I’m in your space, killing ur dudes.
So: a new Sid Meier game was announced earlier today. When I’m dictator, days like this will be international holidays but in the dark interval until then we’ll just have to make do.
Gather your family around the iPad, friends, because I’ve been on an expedition to find every single morsel of information about Sid Meier’s Starships that’s available for public consumption. Nothing has escaped my Sauron-like gaze, and I’ve got it all waiting for you after the jump.
Perhaps you mean side-suto.
Side Meier? Is that a Dutch Judo move? Who cares, Owen?
To quote the younger Skywalker — I care. As should you. Sid Meier’s oeuvre is a catalog of some of the greatest computer games in history: Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, and Silent Service for starters. The man is on a very short list of the world’s greatest living game designers. If an asteroid was going to hit the Earth and we could only put two humans on an escape pod, I’d put Oprah and Sid Meier on that thing.
So what’s he making this time?
Sid Meier’s Starships, an “adventure-driven strategy game” for iPad, Mac, and PC. It’s being developed by Sid’s studio Firaxis. Here’s publisher 2K’s official description.
Take command of a fleet of powerful starships in this adventure-driven strategy game from legendary designer Sid Meier. Travel to new worlds, completing missions to help save and protect the planets and their people from dangerous Space Pirates, to powerful Marauders and other hostile factions.
Your ships travel through a randomly-generated galaxy, using diplomacy to collect allies and combat to subjugate enemies. The ships are “fully customizable” and the galaxy is full of missions and quests.
So is this a big, epic game like Civ?
It might be epic, but it probably won’t be too big. According to Polygon, Starships will be download-only — the lack of a boxed retail release suggests that it’ll be a $10-$15ish game like Ace Patrol Pacific Skies, the WWII turn-based dog-fighting game Firaxis released in 2013. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. We loved Ace Patrol around here, and I personally played it for months.
Wait a second — how do we know it’s actually being designed by Meier? He’s still got his moniker plastered on Sid Meier’s Civilization and he hasn’t designed any of the games in the series since 1991.
Well, publisher 2K Games told Gamespot that “Starships was developed by Meier and a small team at Firaxis”, and that fits nicely with what we know about how Firaxis works these days.
There’s a big team working on an XCOM or Civilization-sized project, and then there’s a smaller team working with Sid on less resource-intensive games like Ace Patrol. “I got the urge to do a game with a smaller team that we could do in a quicker period of time”, Sid told PC Gamer back in 2013. “With a lower budget you can take more chances and do things that are a little more risky.”
The name is also a pretty good clue about Sid’s involvement. The man has a million virtues, but a knack for catchy names is not among them. Civilization, Pirates, Dinosaurs. Sid names his games like store brand potato chips, and “Starships” fits that pattern neatly.
Finally, we know that Sid’s had sci-fi on the brain recently. Firaxis had an in-house game jam late last year, and the game that Uncle Sid cobbled together was called Final Burn. It was not about a burrito dinner gone wrong, but rather “a set of intergalactic explorers looking for a way home”. Sound familiar?
Sid Meier’s Vogon Constructor Fleet
This sounds like a 4X game, like Civ.
Yeah, it kinda does! Sid told Eurogamer Deutschland that “there is a galaxy layer, where you decide where to send your fleet and when you get to the planets there will be actual tactical missions, where you send your starships to either fight bad guys or escort somebody for example.” And if you look at one of the screenshots in particular, you’ll notice that the planets are producing resources, borrowing their resource icons from last year’s Civilization: Beyond Earth.
And check this out, from that same interview:
“There is what we call the population victory, which is to control more than half of the galaxy,” he explained. “For this, you travel form one system to another, helping them out with their problems and let them join your federation. So, by doing good throughout the galaxy, you expand your federation.
“There is a science victory, where yours will be the leading civilisation in terms of technology and science. Then there is the classic Civilization domination victory, in which you eliminate your opponents. There is also a wonders victory, if you want to focus on wonders. So, there are various ways to win.”
Sounds a lot like Civ.
Wow! A real 4X game on iPad?
Yes, but there’s also an adventure aspect: “[Y]ou take this fleet into the galaxy and in each star system you visit, there will be some sort of mission, a problem to solve, some way that you can help the people living there. After solving these missions, they become part of your federation.”
And then of course, the tactical combat.
“The key elements are designing and building your own starships,” Meier explained. “Develop different kinds of weapons, stealth abilities, armour and shields. Put all the different pieces of a ship together in different ways, to get different kinds of ships. Some will be fast, others will be powerful, some are used for stealth, and your role will to be the admiral of this fleet. Build a fleet of a few very powerful ships or one of many smaller ships, there a lot of variations.”
So that makes it sound like Ace Patrol with a strategy layer sunroof.
Maybe, but on Twitter, Firaxis producer Pete Murray has gone out of his way to tamp down that particular notion.
@EaglePursuit More going on in combat & strategy layer. Only thing it shares with AP is hexes and similar-looking combat gamescape
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
Oh there's one more similarity with Ace Patrol. Firing angle is important.
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
Honestly, those are the only similarities I can think of after much time playing Starships
— Pete Murray (@FXSPeteMurray) January 19, 2015
So this isn’t a pure 4X game, but it’s clearly more than just sci-fi Ace Patrol, too.
So this is a spin-off from Civilization: Beyond Earth, then?
Yup. Sid told Gamespot that this was “the next chapter” of that game. As I mentioned above, a lot of the user interface icons we’ve seen come straight from Civ: BE, and Eurogamer DE was told that “you will recognise some of the [faction] leaders from Civilization: Beyond Earth.” We’ve also seen the “affinities” from that game–imperial ideologies–show up: a couple of the released screenshots refer to “Purity” and “Supremacy” fleets.
That Hutama guy still owes me a favor.
I heard that game wasn’t great.
Well, it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t bad. Anyhow, this is a completely different animal.
Owen, I’ve been traumatized by in-app purchases and I now assume that they’re in every-damn-thing until proven irrefutably wrong. Am I wrong?
I think you’re wrong. Nothing definitive has been said, so I’m reading tea leaves here, but I sincerely doubt that there will be any IAPs in Starships.
Firaxis experimented with IAPs in their first mobile games, Haunted Hollow and the first Ace Patrol. Lots of people (including me) kicked and screamed about the presence of IAPs in those games, and it seems like Firaxis took that feedback to heart. Ace Patrol follow-up Pacific Skies featured no IAPs at all, and neither did the Firaxis-branded Civilization Revolution 2 developed by 2K China.
That hasn’t stopped 2K from stuffing their other games full of IAPs, but it sure seems like the publisher gets that the audience for Firaxis’ kind of strategy games is not the same audience that’s happy to pay for in-game consumable tchotchkes. Sid himself has voiced discomfort with IAPs in the past. Thank goodness. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.
You’ve had a lot of time to perfect that Cylon detector.
You’re going to bore us to tears with like, 10 more posts about this game between here and when it comes out, aren’t you?
Yes.
And when is that, exactly?
According to the official website, “Spring 2015″.
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