Review: Sid Meier's Starships
Originally published at Technology Tell.
If imitation is the best form of flattery, then how do you explain a game that apes the essential parts of the genre that its developer, Firaxis, made famous, sans the depth and soul? Flattery is a hard word to attach to a product like that. For now I’ll just call it Sid Meier’s Starships, a close-but-no-cigar mobile alternative to the space-flavored 4X game.
“Simple” serves both as a relative understatement and a selling point in Starships. Simple allows for quick sessions that feel complete, due to its mobile-friendly design, but Starships lacks so much in content it’s offputting. Its brevity is jarring when you first sit down for a space conquering session. After selecting a race and leader—both of which do little more than modify the micro numbers of your turn-by-turn procession in some form or fashion—you’re greeted with a pair of screens which show you the ropes.
To call these two Photoshop splash pages a proper tutorial would be fighting words to other, multi-mission, fully voice acted learning missions that populate Starships’ genre contemporaries. The fact that these two static pages are more than enough information for you to absolutely wreck this game is maybe more disheartening. I’ve never beaten any strategy game so easily in my life.
Your game map is populated by planets that you and your opponents must race to conquer. Each planet produces missions that, when completed, add towards a meter that determines how loyal the planet’s populace is to your empire. When the meter is full, the planet is yours. Even when it isn’t full, each planet connected to your homeworld (or another fully converted planet in your territory) provides a small number of resources for your cause.
These resources are spent in straightforward ways. Each one—be it metals, food, etc.—is spent in material specific lists that are rudimentary and uninspiring. Every level of one selection increases laser range, another plasma cannon damage, shields, armor, and so on. There’s no real nuance between tech, and definitely no researching to find newer, better tech outside of increasing a level counter from 1 to 2.
Depending on the amount of enemies you have, you will run into the outer limits of explorable space in a surprisingly small amount of turns. Then it becomes a game of diplomacy, Starships’ decidedly worst feature. Meeting other races executes a shallow menu of options that consist of many ways for the enemy to provide you arbitrary information about them. At any time after first meeting them, you can see what missions they just completed for other planets, and even see what they believe their chances for total galaxy domination is. Why would they offer up all of this information to a perfect stranger? Because their diplomacy behaviors are completely binary. Either you are at peace with them, or at war with them. No in between.
When in battle, be it at war with other factions or with the nebulous marauder AI that tend to be the target of all of the planetary missions, you are whisked away to a hex grid that is populated by obstacles like planets and asteroids. Besides the random wormholes (that teleport you to random other wormholes upon encountering them), these maps don’t interact with you at all. Asteroids and planets are just impassible terrain to block enemies, when they could be more dynamic and tactical. There are missions that involved navigating asteroid littered maps that are remain mostly hidden, but past that, the passive maps are a bore.
Ship combat itself is pretty rewarding, if not incredibly clear about its rules. Ships have a move and an action each turn. Laser equipped crafts fire from long range, and can do so through obstructions, though at a penalty to damage. Ships can deploy flights of fighters, and with the proper preparation, can double your potential firepower in any given match. Torpedos can be launched in straight lines and can fly through their trajectory over multiple turns. Between said turns, they can be detonated prematurely. The tactical usage of torpedos is the most fascinating thing about combat in this game, and it rarely ever worked for me.
Before going into battle, you can upgrade your fleet’s ships in whichever fashion you like. Depending on how you upgrade them will determine how they look and what sort of class they’re considered to be. For example, faster ships are cruisers, ships with more armor are destroyers. But there’s only ever one fleet per faction. Meaning if you choose to take the galaxy by force, all it really takes is for you to find your enemy’s fleet, destroy it, and take advantage of their suddenly available planets. Fleets are never destroyed completely when they lose battles, though. They just require repairs, then they’re back in fighting shape. A very odd concession, as the risk involved with fighting people is pretty much thrown out the window.
There are other ways to win the game without combat. Having multiple max level technology discoveries or building 3 “Wonders” can grab you victory. And if you focus on any one of these conditions, it will be difficult for you to fail. The AI just isn’t up to snuff to keep you challenged for very long, and there is no multiplayer to speak of.
At least it looks decent for an iPad game. Outside of the upgradeable ship parlor trick, textures are pretty good for the platform, and there are plenty of great special effects to be had during battle. Some of the menu art—though pretty generic in its over adherence to pre-established space rhetoric—is still admirable.
Everything about this space sim is overly dumbed down, but don’t take “simplistic” as an insult. Civilization: Revolution was a “simplistic” version of the genuine article, and was still a great game. And considering it came from the same place, Starships’ lack of interest in challenging the player—be it in mastering its systems, the act of playing the game, or your imagination as it relies on such tropey space game standbys—makes it a hard game to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore of mobile strategy gamers.
It’s not an incompetent game, but it’s not a very interesting one, either.