The Infinite Dark Design Blog - Parts 1-4

Again, in line with the request from patrons that they get a one-stop-shop for my online content on the Patreon, here are the first four parts of my Infinite Dark design blog.

Obviously, very little here should surprise patrons, but if you've not already sampled the beta edition, you can get it here.

#1 - The Elevator Pitch

Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark is nearly here!

I'm comfortably on schedule for my planned publication date of Friday 28th May 2021 to the point that I'm prepared to say that that's my planned publication date. If humanly possible, the book will drop with both print and PDF editions at the same time, but print on demand may run a few days behind PDF. We'll see.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good excuse to write a series of blogs talking about the game's development, it's key features and why fans of spaceship combat games should buy it.

An "elevator pitch" - as I'm sure you don't really need to be told - imagines that you find yourself in an elevator with a person prepared to listen to your idea for as long as it takes to reach the lobby. If they like it, it gets bought. If not, it doesn't.

Infinite Dark puts the people back into the spaceships. It has lots of unique features, including the ability to use the same rules to play mighty conflicts of fleets of immense battleships as well as the tense duel of a pair noble fighters; and a Solo play mode, of course. It's a Precinct Omega game, so you can be sure it's built to accommodate whatever spaceship miniatures you love, with a high degree of customizability built in.

But the pilots are what make it shine. Adding pilots to your fleet not only creates another level of customizability, but also turns each battle into a tale in the careers of your heroes. They may be left floating in the void, or they may make themselves a name in legend. Or both! Whether your pilots are humans, uplifted cetaceans, artificial minds or an entirely new species, each has a history and an attitude, as well their own stat line that will influence how they and their vessel fight.

*ping*

Doors open. You in?

#2 - Command Levels

A key feature of Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark is its "command levels".

This is something you need to decide on early in the process of planning a battle, whether it's a solo mission or a fight against a human opponent (especially the latter), because it's what determines several of the core rules.

There are three command levels (CL). Command Level 1 is tactical fighter combat: space dogfighting, essentially. It's not, however, like X-Wing, because that's really a World War 2 dogfighting game that happens to be in space. Whilst I don't pretend that Infinite Dark is a 100% faithful reproduction of the experience of space combat, it does at least nod in that general direction. At CL1, vessels are far more manoeuvrable, whilst their weapons are generally less so. As a result, a pure combat will involve trying to manoeuvre to keep your weapons bearing on your enemy.

CL3 (we'll get to CL2) is the classic conflict of mighty battleships.  Think Full Thrust, Battlefleet Gothic, or Star Wars Armada. In this command level, vessels are far more ponderous in their manoeuvring, but are far more able to always have weapons pointing in the right direction. Pure combat is generally a slow attrition of the enemy's shields and armour.

Before we talk about CL2, it's worth mentioning that "pure combat" isn't really a thing in Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark. I'll talk about it in a future blog, but that game is mission oriented, which means players will usually be trying to achieve something other than the destruction of the enemy in order to claim victory.

And finally, let's talk about CL2.

CL2 is the hardest to define and the least well-represented in the existing range of space combat games but, as a result, I feel like it has the most to offer players. CL2 is the realm of long-range scouts, deep-space explorers, mining vessels and smugglers. In rules terms, it falls, predictably enough, in the mid-range for both mobility and firepower. But it has the most potential for interesting stories. Vessels like Serenity, Nostromo and the Millennium Falcon really thrive in CL2.

I'm looking forward to exploring all three command levels in their own dedicated supplements, but for now I hope this will get you started thinking about what kind of battle you may want to play most often.

#3 - Vessels

Although one of the things that makes Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark special are its pilots, there's no denying that you can't play the game without vessels.

I settled on "vessel" rather than "ship", because a ship has a technical definition that wouldn't apply to lots of the vessels you'll use in Infinite Dark. You may field a mighty carrier (undeniably a ship) or you may be putting out an orbital police mech (definitely not a ship). But all of them carry a pilot in one form or another, so they all count as a vessel.

Anyway, that aside, you'll want to know about things like classes and suchlike. Well, early in the design process, after suggestions from my patrons, I decided to ditch classes for vessels in Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark. "Classes" are things like "frigate", "cruiser" and "destroyer" and I realized that this didn't fit with the three command levels. But, more than that, it didn't even really make sense in the context of spaceship combat. For that matter, it barely makes sense in the context of modern naval warfare!

Instead, vessels in Infinite Dark, regardless of command level, are defined in terms of two primary stats: Mass and Power.

Mass is literally how big the vessel is. Bigger vessels can pack in more stuff and can take more damage, but they are also harder to manoeuvre.

Power, meanwhile, is about the reactor(s) that the vessel operates. Vessels with more power can be more certain of doing the thing they want to do, when they want to do it.

Both MAS and POW run on a scale from 1 to 3. So the smallest, weakest vessel in a fleet is MAS1/POW1, whilst the largest and more potent is MAS3/POW3. From the MAS and POW of a vessel, you also get its points cost: multiply them together.  So a MAS1/POW1 vessel costs 1 point, whilst a MAS3/POW3 vessels costs 9.

But not only that - it also tells you how many points you get to allocate to the vessel's stats. And we'll look at vessel stats next week.

#4 - Vessel Stats (not yet published on the blog)

If you've not read them yet, you might like to check out the elevator pitch for Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark, and learn about command levels and the basics of vessels.

This week, we're looking at stats and, if you've ever played a Precinct Omega game before (like Horizon Wars: Zero Dark), you'll instantly recognize the MFAD formula, although for vessels, this owes more to the original Horizon Wars battle game than it does to the later skirmish version.

M (Manoeuvre) is about how quickly and easily the vessel can change its speed and heading. It's important to note that M is not, itself, a vessel's speed. In space, other than the speed of light, there really aren't speed limits. Any vessel can travel as fast as its reserves of power will allow it to go. What counts is being able to increase and reduce that speed quickly and turn to travel in a new direction. In a vacuum, that latter part is really quite tricky. If you ramp up a vessel's speed to high and can't change direction quickly enough, you will literally fly off the table.

F (Firepower) or possibly just "fight" - I'm pretty easy. This obviously indicates the volume and accuracy of fire that a vessel can deliver. But it also covers off things like the vessel's ability to board or control another vessel.

A (Armour) is fairly self-explanatory, although not in the way you might expect. Armour has two main functions, although both make a vessel harder to damage, obviously enough. In the first instance, it's a modifier to the range to the vessel (because that's the target number for shooting). In the second, it also shows how many shields a vessel has. Invisible energy shields are a standard sci-fi trope and, in Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark, an enemy has to destroy a vessel's shields before they can damage the vessel itself.

D (Damage Control) is one of those stats that's distinctive to Horizon Wars games. Like Armour, it serves two functions. The first is to oppose incoming fire. This represents things like ablative armour, anti-missile guns, chaff and other strategies to bamboozle enemy firing computers. The second, though, is to fix and restore systems in the ship. If you want to repair shields or fix a damaged hull, you need to test your Damage Control.

All vessels have a basic stat of 2 in each of these stats, then a supply of points they can allocate to them, based on their MAS and POW.  And if you want to know more about those, you can read last week's blog.

Next week, though, we'll look at another factor that will influence the effectiveness of your vessels: their pilots!