile launch in our
game.
Secondly we should consider adding a layer of logistics to our game.
Homeworld tracked fuel for fighter craft, but had no other supply mechanics.
Conquest Frontier Wars did have supply on a ship to ship basis and it was very
important to the game. Lack of supply ships could doom assaults. We should
consider adding similar mechanics to our game. Units should have two needs,
fuel and ammunition. As the battle progresses it would be necessary to ensure
ships do not run out of either or they would be unable to move or fire. This
adds some complexity, but opens up interesting strategic options, like cutting
off enemy resupply in battle.
The toughest point to consider is how to handle z-dimensional movement. Some
space games, like Sins only support moving on the x,y plane. Homeworld and
Nexus have full 3d movement. I think we should do the same. Players expect that
freedom of movement in space and it allows us some interesting strategy, such
as attacking an enemy from above or below. Our new emphasis on Napoleonic
battle helps us here as attacks from the flanks (or above/below) should inflict
additional damage. We should be careful of constraints here though. If we allow
too much z-axis freedom ships will start going everywhere for little gain.
Perhaps we could limit the area of battle somewhat so the units do not get too
separated. This will be tough to justify in-universe. We could set the area
engagement to be so large that we could enforce a communication delay between
ships. May be interesting to increase unit response times the further they get
from the flagship, the unit sending the orders. This would keep units close to
the flagship and make that unit very important. Do you move your flagship with
an assault so that you can relay orders quickly or do you create a complicated
battle plan and hope it is carried out as expected.
Overall It is not so much that we are making a new design, but repurposing
an existing design for a different setting. I want to shift our focus away from
individual ship management to that of a large scale battle of maneuver. To
those of you familiar with anime this setting is not so new, it is basically
how battles are fought in the classic anime series Legends of the
Galactic Heroes. Now if only the games
they made were localized.