Every Ship Counts

There's a moment in most space RTS games where your fleet hits a certain size and the individual ships stop mattering. You've got a hundred and fifty units selected, you right-click the enemy blob, and whoever brought more stuff wins. I've played those games for years and I love them. But the moment where I lose track of my own ships has always bothered me.

The Outer Line is my attempt to make a space RTS where that moment never comes.

The idea is simple: keep the fleets small enough that every ship has a name you recognize, a role you chose, and a death that hurts. Early game you might have a handful of ships. Mid game, maybe a dozen or so. Late game, with a fully upgraded Mobile Shipyard and a couple of Shipyard structures producing in parallel, you're looking at a few dozen at most. That's your whole fleet. That's your entire military capacity for a conflict that spans multiple Gravity Wells.

This isn't a technical limitation. It's the core design choice everything else is built on.

When you only have a small fleet and you lose a few in a bad engagement, you feel it immediately. Your patrol routes have gaps. Your next attack has less firepower. That Destroyer you lost had been in your fleet since the opening minutes and it had abilities you were counting on. The replacement coming out of your Shipyard won't be ready for another minute, and the enemy knows you're weakened right now.

I wanted that weight. Every engagement should feel like it matters because the stakes are real, not because the game tells you it's an important mission.

Eight classes, eight roles

The fleet is built from eight ship classes, divided into three weight categories. Light ships are cheap, fast, and fragile. Medium ships are the backbone. Heavy ships are expensive commitments that can anchor a battle or cost you the war if you overinvest.

Frigates are your scouts and harassers. They're the first ships you build, the ones you send into unknown Gravity Wells to see what's there. Destroyers hit harder and earn their keep escorting your heavier assets. The Cruiser sits at the center of most mid-game fleets, versatile enough to adapt to whatever the enemy brings. Heavy Cruisers are more specialized, built for fleet support and coordination rather than direct combat. Battlecruisers push through defensive lines, offensive tanks that absorb punishment while your lighter ships work the flanks. Support Ships keep your fleet in the fight, repairing damaged ships and restoring crippled hardpoints mid-battle. And then the Battleship: a slow siege platform that dominates the space it occupies, as long as nobody flanks it.

And then there's the Dreadnought, but that's a late-game story for another devlog.

Each class has its own energy pool, its own set of four operational protocols (more on those in a future devlog), and its own hardpoint loadout. A Frigate moves differently, fights differently, and fills a completely different role than a Battleship. It doesn't just have less health.

The challenge of small numbers

I won't pretend this is easy to balance. When you have hundreds of ships, one being slightly overpowered doesn't break the game. When you have a dozen or so, it does. A Cruiser that's a little too cost-efficient means nobody builds Destroyers. A Battleship that's a little too slow means nobody brings one to an offensive push.

I'm still working through this. The balancing pass is ongoing and will probably continue right up until release. What I can say is that the design goal is clear: every class should have a reason to exist in at least some fleet compositions. If I ever look at my test games and see that nobody builds Support Ships, that's a problem I need to fix.

Three factions, three philosophies

The Outer Line has three playable factions, and they don't just get different paint jobs. Each faction's ships reflect a different shipbuilding philosophy.

The United Solar Federation builds balanced, reliable ships. No dramatic strengths, no dramatic weaknesses. They're the baseline, and if you're learning the game, a solid starting point.

Heavy is what the Orion Industrial League does. Their ships have thicker hulls and can take more punishment, but they're slower. An ORI fleet holds ground. It doesn't chase.

The Nexus Energy Compact is the most fragile and the most punishing to fight. Their shields are the best in the game, regenerating faster and absorbing more punishment, but under those shields the hulls are thin. When the shields go down on a NEC ship, things get bad quickly.

These differences compound with the small fleet size. Picking a faction isn't cosmetic. It changes how you build your fleet, how you fight, and what you're afraid of.

Why this might work

I grew up playing Sins of a Solar Empire, Homeworld, Empire at War. They're brilliant games and I'm not trying to compete with them. They handle massive fleets and huge empires in ways I couldn't replicate as a solo developer even if I wanted to.

But I kept coming back to this feeling that I wanted to care about my ships. I wanted to know that the Destroyer on my left flank was the same one that survived the raid on the enemy's Supply Nodes three Gravity Wells ago. Losing a Battleship should feel like losing a chess piece, not a drop in the ocean.

That's what I'm building toward. I don't know if it works perfectly yet. Every playtest teaches me something new, and the numbers shift every time I sit down with it. But the core feeling is there, and every system in the game, from hardpoint targeting to the energy pool to the modular Mobile Shipyard, is designed to reinforce it.

Next time I'll talk about hardpoint targeting, the system that lets you choose exactly how to take an enemy ship apart. Pick the right hardpoint and a Cruiser stops shooting back before it stops moving.