Exactly my thoughts as well. “One more turn…tonight on the bus ride home…”
New tag line, “Sid Meier’s Starships! Making your sit on the crapper slightly less boring!.”
- Apologies to those playing and liking the game. I’m just messing around.
In my experience they use cover relatively well, but you can bait them out of it. And they handle single torpedoes pretty well. However, sometimes multiple torpedoes seem to confuse them for whatever reason.
Bahahaha. It’s not like I dislike the game insomuch as I’m not seeing a…spark, you know?
Whatever else Starships may be, torpedoes are awesome. Super fun mechanic.
You don’t want a spark in in the toilets…just sayin.
I do not believe Sid Meier has changed as much as the players have changed over time. The original FEELING we had the first time we played Civilization is very hard to repeat.
A more sophisticated audience is hard to surprise. I think Sid is correct in going to simpler designs. It helps creating a challenging AI, is quicker to play for an aging and thus busier clientele and I suspect is a harder challenge in design than having a game with a ton of mechanics.
I am certain Sid Meier learns from every game he designs and as he changes things up it would not surprise me that he will hit a winning formula over time.
More importantly how many game designers has he influenced? I can only imagine.
Julian Gollop is another designer that seems to be going for simpler things. Chaos Reborn seems to be taking shape very well.
People also forget what a simple game Civ 1 was by modern standards… and how bad the AI was!
There is an obsession with AI these days that I find wrongheaded. A good aI isn’t in any way indicative of a good game. Master of Magic, Master of Orion and the like had …oh god… I 'm doing it again, am I not? Starting the old MoM and Moo argument contra new games. Sorry. I’ll shut up now.
I don’t think that it’s wrong that people’s standards change. MOO and MOM are absolute all-time classics, no doubt, and the AI would be laughed off the stage if they were to be made today. This is no different than the technical execution aspect of any other entertainment medium – how laughable are earlier Hollywood CG efforts to today’s audiences? Doesn’t mean that Star Trek: TNG or what have you are bad or don’t deserve their place in history.
Much rarer are the products that don’t run into that issue. Thus the 16-bit generation being much more fondly remembered (and actively played!) than the PlayStation generation; Super Mario World is still nearly a perfect game, and Brave Fencer Musashi for all that I would have given it a flat 10/10 when it came out (that’s a “buy” on the 7-9 scale) is not anything I can go back and play without cringing.
On sale on steam. 33% of. It just came out LAST WEEK. Really?!
I decided to pick it up on my iPad in case it would be a fun beer and pretzels type game. Played one game and haven’t had any desire to try another. <sigh>
Dunqan
Not really. It was a pricing error that lasted only for a few minutes. Now 10% off.
I see 10% off. Where’s this 33% off sale?
-TomYup. I already uninstalled it. Too much better/more compelling stuff to play.
On sale on steam. 10% off. It just came out LAST WEEK. Really?! Lulz
True. But the difference is that, for it’s time, compared to other games on the market at the time, it was amazing. What it offered was different, engrossing, addictive, playable, VERY replayable, and just a barrel full of fun. You have to compare it to state of the art at the time.
And you could say the same for most of Sid’s games in the past, whether it was F-19 Stealth Fighter, Red Storm Rising, Pirates, SimGolf, Covert Action, and so on. Sure, you can’t compare, say, F-19 Stealth Fighter to a sim today. But when you compare it to the state of the art of the time, it was magic.
And from what I’ve played of Starships (on the iPad,) there’s just nothing magic compared to other games out there today. Even lower budget games. As someone else said, there are just more compelling games out there today, and that was not something one said about a true Sid Meier design in the past. Has the state of the art passed Sid up? I don’t know. But I remember interviewing Sid a long time ago, when I was writing for the mags, and one thing I remember him saying was, to paraphrase, the trick to a compelling game is knowing what little things will endear a game to the player, make the game feel “personal” to the player, vs. the details that add nothing to that end. It’s why so many of us were so excited to see a real Sid Meier game come out. And why some of us are pretty disappointed.
I think, ultimately, the thing that is causing that reaction is that the missions feel disposable––like nothing more than a means to an end. I don’t think that’s what he wanted, and much like an author that thinks they conveyed an idea on the page that isn’t actually there, perhaps in his mind he sees that because it is what he is picturing.
Perhaps if when we are presented with the scenarios, there was some choice to make that influenced things. Even if all the choices led to confrontation of one form or another, they might have tilted the balance of the fight to be more easy or difficult (how you would write those options so they weren’t painfully obvious is another story, but I’m thinking something along the lines of King of Dragon Pass).
I rather like the game as it is, but perhaps something of that nature might have enhanced the appeal for those that want to like it but find it sterile or lacking in the personality department.
iOS version is currently available for $8.99 but rereading the comments & reviews that’s probably still too expensive…
Yeah, after all of the hype, all of the pre-game interviews, so many of us who have been Meier fans for many, many years were sorely disappointed. I would suggest you don’t reward them by giving them money for it.