Space Warfare - a road not taken

Early in development, I wanted Firelock 198X to have more than just ground and helicopter warfare. Fixed-wing air support and space warfare were two attempts at creating support elements that would aid your army on the tabletop even if they were not permanently situated on it.

Some of the earliest design work on the game- predating the colorized MS Paint tokens that have been the Tabletop Simulator version's go-to placeholder art for a couple years- was in space warfare cards. These were strictly mockups; no system existed at the time. I was envisioning a sort of double-blind, rock-paper-scissors setup: you wouldn't know what card the enemy was playing until after you had committed your own asset.

The primary role of space warfare was to permit observation. A spy satellite could reveal the enemy's positions without their ground air defense being able to do anything about it. In turn, various space combat systems (armed capsules and antisat missiles) could prevent this with their own drawbacks.

In time, these evolved into some (artless) testing assets:

Federal space assets.

Luparic space assets. The idea was that since they could hardly sustain blackwater warfare the way the Feds can, they'd focus on seizing equipment rather than bringing it with them.

The lupar even had a (colorless) page splash to that end:

Honestly, I might end up throwing this back into their army book even though it's totally meaningless for their listed forces. It just goes hard.

Space warfare was something I really enjoyed on the thematic level, but mechanically it didn't work. The fundamental problem was that it was basically a totally separate minigame you'd play every turn. Fixed-wing aircraft have to still overfly the board, and can thus be harmed by ground air defenses, target specific ground units, etc.- they're an active participant in the battle. Spacecraft sat in a corner playing rock-paper-scissors, and the reward was (presumably) fielding a spy satellite to keep giving you free board peeks. There was an attempt at meshing them into the fixed-wing ecosystem, but that felt wrong- a spacecraft is not "High Altitude"; it's in space; having them be just another form of aircraft with a few targeting restrictions would suck.

So that you wouldn't overly drain from your army's points cap to pay for units that were useless in the actual battle, all spacecraft ended up being around 5 points. That sat poorly for what were supposed to be advanced vehicles, whose crew had The Right Stuff.

Ultimately space warfare didn't make the cut. I hated to part with something so cool, but the game was made worse by it. The Drekfort isn't done with space yet, though. It'll just need its own room to grow.