It's been a good year for 4X gamers. 2003 has seen the release of Master of Orion 3, Galactic Civilizations, and the retail release of Andrew Ewanchyna's Starships Unlimited, called "Starships Unlimited: Divided Galaxies." Each game has had its own story in development. MoO 3 had a dedicated team working for years and a massive redesign halfway through, Galactic Civ was a practically an update of a game that had already existed for years, and Starships Unlimited was born about four and a half years ago when a Canadian pilot named Andrew Ewanchyna stopped flying and started coding a game. Today, he remains the only designer, developer, and programmer listed in the credits.
Each game has taken a different approach to telling the story of interstellar conquest, with Galactic Civilizations focusing on an empire's economic and cultural matters and MoO 3 the political ones. Starships Unlimited, true to its name, is all about the starships. Each starship is like a character in an RPG, customizeable from the very beginning and quite capable in its own right. As the game progresses, starships get larger, more powerful, and more numerous, but not so much as fans of the Master of Orion series might expect. By the end of the game a player fielding more than twenty ships will be commanding a very large fleet indeed, and the largest ship in the game is less than three times as large, in terms of component space available, as the smallest ship available from the start. Six warships can reliably shift the balance of power across the entire galaxy in this game.
The game typically starts out with the player commanding one primitive world and one small starship. Early exploration quickly reveals that each unclaimed planet has an artifact of varying power and worth guarded by one or several guardians, which also vary greatly in potency and number. The timely acquisition and use of artifacts is essential to the game, as technological Ages (see: Age of Empires et al; 4 Ages in all in SU:DG) can only be advanced through adequate research, construction, and owning the proper artifacts. In other words, if you don't get enough of the right artifacts in time, you don't leave tech level 2, no matter how much research you do. This gives the early exploration an immediacy that many other games lack, as you can't simply sweep in behind a complacent enemy and win by colonizing their explored worlds.
While colonies can be built on other worlds, they're expensive, time-consuming, and vulnerable affairs for quite some time in game terms. Most of a player's property rights will be found in the form of trade routes, which the computer automatically forms and sustains effectively.
The level of user assistance that the game employs is something remarkable. In many ways, it's what Quicksilver was promising for Master of Orion 3: individual planets develop and upgrade themselves autonomous of player micromanagement, ships navigate in combat automatically (and successfully!), and fleets of ships can scatter themselves to different spacedocks, repair and upgrade as necessary, and arrive at the intended attack site simultaneously,all with one key stroke from the player total. Tell the fleet to attack a world and watch them go, it's that simple. The user-assist AI is good enough that while the player can take control of the ship-to-ship combat if he or she so desires, it's usually just as easy to let the computer take over once the basics of the game have been learned.
The game seems pretty intimidating at first. The row of buttons at the top of the game screen doesn't go away, and each button is important, so learning how to do what needs to be doing is a daunting task early on. Thankfully, this problem is lessened a bit by an "acknowledge" button that blinks every time you get a message, and also causes the appropriate response/action button to blink, and open when either one is pushed. So, for example, if an alien vessel hails your ship, the "acknowledge" button blinks and so does the "diplomacy" button. If the player clicks "acknowledge," it automatically brings up the diplomacy screen and the game proceeds from there. This on-the-fly tutorial ultimately proves to be an effective way of keeping the game moving while educating new players, but those players can still expect a false start or two before they're ready to sit down to their first real game.
The interface, too, seems more difficult than it is. Once you get the hang of it, you realize that you don't have to open a single menu, popup, or info screen to learn absolutely everything about any object on screen. Just move your mouse over it and it'll automatically bring up everything from current equipment loadout to fleet assignment to crew specialities. While giving orders is a slightly more complicated process, one still only really needs to understand the navigation menu to cause great harm to one's enemies. The assisting AI can take care of the rest.
The glitz factor in this game is very low. The opening credits are a series of stills, not a cinematic, and the game has no jaw-dropping eye candy. The alien species look more silly than realistic or impressive, like they could have been in Star Control 2 ten years ago. The spaceships are reminiscent of Disciples: Sacred Lands or Age of Wonders zoom-in graphics. The "story" (how all these artifacts got here and so on) is nonexistent. And the victory screen is just that: a screen with data from the game just played.
4X gamers, curiosity seekers, and strategy buffs should not be distracted by these petty complaints. Starships Unlimited: Divided Galaxies is a balanced and creative game experience.
Reviewed by Joel Rasdall.
