https://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tactical
They do some nifty things with letting you use kinetic to constrain the maneuver of your opponent so you can better employ your lasers, etc.
It provides a good intro on how to deal with 3D vectors in a 2D boardgame
At first I thought the original post was about the first video game ever made, Spacewar!!
Play Spacewar! online: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/
A recent stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD6cyXdXyzs
Custom designs are insanely more powerful than the builtin ones. Either design a fission plant with super high temp cooler side (to keep your radiators small) and then go full laser star or make sandblaster railguns. 1g nuggets of stuff blasted as fast as possible with ridiculous rate of fire simply ablate through any armor anyone can design.
Or just design a gun that shoots guns that shoots guns that shoots guns that shoot nukes.
The time when they didn't consider the pressure of tritium inside a nuke was hilarious. One could design a basic implosion nuke -> fill it with absolutely insane amount of tritium and make a few tens of kilos weighing 10 gigaton nuke or whatnot. And then just watch the fireworks.
I really love that game. The shenanigans one can pull off.
It's a more realistic space game than Kerbal Space Program and focuses on orbital combat. It does have a steep learning curve since it is literally rocket science, but if you've played KSP or other games with realistic orbital mechanics, you'll be able to pick up the core aspects easily.