Most of them are useful, and most have abilities that tie in particularly well with certain victory conditions. The Harmony trail a distant third with a power that's useful only when ships get damaged. A free wonder can be a huge initial boost, but it depends which one you get, and it's chosen at random. Those bonus rewards are a huge boon early on and keep on paying into the mid-game. For the former, the Purity do seem the obvious choice.

The more substantive choices involve faction and leader. So changing these options can be a useful way of increasing or decreasing the challenge of the game. The more people you pack into a small space, the more difficult it'll be to secure your foothold. One oft-overlooked combination is number of opponents and map size. When you're starting a new game, you get to choose several parameters about the galaxy you're going to be competing for. Although it can be wise to keep a little energy in the pot in case you need to repair damage between missions. Since they're all separate pools, there's no reason not to spend all of them every turn. Metal builds wonders or upgrades, food builds cities, and science builds technologies.

Energy is for upgrading and repairing starships. It's not the most well-organised document, but it does cover most of what you need to know about the game mechanics.įor starters, it tells you that the different resources you gather during the game - energy, metals, science, and food - are spent on different things. The first thing you should do, however, is do what the game suggests and read the space-o-pedia. We've put together this handy strategy guide to help you out. It's enough to play on the easy difficulty setting, but if you want to ramp up the challenge, you'll need to know more. One of its few weaknesses is the fact that the brief tutorial leaves out lots of essential information. Starships is a fantastic light strategy game, and a worthy winner of the Gold Award we bestowed on it.

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