Yeah, I was thinking of including something about the more unique elements of space warfare such as the fact that there’s no sound or that there’s no “ground”. I was thinking “Silent Death” but then found out there’s already a game with that name.
I’m leaning towards “Strike Fleet XXX” or the “The XXXX War” or something where XXXX is a name of a star system or something. MIght look at existing solar system names and see if there are some cool ones out there to use.
Regarding morale mechanics, how do you guys think they should work at the starship level. I think a star captain is responsible not only to his admiral but also to the thousands of lives that are on his ship. So I’m not sure that they would readily sacrifice themselves for the military campaign. Similarly, the loss of a starship would be a huge blow to any military and the loss of an entire fleet would likely not be worth whatever moon or shiny asteroid they were fighting over.
So I’m trying to figure out how to reflect this in the game. A couple options:
1 - Make death permanent for each battle. Players start with a fleet of ships and every casualty they suffer permanently reduces their fleet. Allow ships to jump out of a battlefield at a player’s command so that they are not lost from his fleet completely.
2 - Make individual ships do strange things when their “morale” value is low such as surrendering to an enemy fleet to avoid destruction or jumping out of the battlefield. This means that the individual space captain places his ship’s safety over that of the admiral’s plans and this could be a nasty surprise for the player.
What do you guys think would be better? Full control by the player of each ship but with permadeath, or less control of individual ship actions once morale has collapsed? Or perhaps both?
