Starship Corporation Preview

Just... Where do I start? This has to be one of the single most in-depth games I have played for god knows how long! As a Dwarf Fortress player I am rather familiar to steep learning curves and pride myself on being able to at least understand games without playing a tutorial and without much trouble. However, to say that Starship Corporation is different to this trend would be an understatement. A hugely in-depth game with plenty of features to keep you occupied and lots to consider even when you are just starting off.

Currently Starship Corporation is a strategy game where you buy and sell designs of various ships, creating the perfect build to specific requirements and selling them on to the company that requested it. You have to compete with other companies with cost effectiveness, budget and overall effectiveness in critical areas such as repairs, defence, power consumption and usage, cargo space and space for all of your components. Even then, once you have dealt with the limited space there is more you have to worry about. Though you have met the cooling demands for the engines it’s only a matter of time before they overheat, as you find out in your crew training and simulations. With a large amount of things that can go wrong in space, of course you will have to test your ship in simulations to see just how well it does. Usually? It doesn’t go well.

With ideas for the future based around being able to expand the game into conquest and conflict rather than just ship design and marketing, this game has an ambitious future. One which I fear will overwhelm any new players, I myself struggled to comprehend with the vast complexity of the game despite how ‘early’ it is in development. For the first few hours, despite having played the tutorial, I was blind to what exactly I was doing. Stumbling around and making schoolboy errors whilst struggling to wrap my head around most of the systems and aspects. More than once I threw my hands up in anger as I realised I had run out of space in my designs, or gone over budget. But after the first two hours I slowly started to get the hang of it, I slowly started to piece together everything that I had fallen short on.

But still, for an early access game there were countless features I had not encountered and still some that I have yet to encounter.

The game itself is enjoyable, it's a constant challenge that isn’t meant to be played for five minutes at a time and demands that you sit down for a good hour or more each time you wish to play. The ship design is huge, with an expansive tech tree that unlocks new hulls and rooms to build on your ship, but with most designs requiring a specific hull to be used you can frequently encounter problems with space, a huge problem early on. The game does not ease you in gently, rather it kicks you straight off of the diving board and into the deep end without a life jacket as it grins wickedly at you flailing around. But after a while you learn to progress in different ways, I found a few tricks for improving my ship build and by putting certain rooms at the front of the ship and some at the back I found it was easier to meet the space requirements.

The most enjoyable part of the game for me, is the simulations. Having the chance to watch my crew fight off alien invaders, or putting out fires and keeping my spaceship afloat is great fun, a challenge as well as you manage your crew and instruct them what to repair, what to maintain, where to run too and the like. Even if the simulation goes wrong and you feel that the ship is doomed to failure you can still scrape together a few rewards by using escape pods to evacuate your crew.

As mentioned before, as you progress through the tech-tree new rooms and ship designs will be unlocked allowing you to experiment in your quest to turn a profit. I can’t tell you how relieved I was after I unlocked the armoury, with my crew being able to effectively defend themselves against the invader simulations it quickly boosted my ratings and allowed me to sell my ships at a much more inflated price.

The game at the moment is restricted to the marketing side, yet this remains unfinished. However, according to rumours, the scope of how the developers intend to improve this game is crazy; they intend to add countless new features such as the ability to board and seize control of ships as detailed in their trailer as well as the ability to spread your corporation into other solar systems. Currently with the ability to only sell designs I am rather interested in what I will be able to do when I actually build my ships, if I will be able to explore the galaxy with them? Perhaps, but most of these are just rumours. Afterall, if this is the intention, surely the game would be called a universe simulator or something akin to that rather than Starship Corporation?

To conclude, the game is great in scope, complexity and design. However with the game itself as well as the general project able to confuse most people I feel that the developers need to announce their exact plans in the near future and decide which direction they intend to take the game; clearing up these rumours would make any future previews on this game much easier and much more reliable. Only time will tell just how deep this game will go. I feel that the best hope for the game is to stick on its current path, a market and economy focused game.