Sid Meier's Starships presentation

[Julius Seeker]

The presentation is a little bit weird in order. I would probably watch the beginning until somewhere around the 5 minute mark, then skip ahead to the half hour mark to actually watch the trailer and the demonstration. Then skip back and watch the rest for more information.

In short, it's a 4X Space based game where you encounter planets, and complete missions in order to bring them into your federation, and then battle against rival empires in later stages. The battle system is akin to other tactical games like Fire Emblem and Tactics Ogre, except with space ships.

[kali o.]

It looks sorta like Civ...just in space, with every other planet being a puppet state and dumbed down starship building (compared to other games).

I hope it is good, but hard to be excited based on that video.

[Julius Seeker]

I got the game on iPad.
It's actually a lot of fun, very good interface, and it holds that "just one more turn" addiction cycle that is the core engagement factor of all of Sid Meier's best strategy games. I've only played a couple of hours. It's a pretty fun iPad light-strategy game. I would probably avoid this on Windows, I am not sure this is tue sort of game I would want to sit and play with a keyboard and mouse or trackpad.

For comparison's sake, as far as other iPad games go, it is the best of the Starbase Orion type spaceship games, but I did enjoy FTL more when I first played it, granted FTL is a different genre.

[kali o.]

Meh...super dumbed down. Definitely feels like a mobile game.

[Julius Seeker]

After finishing a game, my view has cooled on this.
1. The Wonders victory seems significantly easier to earn than everything else, at least on the map size I played.
2. Certain strategies are much more powerful than others, the best way to do things is not to increase your fleet size, but rather to focus all money resources into ship improvements.
3. Once your empire gets rolling, you can just steam roll everything.
4. Battles are too long in the late game.
5. Based on leaderboards, I am currently one of the best players in the world. Everyone sucks at this game.

EDIT: now after finishing my second game, this time picking the "Impossible" difficulty:
6. The game is only even remotely challenging on Impossible Difficulty; which I had no trouble winning with max players and max galaxy size, which should have given the opponents as large an advantage as possible.

I'm done with this game.