Sid Meier’s Starships: Review
In the gaming industry there are brand studios and brand names. In simple terms, these are the people and teams from whom we do not expect outright bad products. Even a guru may have successes and failures, but the waterline against which we mark ups and downs will still never be level with the baseboard.
Name Sid Meier (Sid Meier) is just such a brand. As a rule, if part of the project name is the phrase “Sid Meier’s”, this means that we have a completely worthy game in front of us. However, does this rule always work??
Recently released Civilization: Beyond Earth was received ambiguously by the community. On the one hand, the idea turned out to be interesting, the developers added various innovations to the space version Civilization brought quite a lot, but on the other hand, the players ended up dissatisfied with the insufficient depth of strategy and the somewhat “bitten” political life in interstellar spaces.
Nevertheless, the developers not only did not abandon their brainchild to their own devices, but also created a girlfriend for it from a rib and named her Sid Meier’s Starships. Beyond Earth And Starships are related to each other and have a certain influence on each other if copies of both games belong to the same lucky owner.
Looks nice doesn’t it? What a pity that this is only a static screensaver that is shown when flying from one planet to another.
Step march to tablets! That is, the planets
Appreciating a new creation Firaxis, It’s impossible https://acedbetcasino.co.uk/games/ not to make a remark: the space strategy was released in several versions at once – for PC and mobile devices. From the very first steps in the game, it becomes obvious that the mobile option is preferable for developers. This is clear both from the strange controls, clearly intended for touch screens initially, and from the simple graphics. And the gameplay itself makes me think of some kind of “casual” game in the “use your brain while you go to work” mode. Computer embodiment Starships looks like a port from a tablet, which, in fact, it is.
Our adventures begin in the same world in which the events took place in Beyond Earth, only now we have to conquer not a planet, but an entire galaxy. Of course, there are also rivals – sworn neighbors who are also fighting for control of the territory.
How it happens? By completing tasks first. Initially, we are given only one base planet. We must send a fleet to neighboring “balls” and do something good for the local inhabitants in order to expand our possessions. As a rule, perform combat missions. Drive off pirates, escort a merchant ship to a portal, protect a scientific base – in general, it all comes down to space battles. As soon as we successfully complete the mission, customers give us a reward of a certain amount of food, metals or some other resource and give us their favor. To include the planet in your federation, you need to achieve the full support of the entire population. In some ways, the process of expanding your influence is similar to interacting with city-states in recent editions Civilization. True, the policies often gave mutually exclusive tasks and generally forced us to spin around, but here everything is very linear and single-celled: they flew in, knocked us out, took the reward. They flew in again, screwed up, subjugated the entire planet. Yearning.
People die for metal, energy, food, loans..
Peaceful development in Starships – this is such a simulacrum that raises only one question: why? We can build cities on planets, but we will not be allowed to “fill” these cities. The whole process of building a new settlement looks like this: click on the “build a city” button, confirm the construction of the city. All.
The more such abstract megacities there are on a planet, the more resources it produces. Food, metal, energy, credit and science – these are the five main pillars on which the Starships. Energy is spent on building, repairing and improving ships. Science points allow you to make discoveries, which come down to only eight available technologies, divided into many levels. For example, we have a development called “xenomaterials”, which for the first level gives plus ten percent to the protection of ships, for the second – plus twenty, for the third – thirty. The problem is that not a single scientific research leads to the appearance of something new in our arsenal, as has always been the case in Civilization. We will not discover a new type of ship or its equipment, we will not find previously unexplored methods of extracting resources or “cultivating” planets. All we get is a sluggish improvement in the combat characteristics of our fleet in the format of “a little more numbers against such and such a parameter.”.
No construction, no science… Needless to say, diplomacy, which even in Beyond Earth didn’t seem too deep, here it looks like an absolutely useless stump that doesn’t affect anything? Perfections are the paths of development that have come to Starships from Beyond Earth, — in the game they don’t show themselves at all in anything other than a dull starting bonus.
The only element of peaceful development that arouses any interest is the so-called “miracles”. In fact, it is they who play the role that Civilization usually carried out city buildings. Thanks to miracles, we can truly discover not quantitatively, but qualitatively new possibilities: warp jump, automatic repair of all ships and other interesting improvements.
An asteroid down your throat, land xenorat!
We are unlikely to be too far mistaken if we assume that all Starships was started for the sake of the combat component. Despite the fundamentally different setting, the battles here are slightly reminiscent Heroes of Might and Magic or King’s Bounty. Hexagonal grid, even though there is space all around; obstacles in the form of asteroids; step-by-step unfolding of the conflict – really, we’ve already seen it all somewhere. Our arsenal includes a stealth mode, several types of weapons, sensors, torpedoes and other gadgets that, in theory, should have made battles interesting and varied. Asteroids block the line of fire, the damage dealt and received directly depends on the distance between ships, and when damaged, some specific part of the spaceship always suffers. Lasers, torpedoes or motors fail, for example. There’s room to roam, isn’t there??
Alas. Everything is spoiled by a completely brainless artificial intelligence, which makes all these combat features more or less useless. If before the battle the adviser said that our chances of success are 50 percent, this means that we are guaranteed to win. Guaranteed. It’s not clear what needs to be done to lose in such a balance of power. Enemy ships are not just weaker – always weaker – and move as if they were controlled by feeble-minded paralytics. Opponents are exposed to attack, move chaotically and senselessly across the field, with the tenacity of a madman they shoot at small, weak fighters that are “in a set” with large, strong ships. As the complexity of the game increases, the situation evens out somewhat, but not so much due to smarter AI, but rather due to a banal increase in quantitative indicators – enemy ships hit harder, but they themselves die more slowly.
You can watch the completion of a ship up close and in 3D mode. Perhaps the only impressive sight in Sid Meier’s Starships.
Sid Meier’s Starships – a typical mobile game that has nothing to do on a computer. Shallow and overtly "casual", it’s designed to help kill time on the subway, rather than the full immersion we usually expect from games Firaxis. It seems that the “brand rule” did not work in this particular case for some reason.
Pros: an interesting system of “miracles”; Passable battles on high difficulty levels.
Cons: failed peaceful development; same type and linear tasks; parodic science and absent diplomacy; boring gameplay; stupid AI; weak graphics; confusing controls in the PC version.
