I love space battles and am surprised there’s not a whole genre of games spawned from Homeworld around '3D Chess' strategy where you rely on orbital mechanics to win. Bring Ian Banks Contact or Star Wars battles to life under a plot of humanity being hunted to the brink of extinction. I'm pay good money for a 3D strategy game that builds on Homeworld design by adding ‘rock/paper/scissors’ unit tactics from Starcraft 2, the atmosphere of Three Body Problem or The Last Angel, and huge capital ships of FreeSpace 2. Send your fleet into a hostile solar system to destro orbiting shipyards, or try to hold a solar system against an invading armada where you can’t save every planet. You’d invest limited resources to build say 1-3 capital ships which are dependent on a screen of specialist railgun ships, anti-missile ships and carriers. Feel free to build this as I’m not a games dev.

There are so many cool 3D tactics available, similar to the 2D Into the Breach, eg a space station can defend a whole region of space with beam weapons, but you can launch an asteroid at it that makes it vulnerable for a short window, detonate a precious gravity weapon, or sacrifice ships to get a railgun ship close. A railgun ship can kill a capital ship, but only if you can close enough to fire. Capital ships beat all small ships, but are slow. For example, charging 10 carriers down into a planetary gravity well to take out an orbiting space station, sacrificing them all to bring one dedicated railgun ship close enough for a killshot.

I can see a huge payoff for learning basic orbital mechanics and ambush tactics to overcome a superior force, eg commit ships to an attack by accelerating them on a path that may take several minutes to play out, and manoeuvre in a ‘bullet hell’ of slow-moving missiles. Homeworld was too focused on ‘just click it with ships’. I want to pick the right ships for the job, a la Witcher potions. Then I need to use them strategically, eg attacking front-on means I’ll face a powerful front shield and lose, but if I setup a pincer movement from two directions I can target their rear weak shield and win.

Envision a mission to say, commit genocide by glassing every planet in a solar system with asteroid strikes. You can pick one planet to take out with a surprise asteroid attack, but defensive orbital space stations then protect the remaining planets, so you need to bring your fleet into the system. Deep in the system are slow-moving capital ships that will kill any small ship they catch.

General ideas below:
- Capital ships cannot accelerate quickly, leading to hit and run tactics where you fight where their capital ships are not. If your capital ship dies, you die, but you can use it to turn the tide of battle.
- Stealth ships and ‘glass cannon’ ships, eg an unshielded missile ship that can kill everything but dies in one hit. Do you commit ships on an approach course to that high value carrier, or is it protected by an invisible fleet of stealth ships?
- Most weapons take time to take act and everything has a multiple ’hard counters’, eg a gravity weapon that destroys a large area but needs the firing ship to be protected, stationary, for 30 seconds to trigger. ECM ships expose stealth ships but have no weaponry and stop working under missile fire.
- Tradeoffs between shield/armour vs engine and weaponry, eg some ships can only shield one side, so a ship is safe against a single target but will die against multiple targets. Shields are limited and some can’t be used while the main engine is running, but kinetic weapons can one-shot your ship once shields are down. A railgun ship is a sitting duck for 10 seconds before it can fire.
- WW1 biplane and naval battles eg get up close behind an enemy ship and shred it’s shield weak spot, missile ships that work best up close but are useless at a distance, countermeasure ships.
- Billiard ball ship momentum, eg fast ships can fly in quickly for a safe flyby but then need to turn around and decelerate, while slow ships become easy targets once capital ships deplete their shields. You have to send your slow ships first, then launch the fast ones to overshoot them.
- Missions with fast scouts or asteroids as weapons by accelerating them to 90% of light speed beforehand, aiming them like billiard balls with planetary flybys, but you need to base your entire strategy around them. Eg a shoot asteroids at a deep space station. They’ll arrive in 5 minutes, but the space station will see the attack a minute out and shut down shields in order to move out of the way. Do you accelerate your fleet to 10% lightspeed to get there quickly, knowing that each ship will have time for only one shot? Or do you go in slowly, hoping you can kill it before the arrival of two capital ships coming out of the gravity well?
- Orbital choices matter, gravity wells are slow to escape, so fast ships can only change orbit slowly or through planetary slingshots. You can match speed with an enemy fleet, but you can also send ships from the other direction at high speed to discover stealth ships or snipe their capitals. Ships are often weak in one direction, so you have to pincer them before they can surround you.
- So many great scifi plots to draw on, especially around forbidden weapons, AI and an Ian Banks-style technological race against far-superior aliens.