#Stardrive 2 battleship design full

#Stardrive 2 battleship design full

Planets are key to out-producing the enemy, but they can be arduous to develop and defend.īut 4X games always begin full of promise, at least. And yet, when it's time to take stock, StarDrive 2 finds itself firmly in the middle. And if the same goes for the crowded, largely homogenous genre they belong to, where does that leave an entry like StarDrive 2? For the most part, the game seems to be a proper execution of its developer's vision it's worked its way up its chosen tech trees, so to speak, arriving as a sci-fi empire builder in the grand tradition. They're 'games' in the same way that the game of thrones is a game: you win or you die, and the middle ground is really just another burial tract.

The thing is, 4X games don't have much patience for an also-ran. It's only when I come out of my daze a few scaled eras later that I often find myself long surpassed by opposing empires, the graphs telling a story of steady mediocrity since, oh, sometime in the Middle Ages when production took a brief turn towards the slightly sub-optimal. Mistakes amount to small hang-ups in the otherwise effortless forward momentum of upgrades and technological developments, lost in the spaces between ascending data points on one of the genre's ubiquitous end-of-game line graphs. When that contented sort of complacency sets in, I'm more easily coaxed into 'just one more turn.' These empire-building games make it easier still because they tend to defer the consequences of poor moves.

StarDrive 2 lifts a page from Total War's book by having tactical space and ground battles that occur separately from the turn-based 4X layer, on which you do the usual mix of exploration, colonization, planetary development, and diplomatic negotiation.A good 4X strategy game is a bit like a slow-burning fire-something to be stoked every now and again with a click of the mouse and watched through half-lidded eyes into the late hours. But these pieces don't all fit together equally well, and tend to get in one another’s way. At its very best, StarDrive is a space admiralty simulator. There are a lot of different things to take into account when designing your fleet: the power draw of your weapons and engines, the weight of your armor and equipment, the output of your engines, and the overall maneuverability of your ships.

It's an enjoyable exercise in trade-offs and forecasting when I'm sitting there in the ship designer, I'm thinking about how the carrier I'm building is going to support the battleship I just designed, and how their protection from long-range missiles will rely on an electronic warfare cruiser I'm planning to design next. It's not just a case of slapping the latest and greatest technology onto the old templates (though you can easily exchange outmoded equipment if you need to). That's because StarDrive 2 cleverly offers you mutually exclusive research opportunities in groups of three. Once you've researched one technology from a trio, the other two are closed off to you, except through trade or conquest. That means that your rivals can have very different threat profiles that you need to take into account as you build your ships.