Where Meier's Civilization series accommodates pacifism, there isn't much to do with your Starships fleet on the galactic map except pick fights. The salient goal is to have a majority of the galaxy under your thumb-51%, and no less. Planets under your control confer resources each turn (food, industrial production, science, and energy) that can be spent on upgrades for your starships, or used towards buildings and world wonders that improve your production or military capabilities. From your home base, the fleet can be moved over to any adjacent planet with the press of a button, which triggers combat missions that award points towards bringing the planet into the fold of your empire. The titular starships form a single roving fleet on the game's galactic map, and act as the lone controllable unit. The abstracted galaxy doesn't try very hard to sell the sci-fi setting. I can turn aside the quick and obvious assaults on PC sensibilities-the rough graphics, the lack of options-but it's the cynical design that guts me, in the end. It's not those issues that really put me off of Starships, but rather the way it seems to aspire to that narrow, dated idea of what makes a "good" mobile game. Its sci-fi galaxy is mostly abstracted, and its unit models are simple and blocky. On PC, it unfurls in a tablet's compacted, low resolution window, and there are no graphical settings to massage. And the first things you notice about it are the various ways it seems visually bottlenecked by its tablet version. Starships happens to actually be a mobile game-the kind that harks to those days of yore, when "mobile" equated to "simplistic." It released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and iPad, and in more-or-less the same form to boot. But in some circles you can still hear the old backhanded compliment being leveled at games like Sid Meier's Starships. I don't cotton to those implications, not anymore: Mobile games have achieved too much, broken too many molds. Drag a distracted finger across a screen a few times, and kill, conquer, level up…all between stops on the train. A sort of euphemism for alleging that a game was baser somehow, that in exchange for a shallow, compulsive high it asked little of a player save the odd microtransaction. They are similar in many ways to those seen in Human Extinction Simulator, a game which is more focused on delivering some hard challenges for gamers to solve.īut Starships is unique because it links the combat moments via the Star Trek-inspired strategies layer, which packs a sense of discovery and adventure that many space-focused titles fail to deliver.Ĭivilization fans might not love the new spin-off when they first meet it, but in many ways, it feels like a fresher experience than Beyond Earth was on launch."This would be good as a mobile game" was, historically, some pretty faint praise. The tactical battles in the new Sid Meier video game are not particularly difficult, especially on the Normal difficulty that most gamers use, but they do offer plenty of depth for gamers who want to take the time to perfect their strategies and get the highest possible score. Starships shares some ideas with Human Extinction Simulator In the new Firaxis title, problems are solved with lasers and ships and that's awesome for a long-time science fiction fan who was always disappointed with the relatively limited use of firepower on the TV show. This is the best part of the game for me because it strongly reminds me of Star Trek, specifically The Next Generation, and the way each episode, especially in the earlier seasons, was focused on one alien race and its predicaments. When a new campaign is started, gamers will have one planet, fully developed (by one of the factions from Civilization: Beyond Earth, given the names of the leaders and the fact that they belong to an Affinity from that other Firaxis title), and a fleet of two ships (there's one setup choice that can add another).įor the first few turns of Sid Meier's Starships, gamers will basically do quests for other planets, trying to balance the limited resources they have and the limited strength of their ships with the need to secure the allegiance of as many neutral worlds as possible. When Sid Meier's Starships was first announced, it seemed like a more traditional 4X experience but focused on the planets and systems that populate a galaxy rather than the cities and continents of a world, but it will take very little time for those who get the new title to see that it offers a new experience with a focus on the fleet as the main player-controlled element.
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