One of the most surprising things about this game is how comprehensive it manages to be while still keeping the starships front and center.

But they're all streamlined so that you'll spend most of your time sending your ships on missions. You will, however, find in Starships Unlimited all the traditional trappings of space strategy games: colonies, mining, diplomacy, research, espionage, and so forth. This isn't Civilization's let-a-thousand-cities-bloom model. Colonies are important, but they're rare because they're expensive to build and slow to grow. Other games have taken this DIY starship approach, but none have de-emphasized the empire building aspects like Starships Unlimited. But each one is like a powerful playing piece whose capabilities are determined by the parts that you use to build it. In a typical game of Starships Unlimited, you might build only a half dozen ships. Unlike games like Space Empires, Reach for the Stars, or Master of Orion, you're not rampaging across the galaxy with massive fleets. The characters in this instance are the starships. Starships Unlimited takes the space empire genre and brings it back into the realm of space opera, where characters are more important than colonies. Although the name is kind of dopey, it perfectly illustrates the central tenet at work here-that a sci-fi game about space ships is more compelling than a sci-fi game about population growth, unrest levels, or trade routes (all of which are present but not prominent).

Here are some excerpts from CD Mag's excellent review that may just change your mind: ' Starships Unlimited is driven by that rarest of commodities in the computer game business: a great idea fleshed out into an entire game. Why should you care about this 4X shareware underdog if you love MOO? The game claims to 'combine the flow of real-time strategy games with the detailed control of turn-based games'-and it does fulfill that claim, even if that it only means a real-time game that can be sped up or slow down, and automatically pauses when important event occurs. One of the most underrated and unknown '4X' space strategy games ever made, Starships Unlimited is an incredibly addictive game that plays like a unique cross between Master of Orion and Homeworld.

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