Battleships Forever

Battleships Forever is an indie real-time tactics game heavily inspired by Warning Forever, where the player is controlling spaceships. The main game has an eight-mission campaign (the ninth and tenth missions are not yet completed) but the real draw is the ability to create your own spaceships using the bundled Ship Maker program, and a wide array of custom sprites.

Available here.

The series provides examples (sometimes near-prime examples) of:

 * Artificial Stupidity: The AI for your ships isn't the brightest and custom ships can throw the AI completely off. Thankfully this isn't too much of an issue as you can control your ships position, facing and targeting quite easily.
 * Asteroid Thicket: Asteroid thickets can be utilized to the player's advantage. They can serve as impromptu barriers to hide behind, and when they are destroyed they create small "meteors" than can damage any ship they collide with. If your ship has a Gravbeam Projector installed, it can be used to hurl the meteors into enemy ships.
 * Attack Its Weak Point: "Aegis" deflectors are totally invulnerable until you destroy the generator elsewhere on the ship, with one exception; striking the shielded section for more damage than it has health with a single attack. This is because the Aegis deflector constantly resets the target section's HP to the maximum value every frame (30 times a second, assuming no slowdown), but if the damage dealt in a single frame exceeds that maximum HP value, the section is destroyed as normal.
 * Battleship Raid: The "Leviathan" scenario. Nothing but your fleet and a gigantic alien battle station.
 * Beam Spam: The Oenone-class destroyer is designed to bring this to bear. The Cronus battleship has even more lasers.
 * Cognizant Limbs: As with Warning Forever, every individual section, module or weapon can be targeted, allowing you to pick ships apart.
 * Cutscene Power to the Max: The final mission, Stronghold, has a formation of five ships using deflector shields to form an impenetrable frontal line. It doesn't work as well once the attack starts from all directions.
 * Deflector Shields: Two types are available. One shields any section from damage for a limited time while the other shields one section without fail.
 * Escape Pod: Nagaya uses them whenever her craft gets destroyed.
 * Escort Mission: Several in the campaign. Usually the enemy leaves the civilian ships alone as soon as you show up, so they're quite manageable.
 * Game Mod: What the new series of weapons and fancy features started off as, essentially.
 * Hold the Line
 * Leitmotif: One particular piece of music always plays when a giant alien battleship jumps in to kick your butt.
 * Old School Dogfighting
 * Macross Missile Massacre: The modified Hestia Delta's preferred method of attacking, using six Mini Missile Launchers.
 * Marathon Boss: Nagaya's flagship in "Siege". It packs 4 deflectors and an unreasonable amount of armor, and maneuvers like a patrol boat despite its size, so that those 4 deflectors will always be facing you. His ship also packs several particle guns that will shoot down your attacks before they reach him, and he circle-strafes constantly so that (since your ships don't Lead the Target), most of your shots will miss. Finally, once you finally outflank his deflectors, destroy his flak guns, outmaneuver his dodging, and blow off a piece of armor, it explodes with such force that he will rebound around the battlefield wildly, doing nothing but wasting time. Even when all his weapons and deflectors are gone, the bouncing makes it take forever to actually kill him.
 * More Dakka: Flak guns, pulse guns, and other "interceptor" guns are designed to shoot down bullets with other bullets. Lots and lots of other bullets. Then there's the Gatling Pulse and Gatling Blaster.
 * The Vulcan Cannon.
 * Numerical Hard: Enemy health is adjusted according to difficulty, being either 40%, 100% or 150%. This amount alone can be a difference between an instant kill and a fast kill.
 * Recursive Ammo: Conventional and Nuclear MIRV/Cluster Missiles. Also, the Gosling Launcher.
 * Rule of Cool: The Missile Command or Homeworld missile/thruster trails.
 * Shooting Superman: "Stronghold" kicks off with a scripted battle as a cleverly arranged formation uses their deflectors to block all attacks from one direction. Fine. Then, 3 battleships which are immune to attack from the front jump in, and the commander orders his fleet to keep firing and hold their formation, rather than attack from an angle that could actually damage them. And the formation was useless anyway, because two of the battleships started in positions that outflanked it. Thanks for leaving the player with 3 undamaged enemy battleships tearing up the base, Mr. Unnamed Commander!
 * Space Based Weapon Has Cutoff Range
 * Space Is an Ocean: Partly justified for being a 2D game.
 * Space Is Noisy
 * Space Friction
 * Spread Shot: The Autocannon and Particle Cannon are Exploding Shot types. In the former case, the submunitions are launched forwards, and in the latter, backwards.
 * Timed Mission: The second mission has a timer of 5 minutes. Destroying half the platforms produces a "What's taking you so long" comment, even if you do so within 1 minute.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The MIRV missile system definitely counts, especially so when the Tactical Nuke Submunitions are equipped.
 * Tractor Beam: The Gravbeam Projector.
 * Villain Override: Sort of. Direct Control modes allow you to take more precise control of a ship's movement, and if it was set up correctly, manual control of it's weapons as well (which run in automatic/normal AI mode otherwise). This doesn't automatically make a ship amazingly good in a fight, but the AI was already outmatched. Allowing the player to compensate for the AI's inability to lead projectile shots and allowing them to dodge enemy projectiles quite effectively is just adding insult to injury.
 * Word of God: Right here, right now.