![]() While the AI is competent enough outside of combat, it’s a whole other matter in the battles themselves. That’s one area where Starships could use a bit of help. The maps are fairly large, and there are interesting features like wormholes that send you around to another spot instantly.Ī single-player strategy game is only as good as its AI, though. Different missions will have different goals, including escort missions, survival for a set number of turns, sending you after a particular target, and so on. You move all of your ships, then the enemy gets to go, and so on. If you haven’t played Ace Patrol, you can expect fairly typical turn-based strategy combat here. While you typically play the battles from an overhead perspective, the camera pans and zooms whenever you take a shot so that you can get a more cinematic look at your sweet Kirk skills. There are different weapons for long- and close-range, a cloaking ability that completely blows the AI’s mind even on the highest difficulty, sensor scans for detecting cloaked enemies, and torpedoes that are also pretty good for breaking the game once you get the hang of them. Plus, since space has a lot of stuff in it, you can actually take cover during battles here. Sure, it’s in space, and you can’t pull off any fancy dogfighting moves, but your ships have some special tricks of their own. The battles are instantly familiar if you’ve played Ace Patrol. Whichever way you choose to win, there’s going to be a lot of fighting, though. Just like Civilization, you can win by advancing your technology far enough, building a certain number of wonders, ruling a majority of the population, or that whole destroying everyone else thing if you’ve really got your heart set on it. While the game certainly seems to be pushing you towards the route of destroying your opponents, you can win in other ways. You can also build cities on any planets you’ve occupied, but the main point of that is to increase resource production so that you can, you guessed it, make your fleet stronger. There are even wonders to build, in fine Civilization tradition, though they too tend to serve the sole purpose of powering up your fleet. You can use science points to research new technologies that convey various benefits to your entire fleet. You can use energy to buy new ships and power-up their weapons, armor, and special moves. Of course, your rivals are trying to do the same, and while you can make peace treaties with them, you’re not going to be able to win if you make friends with everyone.Īlong the way, you can spend your resources improving your fleet of ships. Help them out enough and they’ll join your federation, increasing your available resources and inching you ever-closer to victory. Every planet has some problems they need you to solve, and by doing so, you increase your affinity with them. You commandeer a small fleet of ships, traveling through the stars to different planets. Though this takes place in the same setting as Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, don’t expect complexity on that level. ![]() Its design leans more heavily on the former than the latter, but those who found Ace Patrol to be just a bit too slimmed down will probably find Starships more to their liking. At its core, this is essentially a mash-up of Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol (Free) and Civilization Revolution ($2.99), games that are both quite familiar to iOS strategy fans. Sid Meier’s Starships ($2.99) has the veteran game designer’s fingerprints all over it. ![]() The problem with his name becoming a brand, however, is that you can’t be too sure with any given release just how much of the game is Sid Meier the designer versus Sid Meier the marketing tag. It’s an odd outcome for someone who seems to be a relatively low-key guy. So it is that after just a few more games, nearly every game Sid Meier had a hand in, and a few that he didn’t, carried his name. The game was a massive hit, and while publishers generally don’t like to canonize developers, they’ll make an exception for just about any rule if the money looks right. I’m not sure how or why his name ended up in the title of Sid Meier’s Pirates! ($2.99), but it might have simply been to help make the somewhat generic title more unique. There are a lot of reasons for that, depending on which period we look at, but one of the bigger exceptions to that is the name of Sid Meier. Even today, it’s rare to see a developer’s name affixed to a video game title.
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