But in Sid Meier’s Starships, you will take command of a fleet of starships and battle Space Pirates, Marauders and other types of enemies, fighting for the well being of the galaxy. A lot of them!Įven though it’s set in the same Civilization universe, the game is completely different, even though the design will remind those who played it of the original game. I am talking about Sid Meier’s Starships, the latest game from the renowned developer and a title that comes as a sort of an expansion or spin-off of the latest Civilization game, Beyond Earth. Big swaths of the galaxy can change hands quickly, meaning there may be nothing you can do to stop a swing that puts a rival faction over the 51% galactic territory control they need to win suddenly.This Thursday wasn’t exactly amazing in terms of new game releases, but one really solid launch made this week so much better. It’s especially confusing to watch that happen, because during the AI turns everything moves so fast it’s hard to know what’s going on, and there’s no meaningful summary of events. Or, the same thing can happen to you - one bad battle can mean the whole thing comes crumbling down. Because each empire has only one fleet, if you soundly defeat a rival in combat once, you can basically roll through all their territory until you’ve used up all your fleet’s stamina. After one of those big battles, the strategic game falls apart a bit. Also, the iOS version’s controls make targeting these warheads a huge pain. It would be a great mind-game weapon to use in multiplayer… if Starships had multiplayer. Equipping a fleet of four ships with torpedo launchers and blanketing an entire area with them is a great tactic for demolishing an entire fleet in one of the larger battles to take an enemy homeworld. Hitting a button to detonate them at the right moment to catch an enemy ship (or two) in the blast radius is an interesting dash of real-time action added to a turn-based tactical game, and a clever means of area-denial. You launch them on one turn, and then on the next they continue on that course as you view them from a chase-cam perspective.
Submerged Jared PettyTorpedoes battles are some of the best fun. I find myself easily winning battles in which the mission select screen predicts I have less than 40% chance of victory, because after all, a single-player tactical game is only as good as its AI.
In later, more tactically interesting battles, fleets become large and durable enough to trade blows for a while, sometimes scoring random critical hits that disable shields, engines, or weapons.
#Sid meiers starships ipad Pc#
I’ve even had intermittent but major frame rate problems on both PC and my iPad 3, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Plus, the many asteroids that serve as “cover” for ship battles look terrible. Ships get some good beauty shots thanks to the action camera, which shows projectiles launching and hitting targets, but the weapon and explosion effects are so poor I’m surprised Firaxis wanted the camera anywhere near them.
Other than that, though, Starships doesn’t look great - even for a game clearly designed to run on the iPad. Those choices are meaningful, too, since a ship with fast engines and close-range weaponry has very different utility from a slow one that sits in the rear launching long-range torpedoes and fighters. That creates a wide variety of ship design variations stemming from the three base vessels (associated with which starting bonus you pick for your faction). Upgrading your individual ships is one of the coolest things about Starships, because they’ll change appearance based on every point you plug into engines, shields, armor, long or short-range weapons, stealth, sensors, torpedoes, or fighters.
#Sid meiers starships ipad zip#
The problem is, most of those missions are either extremely easy due to the barely upgraded ships having few capabilities (just zip behind your target and blast their weak rear shields at point-blank range for one-shot kills), or so hard my entire fleet was wiped out on the first turn – effectively ending the game before it got started. When you’re first setting out from your homeworld with a two-ship fleet to win independent planets over to your cause before rival empires do, mission variety is pretty good: escorting a friendly ship to a destination, preventing an enemy from reaching theirs, navigating a maze of asteroids while handicapped by a limited view distance, taking out a VIP enemy ship, hunting stealth fighters – there are quite a few.
0 kommentar(er)
