We Prioritize Objectives Over Fighting!
So What?
When we set out to design our battles, one thing we agreed on almost from the very beginning is that a fight should be for something or over something. That was very easily said. How many games have you played where the objectives are really just a means to funnel two armies’ worth of fire into a killzone?
This led us down two parallel design paths. First, we needed to create an objectives-based system that prioritized and incentivized taking objectives - even if this meant not shooting an opposing ship, and even if it meant letting the enemy destroy one of your own ships to get the objective!*
Second, we needed to build out ships capable of contesting objectives. By the time we got to this stage of design, we had a framework for a few hull classes:
Corvettes, meant to dart in, harass larger ships, and get out before taking too much damage;
Cruisers, the largest combat ships meant to control the space around them;
Frigates, which are the most flexible combatants and still warfighters in their own right;
Bulk Freighters, which are dedicated objectives platforms
On The Origins of Freighters
One of the early rulesets we worked on was around aircraft combat. In that game, fighters controlled the skies so that bombers could deploy their payloads - and so too could transports like helicopters and cargo planes. We had a framework that said vulnerable, non-fighting hulls like the C-130 (or A400M/your regional equivalent) were key means for players to take “things” from the board. Relics capture, troop delivery, cargo drops, you name it.
That framework persisted into Fleet Command Hevelius. We knew early on that a cargo ship (“Bulk Freighter”) would be the perfect platform for a local government to strip and replace with a suite of mission packages: barracks for troop deployment, dedicated intelligence centers for hacking into things, entire decks dedicated to medical space to evacuate casualties… a cheap base hull that you can invest heavily into to make it shine.
Parts of that decision influenced (and were influenced by) our parallel decision to make the Hevelien Expansion Zone a lower tech, lower density space compared to the rest of the galaxy. If you’re a superpower that controls a quarter of the galaxy, you can afford a dedicated ship to do everything under the suns. If you’re leasing the very space you govern, you might be inclined to pinch pennies where you can.
In that regard, the decision to make freighters an objective platform practically wrote itself. Which brings us to…
Corvettes as the New Variable
We landed on Corvettes as a counterpart to Bulk Freighters later in the development cycle. We didn’t really think about it in these terms, but in hindsight they became a bit of a parallel to the gunships, helicopters, and VTOL craft of the airplanes game. Fleet Command Hevelius lives at the epicenter of black ops, shadow wars, and wars by proxy. Something small, fast, and hard to hit (like a Corvette) would be uniquely qualified to deploy strike teams while evading the enemy.
Our first question was to ask ourselves why governments wouldn’t use them in our setting. We quickly decided they would, so our second question was why governments would stop at only deploying military forces. We quickly decided they wouldn’t.
So then we had to ask ourselves, why would a government take something less survivable (like a Bulk Freighter) over something more survivable (like a Corvette) to take objectives? That one we had to think about over a few iterations.
Making Tradeoffs: In the Game and In the Setting
In universe, and after a LOT of discussion over what it would mean for the whole narrative structure of the setting, we determined that a Bulk Freighter would be the ideal platform for conducting non-combatant tasks.
Mechanically, we decided to represent this through the cost and flexibility of Bulk Freighters. A Bulk Freighter is pretty cheap as a base hull and can’t do as much on the battlefield as its peers. For additional points, you can either:
Take a module that lets the Bulk Freighter tackle every objective on the board, giving you ultimate flexibility in where to deploy it; or
Take a module that lets the Bulk Freighter take on one objective type, while also flying a “noncombatant beacon” - letting it act as mobile terrain and imposing a Victory Points cost to your opponent for attacking it (though in return it’s incapable of attacking back).
For Corvettes, giving them access to one objective module (at a time) meant it would be more expensive to capture every objective on the board, at least compared to outfitting a couple of Bulk Freighters to roam wild. The tradeoff was recognizing how much easier it is for a Corvette to contest any one Objective.
We also decided the other two ship types (Frigates and Cruisers) should have minimal objective-taking capacity. They can play king of the hill and contribute points to missions where the goal is to get everyone off the board, but narratively we determined it made very little sense to do neither combat nor objective taking well.
Designing Missions to go with the Ships
It’s presented linearly here, but ships and objectives evolved together throughout the design process. As mentioned above, a key factor was giving you a reason to fight in the first place. A Fleet Commander has an awesome responsibility: order tens - sometimes hundreds - of thousands of living beings into battle. Not all of them will make it out alive. Nobody should make this decision lightly.
As we looked into making the battlefield as rich a space as possible, we determined objective diversity could be a key factor here. How do you build your fleet if you have to just evacuate civilians, versus having to evacuate civilians and deploy troops on a critical station and ensure enough of your fleet exits the board by the end of the game to win the Victory Point for each?
We settled on a handful of objective types that could drive a proxy war, and each of them let you interact with them slightly differently. As a couple of examples:
The objective for evacuating civilians acts as a piece of terrain, making it harder for you to maneuver around your opponent;
The troop deployment object has a mechanism letting you remove opposing victory point counters from it; and
Territory control splits into “everyone here gets a point this turn” and “only the strongest force gets a point this turn”.
When you take all of the above and factor in incentives for fleet survival, it seems like we give you a lot of reasons not to fight the opposing side. This is kind of true - in our playtests, we found we really had to incentivize players both narratively and mechanically to not just try and table their opponent.
The incentives to fight are pretty inherent into the system. Taking out an opposing ship makes them less likely to take objectives, and makes it less likely for them to interfere with your objectives. Smaller map sizes and terrain placement drives a need to clear crowded spaces. Players given starships and the freedom to shoot something tend to want to exercise that freedom.
What we wanted to do was give players a reason to believe that not being the best warfighter could still let them win a game so long as they played smart. What we did not want to do was make fighting irrelevant. As a result, we do include a couple of objectives types that drive combat - and even an end of game framework that takes into account how much damage you inflict (to compliment or offset how much damage you receive).
So What?
Designing a wargame where you can win without being the best warrior took a lot of intentional design. It is something we had to bake in at the very beginning of writing Fleet Command Hevelius, a philosophy that underpinned everything from the mechanical design of the game to the narrative design of the setting. The result from starting early - building the fight around objectives rather than building objectives around the fight - is an objectives framework that we hope can support Fleet Command Hevelius for years to come.
* You can see us do exactly that in Two Turns of the First Vignette