The asteroids strewn about the playing field block fire, and black holes teleport ships to other black holes on the map. Or you navigate a maze of asteroids to reach an escape gate, or defeat an enemy boss. You might be asked to escort a unit (that, mercifully, you also control), or hunt down an escorted one yourself. The different victories have different names, but they all boil down to exercising military might, which in turn requires trudging through watered down and grossly exploitable battles.Ĭombat missions set your ships down on a honeycomb game space surrounding a planet. There are victory conditions outside of conquering your opponents, sure-controlling X amount of world wonders or researching Y amount of technologies-but these goals take resources to complete, and the only way to fill your storehouses is to perform combat missions and claim planets.
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Where Meier's Civilization series accommodates pacifism, there isn't much to do with your Starships fleet on the galactic map except pick fights. The salient goal is to have a majority of the galaxy under your thumb-51%, and no less. Planets under your control confer resources each turn (food, industrial production, science, and energy) that can be spent on upgrades for your starships, or used towards buildings and world wonders that improve your production or military capabilities. From your home base, the fleet can be moved over to any adjacent planet with the press of a button, which triggers combat missions that award points towards bringing the planet into the fold of your empire. The titular starships form a single roving fleet on the game's galactic map, and act as the lone controllable unit. The abstracted galaxy doesn't try very hard to sell the sci-fi setting.
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I can turn aside the quick and obvious assaults on PC sensibilities-the rough graphics, the lack of options-but it's the cynical design that guts me, in the end. It's not those issues that really put me off of Starships, but rather the way it seems to aspire to that narrow, dated idea of what makes a "good" mobile game. Its sci-fi galaxy is mostly abstracted, and its unit models are simple and blocky. On PC, it unfurls in a tablet's compacted, low resolution window, and there are no graphical settings to massage. And the first things you notice about it are the various ways it seems visually bottlenecked by its tablet version. Starships happens to actually be a mobile game-the kind that harks to those days of yore, when "mobile" equated to "simplistic." It released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and iPad, and in more-or-less the same form to boot.
But in some circles you can still hear the old backhanded compliment being leveled at games like Sid Meier's Starships. I don't cotton to those implications, not anymore: Mobile games have achieved too much, broken too many molds. Drag a distracted finger across a screen a few times, and kill, conquer, level up…all between stops on the train. A sort of euphemism for alleging that a game was baser somehow, that in exchange for a shallow, compulsive high it asked little of a player save the odd microtransaction.
"This would be good as a mobile game" was, historically, some pretty faint praise.
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