So usually over the course of an hour or two you'll be sending your fleets around the cosmos, picking fights with any ruffians bullying nearby planets and then befriending the colonists living on these worlds. There are some other abilities you can use but I found that I rarely used them since most combat engagements are relatively easy. Combat is just a matter of getting your ships to have line of sight on the enemy (by peeking through asteroid fields) and firing. Here it becomes very reminiscent of Ace Patrol except without the aerial manoeuvres. ![]() Missions usually come in the format of fighting pirates and this is done in the tactical game mode. Eventually they will join you once you've maxed it out (usually after completing a couple of missions for them). If you want star systems to join your empire/alliance/federation you need to complete missions for them and build your influence. You can even build “wonders” which confer benefits on your fleet. From this view you can do things you'd expect from a 4X game such as research new ship technologies, upgrade your ships weapons and systems, or develop planets by building cities and improvements. Consequently, fatigue will be the limiting factor, at least early on in the game, on how much you can do per turn (since just about every mission you do involves combat). In the strategic game mode you can move your fleet of spaceships from planet to planet but each jump between planets results in fatigue which makes your fleet less effective in combat. You have a strategic game mode which shows all the potential planets you can control and a tactical game mode where your fleet of spaceships battles one another on a hexagonal grid. ![]() Starships actually shares quite a bit in common with Master of Orion, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in my books. So you'd hope the gameplay is actually pretty damn good right? RIGHT? There's much less lore here than what exists in Beyond Earth and it's a shame because they could've definitely expanded on this aspect, but I guess they just wanted to focus on the gameplay. What do I think of the plot? It's a throw-away plot which has been developed just to give an excuse for the factions in Beyond Earth to venture out into space and (more often than not) fight each other. Sid Meier's Starships is set far in the future when the factions in Beyond Earth have taken control of the planet they've colonised and are now setting out into space with a fleet of ships to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before! *Ahem * Okay, not really, but you do have a fleet of starships that are apparently answering a plea for help against aggressors, so you're really going into space to fight for the meek and then influence them enough to join your empire/federation/alliance/tea party. I'm truly fortunate to have such choicest friends! NO for gifting a copy of this game for my birthday. ![]() So the real question is does this game have enough depth to keep you entertained? Or is it just like many other mobile games out there? The game definitely looked promising from the screenshots, like a Sid Meier version of Master of Orion, however when you read the fine print and realised the game was also being developed for mobile phones, it dawned on me that this game was probably going to be more like Sid Meier's Ace Patrol. So I guess that's why you're here now: to learn if it actually is too good to be true. So when I heard about Sid Meier's Starships coming out and that it would be basically a continuation of your Beyond Earth empire but in SPAAAAAACE, it seemed too good to be true. Despite the mixed user reviews for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (52% out of 13,767 reviews), I actually enjoyed the game, giving it an 8/10 in my review.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |