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I’m not that good at the game.When you’re first setting out from your homeworld with a two-ship fleet to win independent planets over to your cause before rival empires do, mission variety is pretty good: escorting a friendly ship to a destination, preventing an enemy from reaching theirs, navigating a maze of asteroids while handicapped by a limited view distance, taking out a VIP enemy ship, hunting stealth fighters – there are quite a few. I’ve had missions tell me I had a 40 percent chance of winning, only to have me win the battle in the first turn. Each mission, you can ask the game for details and receive a “You have X percent chance of success.” These predictions are apparently pulled at random out of a hat. There are also some quirks with the game’s win/loss predictions. The game should look better than it does. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s a budget title, because of the short time-scale this was made in, or because it needs to run on both PCs and tablets. The maps themselves are better, though you’re bound to notice some low-res textures on occasion. The typeface, the colors, the use of empty space, it’s just not very attractive. This is far from the company’s peak (which I’d pinpoint as the minimalist design used in Civilization V). It looks like menu design from ten or fifteen years ago-definitely not the level of production I’d expect out of Firaxis. Even more so than Civilization: Beyond Earth, the UI elements in Starships look…ugly. For one, it could use a major upgrade in the art/UI department. I do have a few small knocks against Starships. Starships takes the same idea and applies it to the turn-based genre. Part of what makes games like League of Legends or Hearthstone so appealing is they present strategy gaming on a small, contained scale. It’s that couple-of-hours scope and that feeling of personal skill growth in particular that will keep me coming back to Starships. That means you can iterate on your own strategies quickly, getting better at the game by learning from your own mistakes instead of counting on reading other people’s mistakes to make you a better player. If you lose in Starhips, there very well might be time for another match the same night. Do you use your funds to make lots of small, underpowered ships so you can fire more times per turn? Or do you focus on two or three behemoths, knowing you’ll knock out an enemy ship with each shot but you’ll also take more damage if battle has to go on longer? Or do you make every ship in your fleet ultra-maneuverable, allowing for guerilla tactics within asteroid fields?īut the best part is, as I said, that you don’t need to know any of those answers going in to Starships-most of all because losing isn’t quite as painful as it is after you’ve put thirty hours into a game of Civilization. Each ship in your fleet can only fire weapons once per turn. Do you drill down on shield technology, making your shields gradually more efficient? Add better hull armor to your ships?Īnd your ships have the same levels of customizability, though they draw from a separate pool of funds (energy). There are only ten or so technologies, all available at the start, and each one has an immediate impact on your ship stats. In Starships, you still research new technologies-but there is no tech tree. And what’s the best strategy? To take the research penalty and get advanced tech early on, or to diversify early and often? There are so many choices, and you don’t really know what any of them do. In Civilization, the tech tree is always a massive, intimidating mess during your first game. With a limited number of systems, you’re forced to come up with clever strategies by making do with what you’ve got. If Civilization is a game where depth arises from an infinite number of choices, Starships is a game where depth arises because of the rule constraints. Which is not to say there’s no depth to Starships. You can pop in, start playing, and within one or two games understand what’s going on. Unlike Civilization or Total War, where you might spend hours reading up on various strategies trying to get a handle on the game’s inner workings, Starships is immediately accessible. It might sound complicated laid out in words, but it’s beautifully simple in practice. If you capture another Federation’s home territory (which is a massive battle) then you get all their territory and knock them out of the game. Gain four bars of influence (by completing more missions, purchasing influence with energy, or taking shore leave/ending your turn at a location) and the planet becomes part of your Federation’s territory. Defeat the pirates (or, occasionally, complete tasks on an objective-based map) and you’ll gain influence with the planet.
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