One of the more fun challenges in ship design here is getting any particular blob of ships to make sense as a fleet, rather than simply as a swarm of individual vessels. Not only do the individual ships have to be generally fun to fly on their own, but they have to have some clear purpose: a mission or role that they excel at doing compared to any other ships flying alongside them. Sometimes this is simple enough to figure out – “I’m a bomber! I blow things up!” Things get interesting when more subtle or more complex niches (say, “I’m a fighter/bomber meant for carriers too small to carry complete squadrons of both,” or “I’m a mobile point defense platform”) start to show up.

So, fleets. The goal’s not just to have a bunch of vessels which can each do a specific task; that’s just a swarm of individual ships. The goal’s to have that bunch of ships designed in a way where they directly complement each other and create a whole that’s better than the sum of its parts. You know, fleets. Or squadrons, or wings, or task forces, since it should work on a number of scales.

A lot of smaller-scale examples are obvious. Some ships are meant to be defended by others. A group of bombers will get mauled by a group of fighters unless they have support of their own; a warship may have all kinds of direct-fire damage output but be vulnerable to those same bombers (or other projectiles) due to its own size and sluggishness. The solutions for these are simple enough at first: fighters are around to protect bombers by destroying opposing fighters, and big warships are defended by smaller, more agile warships geared more towards defensive weapons.

Much of the initial burst of unit design was done in these sorts of terms, where we’d come up with pairs of units or unit types which complimented each other fairly well. After a fairly early point, the possibilities branch out quite a bit more: each new unit added has different interactions with every other one in there, after all. Unanticipated roles show up, like discovering that a quick and maneuverable interceptor is a terrific platform for intercepting torpedoes, or that a frigate built around anti-fighter weapons can protect bombers offensively as well as it can protect a carrier defensively. New roles show up as well: perhaps the big warships should have two smaller ships tagging along, with one being an escort and the other being a more medium-sized combatant to spare the flies the sledgehammer. More specialized fighter and bomber types give flight wings more versatility and flexibility. And so on and so forth.

In smaller skirmishes plenty of this isn’t likely to show up – there’s only so much you can do when two pairs of warships or a couple of fighter squadrons run into one another, after all.

At the larger scales, though…?

I came into this project with a bit more of a grognardy background than, well, most reasonable human beings, which is one of the reasons we’re blurring a lot of strategy into the genre stew that SFX will hopefully become in the coming months. This means, among other things, that I like the idea of variety: choices, options, room for multiple play styles and techniques within the same environment.

In a game like this the obvious way to do that is to have a number of ships to choose from. That’s a pretty standard thing in games even vaguely like this, often boiling down to “you have your small, agile, weak ship, your medium well-rounded ship, your brick that flies like a brick and hits like a brick, and your gimmick option.” A whole lot can be done, and be done astonishingly well, with that kind of setup; it was in fact originally what SFX was going to consist of. One day, we decided to try plugging a small warship in – for certain values of “small,” as we’re trying to keep all of the ships to scale – and, before we knew what we were getting ourselves into, we’d started piecing together elements of a complete fleet.

A handful of ship types? We found ourselves looking at a score of ship types, the rough variety and set of roles that one would need for a navy of some sort. The basic themes of the initial handful of choices were still there, with a consistent range of sizes, but the wider variety let us put in some more divisions and specialized roles. There was suddenly room for, say, a standoff interceptor, or light and heavy bombers, or carriers (which bring in whole kettles of fish on their own, of course).

What this fleet didn’t have, however, was an opponent. (You can see where this is going.)

In a final fit of madness we decided that the variety we put into the first fleet of ships we started planning out was going to be extended not to one other fleet, but to three. Each fleet would have its own complete variety of vessels, able to undertake different roles and missions, and each of which would require a subtly to radically different play style to use effectively. As of this writing, thirty-one of the ships have been plugged into the game to one degree or another; not counting space stations, “terrain” units (e.g., jumpgates, armed asteroids, etc) and some “generic” civilian and transport craft, this is a little under half of the planned total.

With that said, here’s a brief intro to each of the fleets and their implied playstyles. (Any actual detailed lore and background is still half-formed at best, and I’ll save that discussion for future posts.)

Fleet One: The initial force we started with, and by far the most developed in terms of number and variety of ships. This fleet is one of the two “balanced” forces in the game. The fighters and other small craft are built around missiles and kinetic weapons – simply put, they fight loudly – while the warships rely on broadsides of powerful short-ranged beam weapons with a few standoff weapons for long-range actions. Carriers only pack basic defensive weaponry, but can launch large complements of fighters and bombers quickly, and those fighters and bombers are the main long-ranged heavy-hitters of the whole organization. Most of this fleet’s ships are straight out of your standard military science fiction tropes – fighters, bombers, interceptors, and the standard spread of space warships   (cruisers, frigates, and so on) anachronistically named after their wet-navy equivalents.

Fleet Two: One of the two “unbalanced” fleets, these guys rely almost entirely on small craft. Instead of a group of warships comprising a fleet, these guys will have one or two motherships – very large carriers which have no interest in closing with enemy forces when they can get dozens or scores of their little buddies to do the work for them. Fighter and bomber roles in this fleet are reversed; the hard-hitting power is in small, agile attack vessels with big guns, and corvette-sized escort “fighters” which provide air defense and other support for them. Both will be supplemented by highly expendable attack drones because, by God, at least one fleet in this game needed those.

Fleet Three: The other balanced fleet. This one started as an attempt to just reverse Fleet One’s aesthetics – instead of the fighters using kinetics and the warships using energy weapons, we wanted to have the reverse look and a similar spread of units. Things got a bit more nuanced, and we ended up with a fleet that behaved kind of as the opposite of Fleet One: the fighters and bombers operate in more of a defense and support role, while the warships – slow and cumbersome, but carrying powerful, long-ranged weapons – do most of the damage. The second-biggest priority for this fleet will be controlling engagement range; the biggest priority will be letting them hurl cannon broadsides around like Age of Sail ships of the line.

Fleet Four: The other unbalanced fleet, these guys are Fleet 2′s opposite, with their emphasis being almost entirely on warships. A small handful of fighters and fighter types will very much be support ships, used for scouting and bomber defense, with most of the work being done by much more specialized warships than the other fleets use. The bulk of the fleet is small and medum-sized warships built around a core of a few heavy hitters, and the vessels will be faster on average than equivalents from other fleets. Subtlety of maneuver isn’t intended to be a strong point here. (Several of their cruisers firing at some poor doomed target is the stylized header image for this blog right now.)

And there you have it, a brief overview of what we’re all getting ourselves into. I hope to make a weekly thing of such posts, so I’ll probably update on or after the weekend with a look into another aspect of the game.