While I did enjoy Ace Patrol, I never got that far in it and thus would not likely be much of an interesting matchup in a multiplayer game, I'm afraid. That does sum it up decently. You are racing about the galaxy trying to earn favor from its inhabitants via various tactical combat missions while a couple of other AI controlled fleets are doing the exact same thing. While there are a few ways to win, the main one is simply winning over 51% of the galaxy's population. Run a mission for a planet and you'll gain both favor and some valuable resources. Do missions for the same planet a couple of times before the AI get a chance to do so and then you'll own the planet which grants you even more resources and puts you completely in charge of its defense. These resources you collect come in a few different forms and each of the palnets you gain influence over will have its own specialties. Off the top of my head I can't recall which does what other than some obvious stuff like food allows you to build cities (more cities on a planet the higher their resource production), research allows you to improve your various ship functions, and metal is used to create/repair/improve ships. While the various empire ships can all look different, they're all essentially the same basic ships with just different ratings on their individual components. Even research, at least as I've seen so far, will never offer up any radically new components or weapons, just ways for your existing guns to do more damage or your shields to absorb more punishment. One concpet pretty original is the whole Shore Leave thing. The game allows you to decide how much you want to get done in a single turn at the cost of greater and greater crew fatigue for each mission you take in that single turn. While resources will only be generated once on all of your systems at the end of your turn, you could just keep it safe and run a single mission that turn with your crew at peak efficiency, or end up doing 3 or more missions with a crew practically falling asleep (stats for the ship are lower and enemy hits will do extra damage) by the end.
I'll send you one, dude. I'm always looking for multiplayer matches for that. Anyway, I've only scratched the surface with Starships but I'm really liking it so far. My only concern is if it will be too easy and generally how dynamic the AI is for replay value. Just like with Civ Rev 2, it's a damn shame this has no multiplayer!
I've played two games on medium/moderate and both were easy victories after a point. I think anyone with some turn-based strategy experience and a coherent strategy of some kind will probably find that to be the case. I think I am going to step up to a larger Galaxy before upping the difficulty, though.
It's annoying. You have to go to the spaceopeda and go to the section battle cards. You can identify that way. It's a bit too much work just to find out what card is
MMMMM.. i'm reading a lot of review ad impression... some review are: "wow! Very beatiful! Simple and deep at same time" other review are: "yawn... very boring after 3 hour..." Bho... i'm very confused...
@khann yeah, the battle cards could have definitely used a sub-screen where you could see what they do and chose what to activate. I get they wanted to streamline the interface as much as possible, but this is one of th only games I've ever seen where I wish playing needed a few more taps in spots (I.e. Movement and firing). Sid did a bunch of videos about the gameplay before it came out. Go dig those up. They represent the gameplay very well. The people complaining the game is boring wanted a different kind of game than what this set out to be.
The most elegant solution is one I've seen in only a handful of games. One, small & simple "?" Button, that, when engaged, substitutes a pop up detail bubble, instead of the default action on that particular feature.
It is deep compared to other iOS games and very simple compared to 4x games. If you played a lot of Civ, CK2, Master of Orion, you will find this a bit too simple. This is coming from a player of CK2, the original XCom, who played every game from Sid and many others. Personally my only criticism is that they didn't make it playable on IPhone, I do not bring an IPad with me so I will never play this game on the go and at home I can play on the PC much better games.
I played a lot Civilization 1-2-3... And was great... I didn't find a so deep game in IOS world. Did you find? CivRev and CivRev2 are superficial compared Civ 2 or 3. Thank you
I've been enjoying my time with the game, but I wish there were more customization options. For one I'd like to name my own ships. Does anyone know if there's a way to do this?
There is a discussion on reddit where some users posted a few names, I didn't play all of these on iPad so I do not know if they are all good: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2yt2o6/sid_meiers_starships_review_thread/ However I remember a very good strategy game: Battle Academy on iPad, if you like turn by turn tactical battles it is good. If you like the last XCom it is pretty much the same on PC and iPad so go ahead if you prefer to play on iPad.
Stuff I like: The simplified 4X ethos. Most of the micromanagement has been streamlined (NOT dumbed down) to just the stuff that matters. IE, making numbers on your planets get bigger. Ship/fleet loadouts is very nice. Could spend a lot of time playing with various ship loadouts. Game is gorgeous, very glossy, high production values. Stuff I don't like: Far too easy to mis-tap and move ships by mistake. A lot. Battle cards need to be looked up in the 'pedia. Too easy on default, I'll bump it up to higher settings but was able to grind my way to a sudden and easy population victory by knocking out two adjacent homeworlds. Worry about how much replayability it'll have, all dependent on AI response on higher difficulties. Overall I'm very happy with it, needs a bit of tweaking but the core is solid. My first game on medium/moderate was a couple of hours long and the "tips" button worked far better than a tutorial. Very organic and unobtrusive. My biggesr question will be finding the "right" way to play the game. As in, on XCOM classic/ironman is the sweetspot. With Civ games, and this, there are a lot of options. Map size, AI difficulty, number of opponents. Kind of too many options in some ways. Would 3 opponents on a huge map with tough AI get the best game? Or slightly weaker AI with 6 opponents? Etc etc. It's a lot of hours to invest just to experiment and find what works best. Right now, calling it a 4 star game with final judgement reserved until I've played more. But I know I will play a lot more.
Unfortunately, the UI looks like that of a PC game ported over to the iPad. The buttons are already pretty small on a 9.7" screen. It's probably marginal on an iPad mini and I don't think it would work on anything smaller without significant redesign. (Which would've been nice - an interface that worked on a phone would probably be beneficial to the iPad version.)
Big thanks to everyone who has provided comments. I'm definitely going to buy it but right now life is getting in the way of my gaming. However it sounds like this first release is a little rough so hopefully 2K will have it all sorted out by the time my schedule opens up. It's a shame that developers have gotten careless about releases since they know they can update it after the fact.
Is there a way to detonate them on the first move? I haven't been able to. Seems like either you get lucky or only use them on the maps where torpedoes don't show up on radar.
Having an extra step to do something just proves I'm right: Giving a user a chance to forget to do that extra step means that mistakes will ultimately be made. A mouse and keyboard takes away that neccessity to have that extra step.
This happened before games could be updated too. Test Drive Unlimited for the PSP has several gfx glitches (Pagani Zonda rear lights, for example), GTA: CW for the DS has some game-breaking bugs, TOCA for the GBA from Codemasters was a complete disaster regarding bugs, and several others too. The good part today is that they can be updated
Have you seen this game on a PC? I got the Mac version and never have I seen a game that says I WAS DESIGNED FOR THE IPAD! like this one does. Imagine buttons and text (that you think are small on a 9.7" screen being displayed as there are, with no adjustment or resizing, on a 27" screen. I got my face print on my screen from trying to read the text and see the icons. I can resize the screen and it fills 27 inches but I wrongly though earlier that everything was scalled up. but no. The icons and text are still very small. And evertime I play the game it starts up in an iPad size window.
