We Put Terrain IN SPACE!
So What?
Space is big. More so than being big, space is empty. That created a challenge for us in the scale of conflict we wanted to show.
Fleet Command Hevelius tries to shy away from the image of ships darting through asteroid belts to outmaneuver each other. Space rocks and gas clouds - traditional space terrain - are insignificant obstacles for a ship that can zip to the moon and back a few times in a single turn. Jupiter could fit inside one of our bases with room to spare (2” equalling 1 light second), and we could just about squeeze every planet in the solar system into the same space.
Adding in an abstraction of 3D movement complicates things even more. While we don’t track Z-level differentials between ships, we encourage players to assume their ships are moving “up” and “down” relative to each other even as they move across a 2D playing field. It’s fair to assume that you can pop up from behind a planet to take a shot without stressing your engines too badly.
The time component, in that everything happening one step at a time for a player is actually unfolding simultaneously throughout the turn, is another narrative means to simulate (or encourage imagining) more complex operations than pushing a ship 3” to the left can show.
The net-net is that we decided we couldn’t really put an object between you and your opponent without breaking some part of the narrative framework we were trying to build. We also knew that an empty board would get boring fast.
We found our solution in the state-on-state relationships we kept talking about with each other. We were writing a story that talked a big game about why two superpowers relied on proxy forces to fight on their behalf. Aside from being a reason to limit ship rosters to a single faction, we weren’t really seeing that complexity feed into the game mechanics.
In the Infinite Stars of the Far Future, There is only Politics…
The thing standing between you and your opponent doesn’t have to be a physical object. Suppose you were fighting next to a neutral party’s territory. A few stray rounds, a misplaced volley, a fleet of warships flying through that space… that sort of thing would destroy the legitimacy of your operation to galactic observers.
In the Hevelien Expansion Zone, your fleet is such a small fish that it would take very little to lose material support for your war effort. The power directing your fleet into action can’t risk winning a battle only to lose the war.
That led us to the concept of a No Fly Zone. This was a universal terrain piece that blocked movement and shooting. We used it to represent habitats, planets, mining operations - you name it, it could live within a No Fly Zone!
Rules, Words, and Keywords
The No Fly Zone lasted for a number of years. As we started finalizing the core rulebook, we started sketching out our first full expansion (more to come on that topic!) and ran into a brevity snarl. While don’t claim to speak for every gamer, the conversations we had throughout our design and playtest process led us to believe that shorter and simpler rulesets were preferable over lengthy, overly complicated rulesets.
As an example, suppose you had a ruleset with the following excerpts:
You cannot move into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone.
You may not end your turn in a No Fly Zone.
You cannot shoot into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone.
You cannot move through a ship flying a noncombatant beacon.
You cannot shoot a ship (or through a ship) flying a noncombatant beacon.
All of that is pretty straightforward… but now suppose you wanted to introduce a captain that could act as a one-off exception to those rules?
“This captain can move into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone; end their turn in a No Fly Zone; shoot into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone; move through a ship flying a noncombatant beacon; or shoot a ship (or through a ship) flying a noncombatant beacon once per turn.”
“You cannot move into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone, unless you have a captain with X trait…” (repeated for every written exception).
This was on the path to being complicated enough, and it was just one terrain concept with one exception. We would have labeled it acceptable friction save for the fact that we were thinking about how to build out new terrain types after launch.
As a result, we started looking at keywords we could introduce to the system, and “No Fly Zone” didn’t really fit. It made sense for the movement restrictions. We could probably have handwaved it for the shooting restrictions.
But for the exceptions, we needed something that could endure far into the future. We landed on “Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)” and the associated “DMZ Violation” concept. Neutral space is demilitarized. Taking any militarized action violates that demilitarized status, meaning those actions automatically become “DMZ Violations.”
Rewriting the Exceptions
Taking that list of rules above and applying the “DMZ Violation” concept to it looks a little something like this:
You cannot move into, through, or out of a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Doing so counts as a DMZ Violation.
You may not end your turn in a DMZ. Doing so counts as a DMZ Violation.
You cannot shoot into, through, or out of a No Fly Zone. Doing so counts as a DMZ Violation.
You cannot move through a ship flying a noncombatant beacon. Doing so counts as a DMZ Violation.
You cannot shoot a ship (or through a ship) flying a noncombatant beacon. Doing so counts as a DMZ Violation.
It’s admittedly not special, but it made writing the Captain exception a lot cleaner. Rather than trying to catalogue all the ways a captain can break the rules, we can just say:
“Once per game, this Captain may commit 1 DMZ Violation.”
Building New Terrain Types
We did not want to stop at just having impenetrable brick walls to shape your decision making. We feature two new terrain types in The Old Ways (Fleet Command Hevelius Vignette #2): Safe Harbor and No Fly Zone. Resurrecting the No Fly Zone from our earliest editions let us experiment with the narrative-mechanic link we value so highly at Hour 41 Games; by taking the name literally, we have a political boundary that you can’t move through, but that you could shoot through without any significant consequence.
The Safe Harbor was the natural next step in terrain evolution. Reversing the No Fly Zone’s restrictions gives you a place that you can fly through, but not shoot through. It almost becomes an oasis of neutral ground on an otherwise chaotic battlefield.
With our third Vignette, featuring the galaxy-sized greed of Pact Traders, we introduce terrain that punishes you for flying through it without actively preventing you from doing so. Between these terrain types, we have a solid baseline for making battlefields interesting, dynamic, and well tailored to the stories you want to tell and experiences you want to have on the tabletop.
So What?
Finding reasons to fight is pretty important for a wargame. For the game we wanted to design, finding reasons to not fight (or at least not shoot at a particular target at a particular point in time) creates a more complex tactical environment.
There were a lot of shortcuts we could have taken to make the game board more interesting. We could have said that asteroids and nebula are staples of the science fiction genre, and made them terrain despite how poorly the scales mesh with our setting. We could have said maneuvering around a planet to get the right firing arc is a cinematic experience, and deserves to become a terrain feature because of it.
That’s certainly true - you can look to the greatest works of science fiction to see exactly those scenarios unfold. It would have made terrain design easy.
However, it would not have been true to our setting. Neither would putting arbitrary boxes on the board and saying, “Don’t think too hard about why you can’t shoot here, you just cant.” Going too far in the opposite direction would rob us all of the chance to tell better stories.
We’d like to believe the interplay between story and mechanics is at least as important as each element individually. This helped us hone in on exactly that.