The tech tree and diplomacy feels far better than Starships, you can go for techs that alternately help troops, ships, planets, economy etc. So the game forces you to expand like cancer, often colonizing planets or asteroid that have little value to gain a foothold. What this means strategically is that you can only project force up to a certain distance away from tiles you own, eliminating deep core strikes to your empire and vice versa. This presents some interesting strategy changes, you can now build starbases or refueling depots on tiles, because you have to transit through tiles to other tiles, and your ships run out of fuel outside your official territory. Saving is important! In the Gold update they went from a seamless space map to a hex tiled model MORE like Starships, with the exception being that it's the galaxy that's tiled not the fight map, making it the exact inverse! I played both the original and then the Gold version after encountering freezes between transitions sometimes, which funny enough happen in Gold too, but in a different way, you get a bunch of events happen during a turn and find yourself stuck in one of them with no way to return to the map. The UI is great, the ambience is good, sound effects and music adapt to what's going on like the Dune games did, and it feels comforting somehow. Notably the space battles can be auto-resolved or like EAW with a realtime battle on a seamless map. Stardrive 2: This one is a lot more like Empire at War than Starships, though at a glance they fill the exact same role with mostly the same elements. The other win conditions are similarly weak, and you end up disabling all but a domination victory to make a game last more than say 2hrs. Oh, and one soft-of gripe about the game length, the win conditions are far too low, like a population victory only requires 64 billion, which can be done controlling 1/4 of the galaxy map. You then play them as sacrificial pawns until late game, when you can use them to chase or flank enemy ships for higher damage rear hits. The more you play, the more each game becomes the same.Īlso just as a helpful addendum, the fights can be heavily skewed in your favour by equiping your capital ships with fighters, they aren't so much effective in the early game (before upgrades) as much as they serve as targets to distract enemy ships. The game then becomes predictable with the only variety coming from the actual fighting tactics. Overall the game is decent, well polished, reasonably detailed, and like other Civ games, you find your borders/territory constantly changing, but this single fleet limitation makes the game feel flat, and the ship upgrade path becomes uninteresting. My complaint is that like many RTS/4X games, there's essentually 1 right answer here, once you master it, it just becomes a routine task. You need to intuit exactly when you should be buying new vs upgrading old, but there's a sweet spot balance between the two that's basically unstoppable. This seems to be a core aspect of the winnability of the game if you can call it that. Where the game falls down is that in each turn, a healthy empire will create money that equates to so many upgrade points per ship, or the option of purchasing a new ship. I did like the fact that there were more types of play required for this than just a straight up fight, like escaping pirates, or taking nodes and holding them a la capture the flag, it gave it a little more interest and randomness. One might be where you have to protect some unarmed ship reaching another point on the map, another might be finding a portal in a maze of asteroids that change every turn, and then there's the fleet battles. The other major difference superficially is that combat isn't just stats vs stats plus random.Įvery encounter or visit to an anomaly ends in a turn based strategy map showdown or maze to deal with. It's not so much that diplomacy is useful, as much as a delaying tactic. Each player can only have 1 fleet, so right off the bat you think about your empire purely in terms of reach, and your neighbouring races level of pacifism at all times. Starships: Despite the obvious Civilization aspect to the game, it isn't really. I gave them each about a weeks worth of on/off play so that I could at least master them, and avoid a snap judgement. Attach signature (signatures can be changed in profile)
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