Solo Space Campaign: Opening Battle

I've played about four different battles in order to playtest my newest solo game Greater Space Battles.  I feel like the rules are pretty much set now although vastly altered from the version posted on my downloads page.  Eventually I'll get the new and improved version (featuring momentum conservation) uploaded.

I'm quite happy with the rules.  In fact, during one evening last week I found myself staying up until 2AM finishing a game.  I haven't become that enthralled in a game since my high school days, nearly two decades ago.  With the ship-to-ship combat mechanics hammered out, the next step is to run a campaign.

The campaign features two opposing factions: the Hilherndon League and the Traughbo's Cluster Vassalry.  The rest of the fluff is at the end of the post, after the star map; first let's get on with the nuts-and-bolts...

I rolled three six-sided dice for each faction, generating the X, Y, and Z coordinates of their home system group.  The star map below shows the coordinates for each system as well as their Spheres of Influence.  Spheres of Influence, labeled SOI on the map, start at 1 for each and describe each faction's ability to project "hard", i.e. military power.  The goal of the campaign is for one faction to reduce the opposing faction's SOI to 0.

Factions raise their spheres of influence by resource acquisition, whether from exploring new systems, establishing and maintaining treaties with lesser kingdoms, or espionage.  All of this is beyond the scope of the solo campaign and is distilled into a simple die roll.  The die roll may face negative modifiers however, based on losses  incurred in space battles.  Up to six (randomly determined) space battles are fought between every SOI roll.  If a faction suffers significant losses in a battle it may (another random roll) receive a -1 modifier to the next SOI roll.  Therefore a faction may incur anywhere from a 0 to a -6 modifier to its SOI roll.  A modified d6 roll which is above a faction's current SOI results in an increase of 1 to its sphere of influence.  A modified roll which fails to exceed the current SOI results in the sphere of influence remaining the same.  A modified roll resulting in a negative number however decreases the sphere of influence by 1.

There will always be at least one battle between SOI rolls.  For the first battle of this campaign period I rolled the coordinates of Beta Murronus VI, the location of the encounter.  The coordinates(X: 4, Y: 3, Z: 3) mean the system is distance 5 (4.690) from the Hilherndon League and distance 4 (3.742) from The Traughbo's Cluster Vassalry.  Next I rolled three six sided dice and chose the lowest one to determine the Strategic Significance of the system.  The result was a 4 (a fairly important resource-laden system).  Despite this lucky roll (a 4, 4, and 6), I'm purposely trying to skew the results toward smaller values since it's the opening phase of the war.  At the middle phase I will roll three dice and choose the middle value to determine strategic significance.  At the end of the war I'll choose the highest of the three dice rolled.  Thus the battles should grow in size.  So what is the strategic significance score?  It simply shows the number of d6's summed to determine the size of a faction's task force/squadron.

Since the strategic significance is 4, normally I would roll 4d6 and add them together to get the total size of a faction's strike force.  First however, I had to modify the rolls to account for each faction's ability to project power that far away.  The Hilherndon League's sphere of influence of 1 minus the distance of 5 to the target system resulted in a (1 - 5 = -4) four dice penalty to the force size roll.  I therefore rolled 8d6 and discarded the four highest dice, only adding the scores of the four remaining dice.  The Traughbo's Cluster Vassalry's distance of 4 with a Sphere of Influence of only 1 resulted in 3 penalty dice; I rolled 7d6 and discarded the three highest dice, summing the remaining four.  Coincidentally both rolls summed to 8, so the two opposing spaceship forces are identical in size.  Due to the system's strategic significance (4), four dice will always be summed, yielding a fleet size of 4 to 24.  The meager spheres of influence of the opposing factions greatly skews the result to the low end of the spectrum.

My rules set groups ships into size classes, with 1 being the smallest hull and 5 the largest.  The dice roll described in the paragraph above indicates the total size of all the ships in the squadron.  In this case both forces have ships whose combined size totals 8.  I rolled a d6 for the Hilherndon League and got a 4, followed by another roll and other 4.  The League's force therefore consists of two size class 4 ships.  For the Vassalry's forces I rolled a 4, then a 6.  There are no size 6 ships so I rerolled and got a 1.  Since I had only enough size left for a class 1, 2, or 3 ship, I randomly determined between the three and got a 3.  So the Vassalry's fields a three ship force consisting of a size 4 heavy cruiser, a size 3 light cruiser, and a size 1 frigate.

That's it; the stage is set for the first battle of the campaign.  As you can see, this whole method is just an exercise in dice rolling.  I tried however, to create some kind of framework to the dice rolls, a framework that will change based upon the successes and failures of the opposing factions.  I think it will work.  If I remember correctly, Star Fleet Battles, and its successor Federation Commander, use five ascending size classes; this system could therefore support a solo campaign if you're using those rules to fight your battles.

Space Campaign, Period 1, Battle 1

The setting uses the feudalism-in-space trope as in Dune, and the role-playing game settings Traveller and SpaceMaster among others.  Faster-than-light travel exists, but starships require days if not weeks in order to make "probability jumps" to other systems.  More importantly superluminal communication does not exist.  Feudalism therefore makes the most sense to me.  I've taken it one step further: in my setting spaceships are hereditary, controlled by lords and manned by vassals.  These lords in turn pledge their support to even greater lords, who control the resources to make interstellar travel possible.  A typical greater lord would be one whose family has acquired a large fleet of sublight spaceships over the centuries, allowing the bloodline to monopolize a system's resources.  The "kingdom" of the typical greater lord consists not only of baronies on the habitable worlds of a system, but more importantly of the interstellar ships pledging their allegiance to him or her.  Alien intelligences have never been discovered in the thousand plus years of human exploration, however remains of civilizations have been.  People still report "lights in the sky" and the major religion revolves around the concept of unseen extraterrestrial benefactors.  Disagreements on key points fracture the religion; the major argument lies in the nature of the benefactors: simply highly evolved aliens, divine beings, machine intelligences, etc.  A sizable portion of the interstellar human population scoffs at the notion of any "benefactors".