Hi all! First post.
I'm currently designing a tactical space combat game called Silent Fury, and I'm having trouble coming up with generic victory conditions. Now, most of the game will be scenario-based and victory conditions will be based on the scenario itself, but I'd love to establish some sort of guidelines for building a scenario's victory conditions, since many of the games I play right now are just for playtesting.
I'll try to give enough detail here so you guys can be helpful without making this post too long.
Silent Fury has a detailed damage model for ships - ships are composed of individual components. Each component has an equal chance of being hit when the ship is attacked, and if a component is already destroyed then further hits against it don't do any more damage. The result is a system where it's actually detrimental to try and pound on a ship until it's completely dead - I was tired of 'hitpoint' systems where the best tactic was to pig-pile on a unit until it died and move onto the next. So the overall effect is that ships almost never die - if you shoot an already-crippled ship, you're likely to hit a component that's already destroyed, so it's better to shoot a ship that's undamaged.
I like this effect, as I think it's pretty neat tactically and you end up with damaged and crippled ships (or near-lifeless hulks) floating off into space.
However, since ships don't generally die, a 'fight to the finish' would take too long. I need end-game conditions that finish the game at a reasonable point.
Ships have crew teams aboard for damage control and component operation, and there are boarding actions, so ships can be captured.
In the main playtest scenario, we've played until one of three things happens: Either 15 crew on one side are killed, two ships (out of four per side) have all their engines destroyed, or one ship on either side is captured. This has worked pretty well overall, but it doesn't do everything I want. Sometimes in a slugfest we hit the crew killed limit for one side or the other when there was about to be a very cool boarding action that we then don't get to resolve.
In terms of overall feel, it's a bit like a naval game where two sides slug it out, some ships are in worse shape than others, but many will get away with varying degrees of damage rather than be sunk. How do we figure out who won that sort of thing?
Ideally, I'd like there to be some motivation for players (like real ship captains) to withdraw their damaged ships from the battle (perhaps by making capturing an enemy ship worth a lot no matter what condition it's in, so to avoid capture you get the ship out of there).
In case you're wondering, the level of detail means that the scenarios aren't large in terms of numbers of ships - my brother and I can usually finish a game with four ships per side in about two hours, and that'll probably be a typical scenario size.
The way damage works is there are three levels of damage - light, heavy, and destroyed.
Components with light or heavy damage can be operated as normal (weapons may fire, engines may run) at full effect - however if you do this, you may incur further damage. Light and heavy damage can be repaired by the crew over the course of the battle and restored to full functionality.
Destroyed components generally stay destroyed and cannot be operated.
There are also three special damage effects like powered down (inoperable), fires (cause further damage and more fires), and hull breaches (increases chance of crew death, hinders crew movement). These can be repaired as well.
Ships with no engines maintain their current velocity (this is space after all) and tend to drift away.
You're probably right in that my best bet is to just keep scenario-specific victory conditions - capture ship X or not does work pretty well.