I’ve gotten a few good turn-based fleet engagements out of Sid Meier’s Starships, but they feel like the quick tactical minigame component of a larger, more complex strategy game that isn’t here. Instead we get a confusing galactic conquest game that moves too fast for its own good. WIthout the support and context of a thoughtful war, Starships’ hex-based battles lost their luster after just a couple of days.
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. 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.
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. 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). 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.
Other than that, though, Starships doesn’t look great - even for a game clearly designed to run on the iPad. 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. Plus, the many asteroids that serve as “cover” for ship battles look terrible. 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.
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. 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. This AI is just alright.
Torpedoes battles are some of the best fun. 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. 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. 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. It would be a great mind-game weapon to use in multiplayer… if Starships had multiplayer. Which it doesn’t. Also, the iOS version’s controls make targeting these warheads a huge pain.
After one of those big battles, the strategic game falls apart a bit. 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. Or, the same thing can happen to you - one bad battle can mean the whole thing comes crumbling down. 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. 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.
Within a day, I’d won my first game on Hard difficulty - and that’s before I understood half of the mechanics, like why I had to manage five different resources. If you can get hold of a couple of the exceptionally powerful Wonders – such as the one that lets you launch fighters that can attack on that same turn and the one that lets you move first in every battle – mopping up the opposition in just a few hours becomes a cakewalk even if you’ve ignored much of the complexity of upgrading your planets’ resource production and disregarded the rudimentary diplomacy system entirely.