Your starships are all a singular unit type, but the game allows a great deal of freedom in customizing them with upgrades to tailor your team against each particular threat. Each consists of a specific objective such as destroying marauders, leading a ship to safety, or escaping a handful of rogue suicide probes. Planets also have missions attached, which encompass the combat portion of Starships. Each planet is also a specific type that provides a particular benefit, such as lowered cost for ship upgrades, increased resource production, and other boons. From there you guide your fledgling fleet to nearby planets, each of which is comprised of a specific biome that bolsters a particular resource output. You homeworld provides your starting resources of energy for outfitting your starships, metals for building planetary improvements and wonders, science for researching starship improvements, and food for building cities that increase your resource collection. You set the size, difficulty, and player count parameters, choose one of three Affinities and one of eight commanders which provides your starting bonuses, and you're off to a randomly generated galaxy with worlds to discover. Apart from the brief overture, there this no story or campaign to follow. Thus the effort begins to chart the stars and determine who's out there, for better or for worse. The introduction continues from Civilization: Beyond Earth's ending, where a signal from a distant intelligent life form is revealed. However, this lack of effort comes at the price of stripping away a measure of challenge through a remedial AI and exploitable victories. Its abridged development system allows you to dive into exploration, resource management, and combat with little effort, finishing a session or two in a single sitting. It looks to a simpler time of turn-based strategy, far removed from the complexity of the modern Civilization games. For a game that has you exploring the cosmos, populating new planets, and upgrading starships, Sid Meier's Starships portrays itself as a relic of the past.

Sid meiers starships review