#SID MEIERS STARSHIPS FULL SCREEN UPGRADE#

Like Civilization, youвЂ™ll start the game by choosing a faction leader. But it still feels like something designed for a tabletop environment and moved over to digital space. There are too many moving pieces, too many factors to each encounter (line of sight, 100+ point damage calculations, et cetera) to really make it feasible. IвЂ™m not that good at the game.Starships is identifiably a board game though-just one youвЂ™d never want to play manually a.k.a. IвЂ™ve had missions tell me I had a 40 percent chance of winning, only to have me win the battle in the first turn.

Each mission, you can ask the game for details and receive a вЂњYou have X percent chance of success.вЂќ These predictions are apparently pulled at random out of a hat. There are also some quirks with the gameвЂ™s win/loss predictions. The game should look better than it does. IвЂ™m not sure if thatвЂ™s because itвЂ™s a budget title, because of the short time-scale this was made in, or because it needs to run on both PCs and tablets. The maps themselves are better, though youвЂ™re bound to notice some low-res textures on occasion. The typeface, the colors, the use of empty space, itвЂ™s just not very attractive. This is far from the companyвЂ™s peak (which IвЂ™d pinpoint as the minimalist design used in Civilization V). It looks like menu design from ten or fifteen years ago-definitely not the level of production IвЂ™d expect out of Firaxis. Even more so than Civilization: Beyond Earth, the UI elements in Starships lookвЂ¦ugly.

#SID MEIERS STARSHIPS FULL SCREEN UPGRADE#

For one, it could use a major upgrade in the art/UI department. I do have a few small knocks against Starships. Starships takes the same idea and applies it to the turn-based genre. Part of what makes games like League of Legends or Hearthstone so appealing is they present strategy gaming on a small, contained scale. ItвЂ™s that couple-of-hours scope and that feeling of personal skill growth in particular that will keep me coming back to Starships. That means you can iterate on your own strategies quickly, getting better at the game by learning from your own mistakes instead of counting on reading other peopleвЂ™s mistakes to make you a better player. If you lose in Starhips, there very well might be time for another match the same night. Do you use your funds to make lots of small, underpowered ships so you can fire more times per turn? Or do you focus on two or three behemoths, knowing youвЂ™ll knock out an enemy ship with each shot but youвЂ™ll also take more damage if battle has to go on longer? Or do you make every ship in your fleet ultra-maneuverable, allowing for guerilla tactics within asteroid fields?Д«ut the best part is, as I said, that you donвЂ™t need to know any of those answers going in to Starships-most of all because losing isnвЂ™t quite as painful as it is after youвЂ™ve put thirty hours into a game of Civilization. Each ship in your fleet can only fire weapons once per turn. Do you drill down on shield technology, making your shields gradually more efficient? Add better hull armor to your ships?ДЄnd your ships have the same levels of customizability, though they draw from a separate pool of funds (energy). There are only ten or so technologies, all available at the start, and each one has an immediate impact on your ship stats. In Starships, you still research new technologies-but there is no tech tree.

You maneuver your ships around this hexagonal grid to try and get a bead on the enemy ships, exchange shots, and use the вЂњterrainвЂќ (asteroids, planets) to your advantage to provide cover. Your fleet is transferred to a smaller, hexagonal grid representing local space. HereвЂ™s where the tactical layer comes into play. Once you arrive at a planet youвЂ™ll be given the option to accept or decline a mission to help the locals-for instance, chasing off pirates. Your main tool in conquest is a single fleet of ships which youвЂ™ll pilot from planet to planet. You need to capture 51 percent of these planets in order to win the game. The strategic level is a galaxy map, full of planets-one of which is your factionвЂ™s homeworld. YouвЂ™ve got two layers to pay attention to: strategic and tactical. In my preview a few weeks back I compared Starships to a board game, albeit one thatвЂ™s too complex to feasibly be played with physical pieces. I can sit down, play through an entire Starships game (or two!), and still make it to bed at a reasonable hour. What Starships does is condense the turn-based Civilization feel down into a few hours, and I love it.

Sid meiers starships full screen