I find myself easily winning battles in which the mission select screen predicts I have less than 40% chance of victory, because after all, a single-player tactical game is only as good as its AI. In later, more tactically interesting battles, fleets become large and durable enough to trade blows for a while, sometimes scoring random critical hits that disable shields, engines, or weapons.
I’ve even had intermittent but major frame rate problems on both PC and my iPad 3, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Plus, the many asteroids that serve as “cover” for ship battles look terrible. Ships get some good beauty shots thanks to the action camera, which shows projectiles launching and hitting targets, but the weapon and explosion effects are so poor I’m surprised Firaxis wanted the camera anywhere near them. Other than that, though, Starships doesn’t look great - even for a game clearly designed to run on the iPad. Those choices are meaningful, too, since a ship with fast engines and close-range weaponry has very different utility from a slow one that sits in the rear launching long-range torpedoes and fighters. That creates a wide variety of ship design variations stemming from the three base vessels (associated with which starting bonus you pick for your faction). Upgrading your individual ships is one of the coolest things about Starships, because they’ll change appearance based on every point you plug into engines, shields, armor, long or short-range weapons, stealth, sensors, torpedoes, or fighters. The problem is, most of those missions are either extremely easy due to the barely upgraded ships having few capabilities (just zip behind your target and blast their weak rear shields at point-blank range for one-shot kills), or so hard my entire fleet was wiped out on the first turn – effectively ending the game before it got started. When you’re first setting out from your homeworld with a two-ship fleet to win independent planets over to your cause before rival empires do, mission variety is pretty good: escorting a friendly ship to a destination, preventing an enemy from reaching theirs, navigating a maze of asteroids while handicapped by a limited view distance, taking out a VIP enemy ship, hunting stealth fighters – there are quite a few.
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