I gave them each about a weeks worth of on/off play so that I could at least master them, and avoid a snap judgement.

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Starships: Despite the obvious Civilization aspect to the game, it isn't really. Each player can only have 1 fleet, so right off the bat you think about your empire purely in terms of reach, and your neighbouring races level of pacifism at all times. It's not so much that diplomacy is useful, as much as a delaying tactic. The other major difference superficially is that combat isn't just stats vs stats plus random.

Every encounter or visit to an anomaly ends in a turn based strategy map showdown or maze to deal with. One might be where you have to protect some unarmed ship reaching another point on the map, another might be finding a portal in a maze of asteroids that change every turn, and then there's the fleet battles. I did like the fact that there were more types of play required for this than just a straight up fight, like escaping pirates, or taking nodes and holding them a la capture the flag, it gave it a little more interest and randomness.

Where the game falls down is that in each turn, a healthy empire will create money that equates to so many upgrade points per ship, or the option of purchasing a new ship. This seems to be a core aspect of the winnability of the game if you can call it that. You need to intuit exactly when you should be buying new vs upgrading old, but there's a sweet spot balance between the two that's basically unstoppable. My complaint is that like many RTS/4X games, there's essentually 1 right answer here, once you master it, it just becomes a routine task.

Overall the game is decent, well polished, reasonably detailed, and like other Civ games, you find your borders/territory constantly changing, but this single fleet limitation makes the game feel flat, and the ship upgrade path becomes uninteresting. The game then becomes predictable with the only variety coming from the actual fighting tactics. The more you play, the more each game becomes the same.

Also just as a helpful addendum, the fights can be heavily skewed in your favour by equiping your capital ships with fighters, they aren't so much effective in the early game (before upgrades) as much as they serve as targets to distract enemy ships. You then play them as sacrificial pawns until late game, when you can use them to chase or flank enemy ships for higher damage rear hits.

Oh, and one soft-of gripe about the game length, the win conditions are far too low, like a population victory only requires 64 billion, which can be done controlling 1/4 of the galaxy map. The other win conditions are similarly weak, and you end up disabling all but a domination victory to make a game last more than say 2hrs.

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Stardrive 2: This one is a lot more like Empire at War than Starships, though at a glance they fill the exact same role with mostly the same elements. Notably the space battles can be auto-resolved or like EAW with a realtime battle on a seamless map. The UI is great, the ambience is good, sound effects and music adapt to what's going on like the Dune games did, and it feels comforting somehow.

I played both the original and then the Gold version after encountering freezes between transitions sometimes, which funny enough happen in Gold too, but in a different way, you get a bunch of events happen during a turn and find yourself stuck in one of them with no way to return to the map. Saving is important! In the Gold update they went from a seamless space map to a hex tiled model MORE like Starships, with the exception being that it's the galaxy that's tiled not the fight map, making it the exact inverse!

This presents some interesting strategy changes, you can now build starbases or refueling depots on tiles, because you have to transit through tiles to other tiles, and your ships run out of fuel outside your official territory. What this means strategically is that you can only project force up to a certain distance away from tiles you own, eliminating deep core strikes to your empire and vice versa. So the game forces you to expand like cancer, often colonizing planets or asteroid that have little value to gain a foothold.

The tech tree and diplomacy feels far better than Starships, you can go for techs that alternately help troops, ships, planets, economy etc. There are upgrades to fuel cells and warp theory and such things to allow you more range (fuel equivalent) outside your empire. The upgrade paths also force you to choose 1 of 3 techs at that level in each category, meaning you can't get all the techs without trading for them, and many at the same level are very useful. Each race's characteristics will lean you towards certain techs, but I find here too there's a generally right path to follow. The diplomacy actually feels useful here.

The single fleet limitation doesn't exist in Stardrive, you can build ships anywhere and have dozens of fleets, they cap this with something called "command points" that each ship has. When you exceed available CP you end up losing money fast -- I'll touch more on this in the wrap-up. The best part is that each ship can be customized, not long loadouts like swapping cannons on hardpoints, but like Interstate 76 where you have tiles you can populate with anything from power to weapons, and each item has a different size. As you upgrade techs or discover new gear, you have to keep adjusting your ships to use them, and then refitting existing ships or more likely making all new ships to the new specs. I ended up saving 20 profiles for loadouts throughout the games I played, which are available in the next game. You also have a roster of ships that can be built, so you end up swapping ships in and out of the roster as your needs/techs change.

Now The realtime combat is a lot of fun, sometimes you'll encounter low level ships that have high tech shields or really powerful weapons that punch above their weight, other times it will be a big scary ship that has only powerful short range weapons you can pick off from a distance with your artillery. Other times you or they get a weapon that just mops the floor, and you can't know what you're getting into, aside from seeing what ships are in the fleet you're about to fight. There are some good formation options as far as whether your ship moves to engage at what distances, or whether it prefers to aim head-on vs broadsides, but one of the more useful aspects in the pre-fight formation setup. You get a zone box where you can rearrange your ships based on what you're facing, with stronger ships often lacking rear-facing point defenses, it's handy to have some smaller defending ships behind and so on.

Now for the supposedly game-breaking aspect, that should make the game impossible, actually becomes a winning strategy -- money loss. Those Command Points I mentioned along with your other colony expenses rack up fast, so fast that one time I was earning -87000 (approx) per turn. By contrast a large planet colony focused entirely on money generation will not make more than +100, even with 10 such core planets I'd never get out of debt, which itself is unsustainable as you need to build constantly to survive. The game penalizes you in a funny way, it randomly sells something you built on a colony like an aeroponics farm or imperial bank, once every 5 turns or something, which yields no more than 75 credits by doing so, as a way of "paying" your debts. As you might imagine that a strong empire with well developed colonies can build stuff faster than it can be sold off. Thus this asset selling becomes nothing more than housekeeping, staying on top of what needs what rebuilt like whack-a-mole.

After trying to legitimately avoid this debt blackhole, I used strong expletives and decided to try going all-in, I wasn't going to worry about money at all, I was going to burn down the bankers! And so I did, making huuuuge fleets everywhere, colonizing everything, giving tithes and gifts to neighbouring races until I was ready to crush them. Playing with diplomacy to demand they hand over colonies or get some war fun, etc. Then what do you suppose happens? The number grows so large it inverts! Suddenly I have 20 bajillion whatever, and I can literally buy everything on every colony including 20 top tier ships even at the lowliest asteroid. Obviously an empire like that is unstoppable. The funny part is that each turn or two you'll find your money flips back to negative, and then back to positive again, making that into its own little game hah!

Overall though, even if you don't cheat and use that essentially unlimited money condition, the act of ignoring the debt alone (like most countries on earth let's face it) can make the game a lot more enjoyable. The space fights are a lot of fun, including the part where you customize ships or craft the right mix of ships for a fleet. The colonies and techs have a deep enough upgrade path that there's always something to do. Diplomatically gaining new techs or using spies to steal techs is also a nice dynamic. It is infinitely more replayable than Starships, though you always end up at a point where you just know you are sufficiently dominant guaranteeing a win by the end.

On the topic of win conditions, there are several ways to win, and one is an Ascension victory of some sort, which is equivalent to your mundane science victory in Civ games, with some additional lore/story to it. Here too games can be too short if you enable Ascension, because 2 races tend to try to win like that aggressively, turning off just that one is enough to extend the game many multiples. Also the map size/density/clustering plays a role in how players progress, effectively dictating how long it takes to meet other races, and thus at what level of tech/size they have developed before you go to war, giving it some further randomness. You still want to kill the evil races first if possible, you can't be allies long term anyway.

That all said, there's a funny little aspect that's actually the key to surviving/victory in Stardrive 2 that's perhaps underestimated or overlooked, ground troops. No fleet can conquer a planet without having ground troops, which have to be sent along in unarmed transports, and therefore both the act of creating ground troops and focusing on techs that make them better, then equiping them appropriately is how you fight a superior enemy. Once you have say 16-20 troop units on your edge planets, the enemy might be able to destroy your fleet (which you can just send somewhere else), destroy your starbase, and invade, they can't actually take it. You end up with this massive enemy fleet sitting there doing nothing, blockading your planet, allowing you to then attack other things, perhaps even taking one of their colonies with troops you had in reserve elsewhere.

The original Startdrive 2 had a turn based ground combat, similar to say X-com, where your units move to cells and fire if they have enough moves left, with map obstacles and various troop loadouts, it was really hard. The Gold version which turned space into tiles, simultaneously removed the tile based ground fighting, turning it into a list vs list fight. I hear this latter change was based on feedback.

All in all, Stardrive 2 is very enthralling, until you reach that dominance, which is achieved soonest by destroying at least 2 of the enemy races, and making sure your territory is adequately contiguous.

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Starships becomes a nice low-investment distraction game that can be played semi-passively, more like a puzzle game, whereas Stardrive is far more multi-level strategy game that can satisfy both RTS and boardgame interests.