Relic did not specifically set out to create a real-time strategy game; Garden and Relic were primarily focused on making a game with exciting large-scale space battles, and chose the genre in order to support that. As a result, they did not try to make innovative gameplay changes in the real-time strategy genre, but instead worked on making implementing the genre in a fully 3D space to make the space battles they envisioned. Garden told "Computer Games Magazine" in 1998 that "there's no sort of design philosophy behind it. The fact that it's real-time strategy was almost a fluke." The original "Star Wars" film trilogy was one of the game's primary inspirations, along with the 1970s television series "Battlestar Galactica": in a 1998 interview with "PC Zone", Garden stated that his original concept for the game was "a 3D game that looked like you were watching "Star Wars" but had a storyline like "Battlestar Galactica"". He drew further inspiration from correcting what he felt were the limitations of the first-person space flight game "". He felt that having the player control a ship from a cockpit view detracted from the feeling of the overall battles, and so chose to have the player control a whole fleet from an external view. According to art director Rob Cunningham, the visual design of the game was inspired by the sci-fi art by Peter Elson, Chris Foss, and John Harris, as well by "Star Wars" movies and Masamune Shirow. The vertical design of the mothership and the horizontal galaxy in the background were intended to give the player a visual alignment to orient themselves in 3D space.