Review by Tim Still

Name:           Stars!
Publisher:      Empire Interactive
Format:         CD-Rom
Available:      Now

Requires:

O/S:            Any MS Windows-based O/S
Processor:      Yes. (no minimum spec.)
RAM:            4 meg (8 meg preferred)
Graphics:       256 Colour recommended, resolution higher the better.
CD-Rom:         No minimum spec
Soundcard:      Windows compatible

Tested on:

O/S:            Windows 95
Processor:      Intel Pentium75
RAM:            32meg
Graphics:       2meg Orchid (Cirrus Logic chipset)
CD-ROM:         Quad-speed
Soundcard:      Sound-Blaster 16 ASP
Controls:       Std 2-button mouse, MS Sidewinder Pro

Stars! (Latest Release)

Stars! Has been around quite a while now. It first started life as a shareware game designed by Jeff McBride and Jeff Johnson way back in March 1995, and has since gone through many updates and version changes. Now, it has been recognised by the commercial games industry for being one of the leading space-based strategy games, and Empire Interactive have stepped in, and helped produce what can only be described as a top class commercial product.

The story behind the game is, of course, a war. But this one was a biggy. The Sznip (a race of crustaceans) and the Fermis (a nuclear plasmatoid-based race) had a major disagreement, and basically destroyed nearly all of known space, leaving it not only devoid of life, but planets and suns too. The only little bit that was left just happened to be the bit you were in. Unfortunately, there were also a number of other sentient species, and everyone wants the last slice of the cake, so to speak. Like the manual says, there's bound to be trouble. This is where you come in. Your race needs someone to lead them in the coming time of uncertainties, and it looks like you've got the job. Well, the hours are good. And you'll probably get to travel...

The first thing you do is hit the tutorial. It's all on-screen, so there's no trying to keep your place on the page, while you try and change your fleet's current destination, and drink tea all at the same time. It's very well written, and advances in stages as you do the right thing. For example, if it tells you to build 2 new ships, that part will stay highlighted until you do it. This makes it very easy to follow, and as you advance through it, you learn different ways to do things, what to look out for, and how to take advantage of some of the many features in the game. And by the time you've completed through the tutorial, you should have learnt enough to get you proficient in all the major areas of game-play.

When actually playing the game, several of the game windows have pop-up help boxes, which usually explain what that particular part of the screen is trying to tell you. For more game help, there is extensive on-line help, complete with a large "how to..." section, covering everything from starting a game through transporting items about to conducting space battles. There are also sections on screen displays, menu and keyboard commands, major game elements and for the techies out there, even how the computer works things such as combat resolution or damage repair.

The paper manual, however, is very well written, and, even though I have been playing Stars! for a while, I found it much easier to understand some things being able to read it from a book rather than on screen. And yes, I did say a book, because the manual weighs in at something over 200 pages. And if that wasn't enough, there's also a very glossy technology booklet, which lists all known technology, such as ship hulls, weapons and pretty much everything you can research.

When you start a new game, you have a few basic options, such as universe size and density, and what race you wish to play (there are six default ones). But if you wish, you can go deeper than that. There are another two buttons on the start screen, one for customising races, and another for advanced game options. I'll come back to the race customise options in a bit. In the advanced game options, you can also choose how far apart players start, options to make the game easier or harder, such as computer opponents that form alliances, accelerated gameplay for play-by-email games, no random events, or a beginner option. You can also define up to fifteen other players, either computer or human, and multiple victory conditions. Even the value of the victory conditions can be customised!

On to race customisation. You can design a race based on one of the six supplied races, start from scratch, or have a completely random race. If you choose the random race, all race attributes are decided, well, randomly. For all other selections, your choices are just beginning. The next screen invites you to choose your races' primary racial trait, or what your race is basically good at. You can choose between things such as war monger, super stealth and another eight different choices. After you've selected that, you then go onto the lesser racial traits, where you can make multiple selections on options such as improved starbases or total terraforming. Then it's onto changing the three planetary conditions that your race can tolerate, including being immune to either radiation, gravity or temperature. Then you can change how effective your resources are, with things like how resources factories produce or cost to build and how many mines your colonists can operate. Finally, you can say how much it costs you to research the six different fields needed to develop new technology. Wait a minute (I hear you cry), what's to stop me just setting everything to maximum, and being a super-race? Well, I'm glad you asked that, as there's a nifty way to stop just this very thing from happening. As you pick all these wonderful options, you use up advantage points, and as you can't have a race that has a negative value of advantage points, if you want things like fifty percent cheaper production research, immunity to gravity, or ultimate recycling, then you're going to have to give your race some drawbacks too, such as no advanced scanners, or seventy-five percent higher research costs in a couple of fields. As most things cost different amounts, you'll have to jiggle advantages and disadvantages to get a viable race. And when you've got your new race, you have to play the advantages you've given yourself very carefully if you want to be all-conquering.

Okay, you've jumped in at the deep end, customised your race, your game, and where you're reading the rules from (or maybe you didn't, and got straight into the game), and you're off! The different game windows tell you all the information you need, such as status messages, planet or fleet information, mineral reports, and a map that can show scanner ranges, planet population, mineral information, ships, waypoints, and everything else you need. As there is a lot of information on the screen, Jeff has thoughtfully provided three different screen layouts for you to choose from, so the information is displayed as clearly as possible.

During the game, you have to invest your precious resource points in six different fields of research in order to develop new technology. The six fields each have their own benefits, such as; research into construction to allow you to develop better and better craft; energy research to give you planetary defences, like shields and missile batteries; and propulsion to give you faster and more efficient engines.

Most developments require research into two fields, for example cloaking devices - which require advances in energy and electronic research, or missiles - which require weapons and propulsion developments. There are also a few more useful items which actually require advances in three fields! Some advanced scanners require significant achievements in energy, electronics, and biotechnology. As to the different types of things you can develop, I think it's enough to say that there are sixteen different categories of items to choose from, with things such as armour, starbases, mining robots, and terraforming being just a few.

As you fly around space, searching for new worlds your people can either colonise, terraform or mine, you're bound to come across another race. In multi-player games, which can be via network, modem or email, you can choose to fight or form an alliance. Playing the computer, however, you have no such option. To prosper, you must expand. To do that, you've got to fight. This is where you make use of all those weapons of war you've been developing. Knock up a new combat ship design using all your latest technology in the ship designer, and go to it. Thing is, it's not that simple. To take a world over that has a large population, you will probably first have to take out the enemy minefields, knock out their defence ships, destroy their ground based defences, and only then can you send in the troops to claim the planet for your own. But all the time you're doing this to the computer, the computer is probably doing it to you.

This leads me onto the next bit. Somehow you've got to keep track of everything that's going on in the game. Every turn, you get a message telling you that something has occurred. There is a separate message for each occurrence, even things like "Jupiter has built 7 mines" which can be a bit daunting, especially as you get further into the game, and you can have dozens of messages. Some are important, such as your fleet has been destroyed on the way to colonise a new planet, or you've achieved a breakthrough in your current field of research. So the message types you think you don't want to know about, you can filter. As each message comes up, you just tick the top left of the message windows, and any more messages of that type are automatically filtered out. You can still view them if you wish, but you don't by default.

The game graphics are limited to small icon-type images depicting things like ships, research developments (both shown in the technical reference), and planets. They may be small, but they are of very good quality, and enhance the game better than a full screen glossy picture that takes up loads of HD space and serves no useful purpose would.

I'm just going to interject a brief note on the multi-player aspect of the game. Now, Stars! is good to play, but it's even better against other people. Especially when they have built a custom race. You can have up 16 players in a game of Stars!, but they don't have to be all human. It's usually fun to have a load of human players, plus a couple of computer players thrown in there for good measure, just to keep the humans on their toes.

The game has a built in message system to allow you to form alliances, arrange non-aggression pacts, trade agreements, joint mining ventures, and other reasons to stab each other in the back. All you have to do is tell your system friendly and neutral players via the player relations window, and your ships won't accidentally start off another war (especially as you already have enough of those to keep you going).

Now onto the sound. The previous versions of Stars! didn’t have any sound at all, but as this game ships on CD, I guess they thought there might as well be some. The background music is a little weird at first, but shortly becomes annoying. The only other sound added is the battle noises. You can hear weapons fired and ships blowing up, but as this are only small noises, they serve as an audio guide as to what's going on, rather than an annoyance.

There are many things that I haven't even had a chance to mention here that go into making the game what it is. Things like ships' battle plans, mining, flinging mineral packets around space, wormholes and stealthy ships are all in the game.

As a game, it plays very well. It's easy to do things you want, and generally drive things along. The game flows well, and it's far too addictive. The only thing I will say against the game is that as you advance further into the outer reaches of the galaxy, and are fighting a war on at least two fronts, things tend to get a little overwhelming. Still, there's not much you can do about that. After all, you're trying to conquer all of space, not join up a dot to dot puzzle. Even if that's what it looks like from the map!

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Rating: 8/10 (Recommended)
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