![]() Sliders allow you to define everything from its operational radius to how it weighs attacking damaged targets versus defending nearby ships, and much more. After placing each ship on the grid, there's a wealth of settings to specify its behavior. Putting one of those together is going to be like playing Tetriswith one hand and SimCity with the other.Īn in-depth fleet editor makes putting all your creations in formation another layer of detail. By comparison, the biggest capital ships tip the scale at a whopping 1300+ slots. I sat there optimizing my first 42-slot corvette for an hour before I felt satisfied, and my first 300+-slot cruiser was a whole other undertaking. And don't forget about boarding actions, and fighter bays, and energy reserves, and… everything else. You'll set fields of fire for swivel-mounted weapons, come up with point defense or anti-fighter solutions, and stock enough munitions to keep all those guns firing. Exposed power nodes or reactors are an invitation to have your expensive new flagship lit up by a chain reaction from a few errant shots. What kind of warp range does it need? How important is turning radius to you? And placement of everything matters, because where you put what determines what gets damaged first when you come under fire. You have to think of weight/propulsion too. Each ship needs enough energy to power its different systems, as well as a way to route the power throughout. You've got engine-only slots, outside slots, inside slots, and hybrids of the two. It's up to you to make it a ship.Įach hull type offers a grid-like layout of different slots. You do start by choosing a hull, but that's all it is… an empty hunk of metal. And I do mean design -this isn't pick a hull, pick a weapon, pick an armor, pick an engine, and go. The greatest expression of this exacting detail is the shipyard, where you design all of your ships from scratch. In fact, StarDrive is exhaustive, even a bit overwhelming in this department. Most strategy games only let you be Adama -this one let's you be Starbuck too.īut don't take the real-time nature of the game to mean that exacting tactics aren't important. If you've ever watched in horror while your most expensive unit continually does all the wrong things, this will be right up your alley. Amidst the chaos, you can choose to control one ship directly with the WASD keys, letting you dodge enemy fire while aiming and shooting with a mouse. ![]() Thanks to the lack of a hard unit cap, fleets get hilariously big with multiple fighter wings darting about like schools of fish and line after line of frigates, corvettes, and capital ships continually filling the screen with dense barrages of ordinance. Like Sins of a Solar Empire, StarDrive is real-time and the biggest impact that decision makes is in combat, which can feel as much like an '80s arcade shooter as it does an RTS. ![]() Now the same publisher is trying to rob me of my free time again with StarDrive, another 4X in the stars, but one that focuses on very different things than ES. Last year's Endless Space was a pleasant surprise that my social life was decidedly not prepared for. ![]() Iceberg Interactive seems to like the little guys, especially when they make space-based 4X games.
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