There are parts of Civ i prefer over later versions, so i do still roll it out from time to time, when i want that Civ experience, but don’t want the added complexity of Civ IV etc. Sure the graphics are pretty bad (especially as my first experience of the game was on the Amiga and that looked better than the PC version) but i love the technology advisor’s very informative pop-up screen, the founding a new town/we love the leader animation screen thing and building my Palace etc. It still is a very charming and educational game today. As are the other games you mention, as i would play most of those in preference to modern day versions (just got F-117a on the gog sale etc) because they are incredibly well crafted games.
Starships is 5 bucks on Steam right now.
Is it worth $5 ($5.60 CDN) if you go in knowing it’s a casual strategy game unlike the TBS depth that we’re used to?
Good question. Do you have problems sleeping? If so then it is a wonderful purchase for $5.
It’s worth the fiver.
Fun little lite strategy sci fi ship combat game.
For $5 I could buy Shadow Warrior.
(This is all my opinion. YMMV)
It is amusing, but ultimately very low depth and limited replayability.
I didn’t find there were enough fun choices i could make in a playthrough to justify more than maybe a second playthrough. So this was basically a one and done for me.
The gameplay is very simple. This is basically a mobile game.
As mentioned before, upgrading/customizing your starships is NOT NOT NOT interesting AT ALL. This isn’t like Sword of the stars where fleets are radically different. Maybe you have a little more of a long ranged focus or a little more of a fighter focus than if you had made other choices, but there is no big difference. This is my greatest disappointment with the game. I like customization.
This game should have started at $5. Is it worth $5 now? Probably, but it is certainly not a great deal (since $5 should have been the starting price).
I agree with Destarius’ general post. Make sure you have every other space game. Maybe if you’re looking for a space strategy game you aren’t looking for shadow warrior (which is a great game), but there are a ton of better space strategy games out there. Many are around the same price now.
$5 is just the right price for a fun but negligible game. It’s worth $10, but only from an Indie without Sid’s name on it. At $5, no one will be disappointed and no one will complain about the simplicity of it all. And indeed, the AI is better than Endless Space… for what that’s worth :)
I think y’all convinced me not to bother. Better space strategy games out there and I’ve not played enough to bother with space-lite. Danke.
Probably a good choice. I came to the same conclusion. It doesn’t take long before a bunch of $5 purchases become enough for a $30 game. If I get a cool game for $5 great, but one that is easily ignored I may as well skip.
Smart move.
Okay, so I paid my $5. Game set to hard.
And… What the bloody hell is this? Why does every enemy planet generate its own pretend “main fleet” that happens to be nearby? We can all see there’s just one fleet and I already blew it up this turn :) And why does the top surviving unit in the fleet generate reinforcements one level below every combat round? Do they think whack-a-cruiser is fun? This is just to be annoying, I guess. It’s still not much of a fight when I come in with 3 ships with all 8s for weapons and the poor thing only has level 2-3 for its own no matter how many stupid destroyers it stacks together.
So yeah, I know, it’s Ace Patrol in space. But the superficial veil of the 4x is actually worse than just having a series of named battles to fight in the Ace Patrol game because it makes you think at first there might be some logic to what’s going on. But it’s the same silly approach to cheating from Civ only redoubled because it’s so in your face and because it goes against the paradigm of the map-board with meaningful units on it. The map is only relevant for the first few turns while the star systems are still unassigned and the AI has a legitimate fleet of its own that hasn’t been destroyed yet. Then it does move the pawn around in a sensible way (though it seems to always win missions regardless of strength?), and you can block it by sitting on a planet it would like to go through or whatever.
Anyway because there is a new fleet generated for the AI every turn and indeed every combat once the game gets going it’s just musical chairs running around to sit on star systems first and fighting the same boring fight over and over again. This was exquisite tedium on a large map with 4 enemies. I can only imagine the pain associated with playing the epic size.
Every enemy planet doesn’t generate its own fleet.
What happens is that your fleet - and the enemy’s - is never really destroyed. If you lose a battle, the next turn you get all of your ships back, but they are all heavily damaged and need repair. They spawn at a nearby planet. The same for the enemy. So what I think you are seeing is the respawned and heavily damaged enemy flee respawning. That’s what I remember seeing. Yes, that’s a lame mechanic but with one fleet per side, I guess that’s what they needed to do to keep a wipeout from ending the game.
Also enemy planets (and yours) can also have automated defense fleets (I think you can build those for each planet) so you may also be seeing that.
But when I attack two planets in a row in the same game turn, the second gets the fully respawned fleet again at full health? That’s what’s happening.Usually the AI doesn’t build any non-fleet defenses except on the homeworld where they get them for free.
The enemy fleet gets respawned every time you destroy it as far as I know. But I’ve never seen it come back at full health like you say unless they’ve had a turn to repair it. Even then towards the end of an empire, they don’t have enough funds to repair and they enter a death spiral - I destroy their fleet, it respawns weaker every time due to lack of resources for repair.
I’ll look at this next time I play.
It’s true that at the end of the overall reduction of the enemy empire over multiple turns that the main fleet becomes weaker. However within the same game turn when I was fighting in a different system it came back unscathed somehow, despite its apparent complete destruction.
This worth picking up for 75% off? $3.74 for a Sid Meier space game? Any space game fans that can help me out?
No. It isn’t. You can get Space Rangers HD for that price, as an example.
I hear good things about this Sid Meier kid. Think he’s going places.
His early work is way better.