Tactical Spaceship Taskforce Hex Wargames - Overview of Existing Systems

2025-02-19 Game Design / Spaceships /

I've got a vague idea stuck in the back of my head to do something foolish like design a better spaceship game. The pitch is the title, but let's break it down, and then take a look around the space.

• Tactical - I want individual components of ships to matter. Facing, arcs, thrusters, magazines, hangary bays. I want each ship to be uniquely detailed. Named, not just a class.

• Spaceship - I want the units to feel like capital ships slugging it out through volleys and strafing runs, c-beams glittering in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. I want the feel of Freespace 2 from the big ships' perspectives.

• Taskforce - I want to stay at a reasonable number of units, more than one unless demoing, less than 10 even running many lighter craft.

• Hex - I want to simplify and speed up everything with hexes. They have damned near no drawbacks in space games.

• Wargame - I want a game as much as a simulation, as many interesting impactful decisions as often as possible. Results that change the game state, mutliple true paths to victory, scenarios that require both tactical and strategic planning.

What's Out There

Starting with the venerable Star Fleet Battles¹ (SFB), it's too detailed, designed for 1-3 ships really. Similarly, it's shifting a LOT of the weight on to the player and the rulebook, the SSD acting as reminder more than direct reference. I'm also disinterested in the power management aspect.

The followup game Federation Commander² (FedCom) actually addresses most of the difficulties with the aging crufty binder of rules SFB has become, as well as just making the SSDs look less ancient and ugly. Still the other issues though. Honestly not a bad game at all - I just think I need to strike a different balance for the scale of conflict I want.

Speaking of early spaceship games, Galactic Knights¹⁹ (GK) is an update to a game somehow even older than SFB with a name that sounds like it's mocking the whole genre - Starfleet Wars²⁰.

Renegade Legion: Leviathan³ (RLL) I most recently played and reviewed. It left me unsatisfied, a deeply flawed game with some good ideas and a bitchin' 80s style. I'll spare repeating myself.

The armor blocks are a combination health pool and ablative armor, numbers to tick off before you get to the interesting bits. There's no real effect until you punch through. And weapons have basically two modes, piercing and non-piercing, just modeled on the armor blocks. It's a lot of detail for little payoff. Once through into the systems, it's a quickly cascading catastrophe with only some obvious connections - turrets/fire control/magazies are adjacent, as are thrusters/engines/reactors.

FASA took RLL and adapted it to the Battletech universe under the title Battlespace¹⁶, which was subsequently folded into the Aerotech¹⁷ branch of the game, and has currently been subsumed by Battletech: Strategic Operations: Advanced Aerospace Rules¹⁸. But it's all one lineage.

Renegade Legion: Inteceptor⁴ (RLI) does a better job modeling system paths though in an abstract but also normalized manner (all ships use the same system diagram). It's evocative and diegetic. In comparison to RLL, the armor blocks are more reasonably sized, and the weapon damage shape more nuanced.

There's an orthogonal approach to spaceship combat. During Traveller's 'New Era' there were two companions games released - Brilliant Lances²¹ (TBL) and Battle Rider²² (TBR). TBL is the small skirmish scale, a few ships a side and power management down to 4 digits of precision. It's pretty far down the mil sim side of things and supports building ships of vastly different power levels. This is because it's meant to take the ships you design with your RPG group and handle combat in an interesting manner. The granularity is the point, it needs to be YOUR ship. Also I think the first of these games to point out that technically a hex has 12 points of orientation, 6 sides and 6 vertices.

The fleet scale version is TBR, and it's probably the shortest set of rules I'm discussing despite what you might initially think. Desperately in need of ref sheets or a well flagged set of the rules, its USP is cramming the entire set of detailed ship stats onto a 3/4" cardboard counter. Having a ship so easily summarized is a hell of a feat, even if you have to look up every single character of each of those strings to interpret them. But a couple games in, I bet it's extremely fast to read.

Silent Death⁵ (SiDe) is another detailed spaceship game, but a dogfighter like RLI. The larger patrol craft have crew as fire control directors, facing damage tracks with critical and penalty ticks, and custom crit tables. You get a more specific set of interesting circumstances to the unit. It also uses an interesting approach to margin-of-success on the attack roll converting to damage. Defenses are totally abstract though.

Back to capitals, Babylon 5 Wars⁶ (B5W) plays a lot like SFB but simplified in some ways and needlessly precise in others. Each individual system and weapon has it's own damage track and can generate critical results for itself, though there's nowhere to put that on the sheet. By the end of a game, the sheet is festooned with marginalia. The game is also guilty of hiding special rules all over the place. But I quite like the movement system, directing heading changes through individually damageable thrusters. It's a game I'll gladly play. Also worth noting no construction rules were ever released despite the huge number of official units and the sheafs of fan-builts.

Slight tangent, the same publisher made a 'fleet scale' version of B5W called Fleet Action⁷ (FA1) that abstracted the weapons in what I think a very clean manner. Also abstracted the crit table and system damage tracks to degrading stat tracks. But it changed the movement rules to a multi-unit squad formation style that can quickly become convoluted, especially with a table full of the dozens of models it suggests a side.

FA1 wasn't around very long before the B5 license passed to Mongoose Publishing, though the models stayed the same. Babylon 5: A Call to Arms⁸ (B5ACTA) simplified the ship damage and unfolded the weapon profiles into something purportedly more understandable, while maintaining the expanded fleet sizes. Mongoose eventually lost the license in turn, reimplemented the rules with their Fading Suns / Noble Armada setting, and then wound up partnering with the SFB people for ACTA: Star Trek.

I'd be remiss not to mention one system while we're down here in the simple abstract realm. Full Thrust⁹ (FT) has a pedigree almost as long as SFB, but vastly simpler. The big selling point is the universal ship builder rules. It uses symbols for what I think could be better explained with words, but there's certainly a subset of gamers that prefer iconography and I don't begrudge them that opinion. I just don't share it.

Starblazers Fleet Battle¹⁰ (SBFB) is just FT in a trenchcoat with ubiquitous multi-mode weapons and traced scale-model box art.

Back to the crunch. Saganami Island Tactical Simulator¹¹ (SITS) is based on a hefty series of books by David Weber, so it's hewing closely to some really specific and limited technological constraints. The damage grid is a lot like RLL, but skips the armor blocks and goes right to the meat of damage tracks. It's a clear successor, and a good improvement.

SITS is technically 3D but there's an element of its universe's FTL that keeps it functionally 2.5D with rolling. You can see what the same publisher does to achieve fully 3D spaceship combat in Squadron Strike¹². This is the simplified fast play version. The full thing is Attack Vector Tactical and it is monstrous. It's much more in the vein of modern air combat, fighter aces jockeying for advantage. I've actually played Squadron Strike, it's fun, but it's a LOT of brainpower for a style of play I don't really want in my space games. 2D vectored will be plenty of movement detail.

One more licensed game I want to look at is Halo Fleet Battles¹³ (HFB). Either the swan song or death rattle of Spartan games. It sort of zooms out to a true fleet scale in that it's multibased ships, and their formation or stance matters somewhat. Suffers from custom-dice-itis, and it was so short lived there's few units. The idea of attaching a frigate or corvette or something to a bigger unit and have it act as an upgrade more than a distinct element is worth considering.

The most recent game of this ilk I've found, and one that's so new and obscure it's not even on BGG, is Metaverse 2¹⁴. It's a doozy of a game. The most kitchen sink of them all. The SSDs are terrible. That's one of the simpler one's above. I'd probably find it less garish if it just calmed the fuck down with the iconography. The only reason I'm even talking about it is that it's so jam packed with options that it's a pretty decent reference doc.

My Current Obsession

So I called Fleet Action 'FA1', because it has an IP stripped second edition, Turning Point: Fleet Action 2¹⁵ (FA2). Some substantive changes, though still easily recognizable. It has the most extensive ship and weapon building I've ever seen. Probably 40 pages of 'Do What Thou Wilt' in tables and formulas. And a CnC overlay for fighters I quite like. Hell, there's a lot here I like.

I want to Frankenstein the weapons, fighter, and subsystem mechanics of FA2 to the damage tables of SITS/RLL with the movement of B5W. I've become pretty comfortable with Affinity Designer, and I want to work in tandem with the SSD layout. To the literal drawing board!