Developer: Firaxis Games
Publisher: 2K
Rrp: £10.99
Released: 12th March 2015
Available on Steam
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Sid Meier’s Starships is a turn based space strategy game spin off of the 4X title Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth and can be bought as a bundle with the aforementioned game. Sadly this game doesn’t tie into its parent title in anyway beyond the theme and name, which I feel is a real shame. It would have been cool to earn some in game rewards in Beyond Earth for actions performed in Starships.
At the start of the game you are given a few choices to make starting with what affinity you wish to be; Supremacy, Harmony or Purity. Depending on what affinity you’ve chosen you are granted a special bonus like receiving double the resource rewards when completing a quest.
Once you’ve picked an affinity you’re ready to pick a leader, there are eight to chose from each giving yet another special bonus.
Its on this screen that you can also select the map size, number of opponents, difficulty and what type of victory you can win by.
There are five resources to gather, energy, metals, science and food. Energy is used to upgrade your fleet either through buying more ships or upgrading the components of the existing ones, as you can imagine the better your fleet the more well you fare in combat. Metals are spent on planets you control to make improvements which will increase the amount of resources those planets produce. The science resource allows you to research new technologies for your fleet. Food is spent on creating more cities on your planets increasing population and therefore level of production. Finally there’s credits, these are a currency that you earn through completing missions and can be used to buy more resources as well as influence.
As your fleet travels from planet to planet you will also be given the chance to take on missions that, if successfully completed, will give you some influence over the planet (thus increasing the amount of resource producers you have) as well as pay you a certain amount of credits.
Missions come in a few different flavors such as defending a planet or defeating marauders but will always result in a space battle. To spice things up a little each battle is given a special condition, perhaps this battle torpedoes are undetectable or maybe the asteroids are dissipating. The battles themselves happen on a hexagon shaped tile based battlefield, these battlefields seem to be randomly generated seeding warp gates, planets and asteroid belts across the small maps.
I’ve mentioned influence a few times now so perhaps I should tell you what I mean. Influence is the, well… influence you have over a planet. The level of the influence you maintain is indicated by a ring that surrounds the planet, this ring is separated into four portions. If you fill all four portions of the ring that planet joins your federation. Completing a mission for a planet immediately fills two portions and ending your turn (called shore leave) with your fleet over a planet fills a portion as well. You can also buy influence with the credits you earned meaning that if you’re rich enough you can essentially buy a planets loyalty.
Here’s where the game is a bit different to most other turn based strategies, you have a limited number of moves your fleet can make. This is shown as a moral meter, with each movement of the fleet your moral ticks down, once it reaches red you have to go on shore leave (end your turn). Thankfully you can manage the planets you bring under your control without having to have your fleet there so you don’t have to waste moral trying to get to a city just to construct a building.
This title was being developed as a tablet game at the same time and it really shows, at the risk of sounding like Totalbiscuit the options menu is sparse to say the least. No graphical settings beyond a full screen mode toggle and even then its not truly full screen leaving the taskbar visible at the bottom of the screen. Even putting that aside, the very way the game’s UI is laid out makes it patiently obvious that this game was developed with a tablet in mind. Personally I have no issue with games being developed for multiple platforms so long as it doesn’t effect the experience of the user, and this one certainly does.
I’m probably going to be in the minority of people that actually enjoyed this game. As much as I love a 4X strategy sometimes its good to have something a little lighter, and this certainly delivers that. There’s no tech tree, diplomacy boils down to saying ‘yeah I want to be allies’ and there’s no micromanagement of resources. Its simple and if you can get past all that quite enjoyable, if somewhat short lived.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Endless Space
Pandora: First Contact
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth
