Legends of Kalidasia is set to be released on January 25th 2017 and is currently available for Pre-Order. Learn more about the game here.

Legends of Kalidasia is all about capturing the feel of space combat. Warships that float have the problem that water is always fighting against their movement. To reduce the effect of water, a naval warship hull is designed to move in a certain direction through the water. In addition, naval warships are less stable when forces are applied against the design of the hull. Space craft effectively have neither of these issues and thus are capable of facing in a completely different direction than they are traveling.

From a game design perspective, representing this different facing is not hard, it has been done all sorts of ways by a variety of games over the years. The real challenge, though, is integrating into the gameplay in a way that is easy to track and does not add complexity. Heroes of the Heragul has done that.

When a warship activates, it selects one of five maneuvers. During a maneuver, the warship must turn itself around its center so that its engines can effectively perform that maneuver. Exactly what direction the warship would be facing depends on the details of the maneuver. However, since most warship weapons are mounted on limited mobility turrets and that each turn in Kalidasia actually represents a rather long time, we don’t need to concern ourselves with the details of its exact facing. It is assumed that at some point during its maneuver, it can get its weapons on target and still be able to completely execute its maneuver.

How Heroes of the Heragul handles this is with the concept of a “Combat Arc”. In the above image, which is a port turn, the warship is adjusting direction of the travel to the left. To accomplish this maneuver, its engines would need to face the right side of the token and its front face the left side of the token. A warship’s combat arc does not always point towards the front of its token. The green shaded box represents which side of token is the warships’ combat arc during this maneuver. Therefore, in this example, the warship can engage targets to the left side of its token during a port turn.

This might seem a little complicated, but it is easy to pick up. Warships in Kalidasia have their weapons mounted in only two different arcs: combat arcs and turret arcs. Since the designers of the warships know how maneuverable their ships are, there is no need to rely on archaic naval concepts like broadsides or rear arcs. A combat arc is fully capable of fulfilling any of those roles on a starship.

Legends of Kalidasia is set to be released on January 25th 2017 and is currently available for Pre-Order. Videos explaining the combat arc can be found here.