Sid Meier’s Starships takes all the things you love about Civ and shaves off some of the complication, most of the time consumption and places gamers in the middle of space to play a fun game of RISK. What more could you want from a $14.99 game? For someone like me, it’s enough entertainment in a short amount of time that will keep me coming back for more.
That’s really where Starships stands.
The gameplay is respectful to the genius that Sid Meier’s games are known for. The game throws you into a territorial hungry section of space, where different factions do their best to cooperate or simply go to war and conquer. You start the game by choosing between three different factions: Supremacy, Harmony or Purity. Within each faction is a total of 8 leaders to choose from. For example, in my first game of Starships, I went with the Harmony faction, which are peaceful folks that just want to make love and not war. By choosing this faction, I had the advantage of my ships being repaired at half the cost. So, if you didn’t catch that immediately and make your own assumption, choosing a faction actually gives you an advantage in some way, shape or form.
Having chosen Harmony, I then selected Fielding (she’s a cool lady) as my go-to person, and by choosing her I received an additional 50 credit earning per city each turn (I didn’t build cities the first go around, so I wasted that opportunity). With each leader there comes a reward to help you out during the game. That is some good motivation to take your time when choosing the appropriate leader for your faction and to pick someone who best helps to fit your strategic nature.
Once chosen, the game sends you straight into the thick of things. You’re given a planet to control and a couple of ships to upgrade and command. The planet is your base (at least at the beginning) where you can build cities, expand upon technology and where you’ll find several options to develop/implement economic strategies. The more money you make in this game, the better you’re going to do during battles. And while the system of making money isn’t incredibly intricate or deep as Civilization games, it’s still deep enough to appreciate the amount of thought that went into this $14.99 title. Games with price point that haven’t been out for two years shouldn’t have this kind of depth to them; especially the ones that are quick. This game is quick, as it only took me one hour to get through the first game.
To add more depth to the process, and possibly more time, you can also befriend different factions and try to set up trades with them. This helps you to upgrade and add more technology to the mix and make things better/easier for you as the game continues. The diplomacy generally doesn’t last long and why would it when you’re competing to acquire the most planets under your control to win the game? It’s a nice addition to the entire mix, but it wasn’t something I concentrated on much during the game. I probably will go back and explore that portion later this year.
On the battle side of the game, your ships can be upgraded in several areas. You can add rockets, carry smaller ships, upgrade shields and generally make your ships out to be massive badasses. The cap for each category in the game is set on eight, which is fine because most of your competition is either on par with you or below you, depending on your dedication to the ships — and you want to be dedicated to them. The more items you upgrade on the ship, the bigger the ship gets and ultimately the more powerful it becomes.
I found that the actual battle side of Starships is where the jewels of this game shine the brightest. The hexagonal star maps, which are simplistic visually, hold random obstacles (astroids, wormholes that transport you around the map, planets) that either hinder your progress or provide you with cover when the time calls for it. Strategizing how and where you need to move and place your ships is cerebral, if not outright addictive. The closest comparison I can make to a game like this is RISK, which is strategy and position heavy when it comes to your troops. Adding to the strategy of Starships is the speed of the game, which is set at warp 10 (pun intended). A space battle can last around 5-15 minutes, depending on how you handle things. For example, when I started to use the missiles on against enemies, I found I could take out 2-3 giant freighters at a time. That in itself cut down the battle times considerable, all depending on enemy ship formation and my own formation. Longer battles tended to stretch into the 15 minute range, which is perfectly fine for my attention span for a game like Starships.
The battles themselves come in different flavors. Typically, it’s just ‘go blow up the enemy until there are no more left’. As the game progresses into its later stages, the game starts throwing in missions like protecting freighters, taking down gigantic mammoth ships (they look like the main ship out of the most recent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and/or protecting a certain location for a specific amount of time (earned the most from this type of mission). The game switches it up enough to keep the flow interesting and engaging, but there isn’t a huge variety of battles to be had within Starships.
Shifting gears just slightly, the battles can and will get more intense when you change up the size of the map (which is an option at the beginning of the game — Small/Medium/Large/Epic) and the difficulty of the game (Easy/Medium/Hard/Impossible). I can tell you that the jump from easy to medium feels like the biggest jump ever. You will find the game enormously difficult from the first fight and will be required to think heavily on the strategy you implement before executing it. At least it will bring you a challenge, if not briefly.
The more ships you destroy and the more planets you conquer will equal out to money you gain (and power). To acquire the money from each battle, you have to send your tired crew on shore leave to let them cool off. Once on shore leave, you divvy up the earnings, which you can apply to upgrading ships or improving planets (or bribing people for control on planets). You want to always keep an eye on the shore leave indicators onscreen.
