Instead it’s a stripped down Civilization-lite you can take over planets to expand your borders, build improvements to improve resource yield, grow your population by constructing cities and spend accumulated science points on technology upgrades that directly improve the effectiveness of your starships in combat. Starships avoids falling into this particular trap by making its empire map far more than a barely-disguised mission select screen. Ace Patrol’s campaign was a painfully vestigial waste of time that had nowhere near enough variety or impact on the excellent tactical combat and which completely failed to provide it with any meaningful context, rendering the entire game repetitive and ultimately forgettable. It’s that last sentence which signals the biggest improvement from Ace Patrol. Completing a mission successfully gets you resources and influence which you can use to expand your empire/federation/galactic hive mind on the empire map. Once you’ve selected a mission you’re then taken to a turn-based tactical combat segment in which you use the various weapons on your starships to blow an AI fleet into smithereens. One is the empire map where you order your fleet of starships to various planets in need of your assistance, which is rendered by completing some sort of procedurally generated mission for them. It has a very similar mechanical structure to Ace Patrol, splitting the game into two parts.

Now we have Starships, however, a title so vague and humdrum they couldn’t even be bothered to give it a little pizzazz by calling it Starships! Maybe they felt like it’d be false advertising, since people would probably have expected a jauntily fun experience haring around the space-Caribbean rather than the second take on Ace Patrol that Starships really is. ( And he was right.) Even the worst of his games, Railroads!, was saved by the exclamation mark and by the fact it did somewhat signal the transition from meaty business sim to playing with a virtual toy railway set. Even the simplest ones were jazzed up by the addition of an exclamation mark: Pirates! is a little muddy as a descriptor, but you can at least tell Sid is very excited about it and thinks you’re going to have a lot of fun playing it. What else would you call a game about the progress of human society through the ages except Civilization? They are usually appropriately descriptive in Railroad Tycoon you play the part of an 1830-era railroad tycoon. It’s not a name that sounds particularly promising, is it? Sid’s a fan of pithy one- or two- word titles, and he’s used them to great effect in the past.

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