This is a great game. It has a connection with Sid Meier's Beyond Earth. I've never played Beyond Earth. I bought Starships because everything I read reminded me of the best parts of SM Railroads and Civ Revolution, in terms of presentation and style. The play is split between tactical turn-based combat with a handful of ships and empire management. All aspects of the game are simpler to carry out than in a full-fledged 4x game. But this is not a 'casual game' any more than Advance Wars or Master of Orion were casual games. The game has elements in common with both of those icons of pc gaming. More on that later.

Shipbuilding is quick, easy, and elegant. A simple table shows your ships and their abilities (of which there are eight or ten). Just click on the box to upgrade X ability for Y ship. It's one of those panels that could be dull and lifeless. It isn't because the UI is friendly and well-made. The combat is so streamlined and straightforward, I can look at those boxes and see in my mind the maneuvers and tactics I can pursue.

Is combat too fast and easy? I suppose it depends on difficulty level. This is one of those games that wants you to not just win, but to win without getting hit. To win with style. You can destroy every enemy ship, but if all your own fleet goes limping back to the shipyard with gaping holes, you will fall behind the building curve.

I mentioned Advance Wars above, an very simple tactics game that involved zero luck in combat: No such thing as a miss or a fumble, and no damage roll. All the values are fixed. Starships is like that. Combat among the asteroids is a game of cat-and-mouse, and it's fun! It's actual strategy. When the enemy ship moves right up behind your ship with its plasma cannons, you know you're dead before the weapon animation plays. Now, there are elements of luck - a warp point (teleportation square) could drop you exactly where you do (or don't) want to be; you could end your move near a cloaked ship and see it too late to do anything about it; a severe hit could cripple your engines. Things like that. But all attacks hit always, and with fixed damage, unless modifiers zero out the damage completely, such as firing through too many asteroid fields or from too far away.

On the imperial side, the game's diplomacy and construction takes just the right amount of time. Enough to engage you but not enough to drag you through tiresome clicks and endless notifications. Strategic turns end when you grant the crew shore leave (almost like dividing the treasure in SM Pirates). Empire management is quick and easy, and it all makes sense. I feel compelled to repeat that: It all makes sense. No arbitrary or clumsy features at all. And the possibilities are legion. You can have a couple of uber ships or several lesser ones. There is a lot to experiment with. Empire and fleet mirror each other in a sense - each has to fit the other's strengths.

The other empire leaders and admirals have just enough artwork and personality to give you the sense that the galaxy is alive and populated. Dialogue lasts just the right amount of time - not very long. You can examine the shps you will be fighting, and you really should to avoid nasty surprises.

Really, SM Starships is a computerized board game, just at the border of a full-blown pc strategy game but not going over the line. It is clearly a game, not a sim of anything or an attempt to capture the whole universe in a gigabyte.

Many games offer a thousand paths to victory, all of them dull. It's hard to put a finger on what it is that makes a slew of possible strategy all sound appealing, but Starships succeeds in that, with bright colors and bright ideas. I feel in charge of all my fleet and empire's doings, with no compromises just to make the game or the dev's happy. It's about me. Or you. SM Starships is good stuff.

It's got the very basics of a good game, they just didn't bother finishing it or adding any polish. Disappointing really.

**UPDATE** - This review was written with the game running on "Hard"

This is the worst game I've played that bears Sid Meier's name.

"Surely it's not that bad" You say.

I'm afraid it is.

In the build up to the release of the game there was little doubt that it was going to be a less involved game to play then the typical Sid Meier fare, more Ace Patrol then Civilization 5. When developers were discussing the game, that was pretty clear and I have no qualms with that.

In fact I was quite happy with the idea of a strategy game designed so I could play over an evening after work.

The 3 hour play time of this review was playing a game to completion on a "large" map.

Initial impressions are poor. The game launching in a tiny window and into a bare, personality-less main menu that could have been ripped from any sci-fi title (it reminded me of the Sword of the Stars 2 menu). I sought out the settings menu and within that I found volume controls and "Windowed Full Screen mode".

I'm sorry what?

I know the game was being made for tablet as well, but this is Firaxis. I asked another friend playing it "Am I missing a settings menu somewhere?" bemusedly. "Nope" He replied "It really is that sparse"

Oh well. Not a great first impression, but not necessarily the end of the world. I setup a game.

Setup lets you pick a faction and a leader. Each faction gets the same leaders, with slightly rejigged artwork. Which comes across as a bit lazy. The factions have a unique bonus with the leaders adding an additional bonus of their own. I was a little bemused at what the various bonuses meant as I only knew about one aspect of the game (crew morale) from previews nothing else made a lot of sense and there was nothing to explain the benefits of a choice, no tooltips, nothing.

The lack of tooltips persists throughout, with a general lack of accessible information.

I setup my game, stabbing blindly in the dark at things that sounded useful

The galactic playing field looks alright and I wait for the useful tutorial to kick in and explain things to me over my first few turns. I get nothing. I understand there's an info button to click but I don't understand why there's a lack of tutorial and I fumble around the first few turns getting to grips with the games systems.

As the game is all about moving a fleet around space bringing disparate planets into a federation you'd expect load out/designing of the ships to be one of the most involved aspects of the game. Instead, you're presented with a list of things to click away at to upgrade or downgrade (removing components nets you some resources back to spend elsewhere) different aspects of each ship.

My fleet consisted of three ships throughout the course of the game, starting as corvette's, ending as battleships through upgrades and the games automatic ship classification. All 3 focused on speed, one was paticularly tough and loaded with close range weaponry. One was less tough, also had close range weaponry and could cloak. One had longer range weapons. The limitation to what you can actually do with ships meant all of them had max speed, and were stupidly tough by about mid way through. But this simple setup felt game breaking. I could defeat any mission or enemy fleet, outside of the missions where you have to defend an outpost that can only survive two hits with fast enemies that just head straight for it.

The empire building aspect of the game is no more involved. "Click this to make numbers go up, because numbers" about sums up this aspect of the game. There's no interesting trade off between balancing metal, food or energy. Get lots of whatever you can, click stuff to have more stuff.

I actually beat my game accidentally. I was working my way from planet to planet, building one ludcriously over powered wonder after another because why not, then a conquered a planet which also had a wonder and triggered the wonder victory.

Well victory nets you a much more rewarding end then it does in Beyond Earth at least. You get 10 seconds of video which is better then a text box. But does it really matter when the rest of the game is so unengaging?

Overall, it's an ok game to have on a tablet, nothing stand out, even where there isn't much competition. But on the PC there's tons. Weird Worlds in Infinite space did something similar but better years ago and it's Early Access sequel likely will to. There is no reason to buy this game for the PC, and very little for a tablet.

I decided to give this game a few hours of play, and a couple of days to judge if my opinions about it were sufficiently objective, and I've deliberately avoided reading other reviews so as not to colour my judgement.

At a very cursory glance, it's an ok, fun, civ: beyond earth themed mini game, that will provide a slightly different way to sink a few hours in to a game for a little bit.

I tend to think of games in terms of wether they "break even" for me or not - am I going to get sufficient gameplay out of a title that the cost per hour played is less than or equal to an arbitrary value.

For me, I tend to consider this value at a nice easy £1 per hour, pretty much the price of a cheap cup of coffee... if a game beats that, it's broken even or possibly even done a lot better. If it works out higher than that, the cost to own is too high and not worth the expense.

On those terms, this title doesn't even come close... as I doubt I'll play beyond the 3 hours or so I've put into it so far, leaving me at a cost to own of over £3 per hour...

I'll try to embellish more below.

Do you remember the free companion app for Mass Effect 3 that was released a few years ago? Called Mass Effect: Datapad, it allowed you to play a basic mini game on a tablet or mobile device that could influence events in the main game.

Simply put, Starships is the "next gen" version of that. There game is a little more complicated than Datapad, but in essence all there is to it is a vehicle for delivering unlockable content in Beyond Earth, which from the initial unlocks I was able to make, are pretty basic, and add a few slightly different starting options for civ's in any new game you start after the unlock (eg a "sponsor" option when setting up your civ to start with ultrasonic fences, instead of the vanilla options) Unlike datapad though, it doesn't add the Beyond Earth equivalent of ME's codex, and does nothing else to really expand on the game or the overall experience.

When you consider that, as mentioned, Datapad was free, albiet a little more basic, it brought a lot more to the game universe it represented than Starships accomplishes for £11/$14 - and that in itself, really draws the value of this title into stark contrast.

Don't get me wrong, it is a fun little distraction, but there really isn't all that much to it beyond a distraction. Every mission map is ostensibly the same... a randomly generated asteroid field with a couple of flavour target decorations in suitable locations.

The galaxy map, where you take part in all your diplomacy, upgrades and travel, is pretty miniscule, even when set to "extreme" size, (I counted approx 20 systems in my last extreme map, for example) which is pretty poor and clearly designed around rushed, dirty play. Similarly unit limitations in missions (up to 15 whole units at once... wow) is a pretty clear indicator of the intended audience.... tablet users, with PC and Mac users obviously catered for purely as a bonus extra revenue stream.

The game, currently, has no tutorial, and requires users to integrate both Starships and Beyond Earth with a 3rd party accounts system (which isn't all that obvious to find) in order to benefit from any of the inter-title unlocks.

The advertised "starship customisation" feature is pretty poor, and is simply a case of pumping points into a specific attribute to beef it up a bit.

The ingame AI is pretty abysmal where scaling difficulty does nothing to changing AI tactics, and instead seems only to make them more able to soak up and dish out damage. As soon as you've worked out that it's possible to spam your way to success pretty easily, all the real challenge is lost, and it simply becomes an exercise in chosing the most economical way to collect all the ingame systems.

Sure I hold my hands up, I had different expectations of the game when I preordered it, and from the demo's and trailers I saw, I was kind of expecting a turn based 4x strategy title. I was disappointed when I realised this wasn't the case, and I cannot say strenuously enough, this is not a 4x strategy game, but I tried to keep playing and experiencing the game regardless, and have tried to judge it on it's own merits rather than how it didn't match up to my expectations.

Is it a fun little minigame? Yes, as I said at the start, it is an amusing distraction for an hour or two.

However, I have played similar games in flash based web games, and I've downloaded far better, and more involved or complete, games than this for free on my mobile devices, and have had varying levels of satisfaction from them.

I found the subject of "cross compatibility" a little bit of a misnomer too... Where Datapad could impact on how prepared the galaxy was to deal with an impending threat, or where Assassins Creed allowed you to affect the economy and environment in which you played, all Starships offers is the ability to unlock gameplay options that would previously just have been included as standard.

Seen in that light, it's little more than a rebranded DLC pack for Beyond Earth, which demands not only your money but also your time in order to unlock the content you've paid for (and by all rights, should have had access to in the first place)

In light of all that, I simply cannot in good concious recommend the game to anyone at it's current retail price.
Taken as a DLC, it's easily double the price it should be for the features it brings to your Beyond Earth experience.
Taken as a stand alone mobile app, it's probably closer to triple the price of a title with similar depth.
Taken as a stand alone PC/Mac game, to be honest, I've paid less than a 10th of the price for indie titles that were far more robust and deserving.

Add it to your wishlist, and wait for it to be added as a bonus game to a humble bundle or something. Spend the £11/$14 buying lunch for a couple of homeless folks, you'll get far more satisfaction in the long run, and someone far more deserving than the developers behind this title, get to have you buy them a meal.

Starships is a game with a lot of potential, but falls short of what it could be. The game lacks a decent tutorial outside of standard tooltips, but the gameplay is fairly shallow without too much curve. Most of the non-combat gameplay is simply buying improvements/investments for better resources, which you can use to buy improvements and investments.

The battles themselves are largely a matter of flying in and out of cover, shooting targets from behind/the side and randomly crippling their abilities while they do the same to you. Torpedoes can be used to created delayed explosions, granting you a degree of control over enemy movement, and there's some shenanigans with cloaking and radar.

The maps are very similar, with the main features being shifting asteroids and portals that randomly teleport you to other portals. The former are very simple: red and green circles let you know that every turn, a path will be opened or closed. The latter is more of an annoyance than anything, due to the random aspect and the game's willingness to send your ship through one if you don't carefully plot your movement across individual hexes.

The game is connected to Beyond Earth, itself an iffy prospect at the time of writing. Completing tasks in BE will unlock bonuses in Starships, and vice versa. The BE unlocks are generally underwhelming, save for Pioneers. You can also choose to "continue" a BE save in Starships, playing as your chosen leader and maintaining the same diplomatic relations with AI leaders, though this is pointless with Starships being a step down from BE.

Ultimately, Starships isn't a particularly deep or intriguing game. The visuals and music aren't bad, and the missions have decent variety, but everything else is lackluster and the options are barebones. There's no multiplayer, no option to continue after winning, and no real depth.

It might be worth a look on Steam sale, particularly if you don't want to get a BE mod or mess with XML files to unlock the bonuses, but Starships can't break from the orbit of its iOS port origins.

I suspect many of my fellow reviewers simply saw Sid's name on it, and expected a large and complex 4X game in space. Which, if they had paid even half-attention to anything the developer said prior to release, they would have realised was never meant to be the case.

This game was never meant to be something like Endless Space, or Galactic Civilizations, or Master of Orion. Firaxis was quite clear about that during the development process, in everything they said to their fans.

Starships is a light/casual strategy game, suitable to playing when you have a few spare moments - during a lunch break, for example. It's less about grand strategy than it is abut tactical combat with a small fleet. And within that framework, it is a very, very good little game. Just, lighter fare than most of my fellow strategy-game enthusiasts will be used to.

Never buy a game just for the title, especially, just for whose name is on it. Always take the time to at least learn what it's publisher claims the game is supposed to be.

To all of those people who bought this, expecting a dep and complicated 4X game requiring multiple hours, and hundreds of turns, just to complete a single playthrough, I say: CAVEAT EMPTOR; the only person to blame for your poor experience, is yourself.

Next time, do your homework, and at least learn what the game itself actually claims to be, before setting yourself up for disappointment when it turns out not to match your unfounded expectations.

This is a hard game to recomend. Unless they make some improvmens to the game, I have to say do not buy this unless it is on sale.

You can think of Sid Meier's Sarships as a 4x Light turn-based strategy game. The best thing I can compair it to is a Simplified iOS version of Endless Space. Even the 4 resources look and sound like Endless Space. You have Food, Science, Metal, and Engery. Each turn your planets give you all the resources that they have produced based on their population and improvment you built. There are only 5 improvment to build, one each for production of each resource and a Planetary defence one for the fifth.

You move your fleet of ships from planet to plant completing quest they give you to get influince with them until they become one of your planets. You only have one fleet and it starts with two ships. Each turn you can use your enerigy to improve your ships or build a new one to join your fleet. You never seem to loose a ship, if it is destroyed in battel, it will be back in your fleet at the end of the battle.

You can also link this game with Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth using the My2K account. Playing this game will let you unlock some things in Beyond Earth.

There are parts of the game that I did enjoy. The simplified version of the 4X game means the game move at a fast pace, focuing mainly on battles. My main problems with the game is that you can tell they put all their focus on the iOS version, and left out a lot of standard featurs you expect to have on a PC game, especially from a Firaxis and 2K game. These are not small Indie startups making their first Greenlight game.

Right now the main problems I have with the game:

-There are no resolution options and no Fullscreen. There is what they call Fullscreen Windowed
-You can set victory conditions, but the AI ignors them and can win any way it want. So victory conditions are just a way to handycap yourself.
-There is no way to rebind keys and there are no hot keys. Right now they only keys that work are they arrow keys to move the map, and the ESC that lets you exit the game.
-No multi-player. I can tell this game is going to get old realy fast. multi-player was something they were going to put in, but decided not to for some reason. I hope they change their mind on this.

Had I bought this on iOS, I would say it a great game and have a lot of fun with it, but as a pc game it feels off some how. Like we have a really good Beta, but you are just waiting for them to finish it now.

Short version: This game should NOT be purchased at this time. Wait 2 or 3 months for 2K to either abandon support or actually finish testing this game. This game is NOT in Early Access and should be a finished and tested product. However, most of the Early Access games I have played were far more stable.

Longer version:
I've never written a review on a Sid Meier game before and it's a shame that this has to be the first one. The bugs that are inherent in this game indicate that very little testing was done prior to launch. In an attempt to stem the tide of negative posts, one of the 2K devs sticky'd a thread to try to capture all technical issues. I don't think he's actually replying to anything there. This thread has been out since 3/12 (today is 3/16) and is up to 32 pages so far and growing.

I entered a support ticket on the 2K page after reading their FAQ/Known Issues thread. I'm suffering from two of the frequent issues. The game doesn't play fullscreen for me -- the Windows taskbar always shows up. The FAQ said that if I hide my taskbar in Windows, this would resolve it. Really? Why the heck would I do that? Shouldn't they just write the game to overlap it fullscreen? You know, just like every other game developer already does? The other issue is far more irritating though. The game crashes after the second set of logos... just about 4 or 5 words into the intro. 100% of the time despite an uninstall/reinstall. So I've not watched the intro yet. The only way to get past this is to spam the Escape key as soon as the second set of logos comes up. I don't get the intro but I can play the game... for a while. Yes, dear friends, the crash-to-desktop bug persists into the game itself. Randomly, the game just shuts itself down with no error messages. Not so bad if you save frequently but later into the game when you have control of a bunch of worlds and a decent-sized fleet, it gets to be a real PITA to save just to go from one world to the next then save and move to the next... But you have to do this if you want to store your progression because you never know when you'll be dumped right out. When you enter a ticket on this at the 2K support site (which I heartily recommend as they need a swift boot to the tail for this), you'll notice that if you select "crash" as an option, they even already have drop-downs for "crash after second logos" and "crash during gameplay." This game should have never ever ever launched in this state. These aren't minor bugs to be worked around -- they are show-stoppers.

Now on to the game itself... It feels more like a tablet game than a Windows game. The price point is about right -- this isn't a deep simulation or world builder. You're not in-game to get invested and watch your planets grow (except for maybe your homeworld). The combat is what the game is all about. It's relatively simple and straight-forward in the basic mode. I haven't tried hard mode yet since I haven't been able to sustain the game long enough to complete a normal campaign. (see the paragraph about the perisistent crashing above)

To me, this game is simply a stain on Sid Meier's name. I can't imagine he had any interest in the project, and it feels like the producers simply pinned his arms to the desk until he signed over permission to use his name for a overly-glossed project that probably didn't take them very long to develop.

This game tries to 'feel' a bit like Master of Orion, but it fails to deliver in pretty much every category. I played it for two days and finished it on epic size. Every planet, faction and technology is the same, no random events happened, there are a short list of "missions" for every uncolonied planet which are all very much the same. It is to MoO what Empire At War was to Supremacy: take a good concept, cut it down to its most bare elements, and slap a price on it.

There's almost no diplomacy, not in the sense that you feel there is real politics taking place as happens with Sid Meier's civilisation games - the AI is neither bold to attack nor is scared of you when you're powerful. Alliances are empty. The game feels as though it has no soul to the purpose but to play through the simple rules, you are fully aware you're just clicking to interact with a simple ruleset, no immersion in actually "being a part" of a story, not even on sandbox level.

The graphics "are nice" but feels like pretty paint on something so simple and simply boring. The game forces you to watch ships explode in its terrible animation (which is, flashes here and there, while the camera shakes galore, focusing on the ship with no choice, then it disappears, this animation when repeated actually made me a bit ill) so, when you take out 5 ships with one torpedo (which is pretty necessary to get through the game without spending too long in the boring battles) you just check your phone while you wait for it to go all "oh look shaky screen in space, isn't space cool??" No. It's not cool.

This is the space-4X equivalent of Farmville. It's only worth getting if you need to keep your son quiet in the evenings, but even then, in my opinion, it's also a waste of his time.

And in the seventh day Firaxis and Sid got tired...

I want to love this game. Really. Spaceships and planets! Exploring with your fleet and investigate different civilizations! Sounds a cool concept, also the maps looks amazing. I did not expect a really complex 4x game, but rather something with fun rules, easy gameplay but challenging enough.

And possibly, hopefully Starships executes that... but there is no real way to find it as the game full with bugs (and no, not the bugs from Beyond the Earth). It crashes for many people with the current built, so honestly I can't advice to anyone to buy at it's current state. Wait a couple of days to see what will happen.

Civ: Beyond the Earth was somewhat a disappointment and I am sad to say but Starships seems to go to the same route. A could be great and fun game who never fullfils it's promise. Please prove me otherwise Sid.