I used to really love playing wargames back in the seventies. I had many SPI, Avalon Hill and other games. I also played games like hack and rogue on BSD Unix systems. Later there was a computer game called Stars!. I have a copy of this still. It was excellent. You would capture neighaboring star systems, gather resources and build fleets of ships. Eventually you would meet up with others and fight for dominance.
One of the excellent aspects of Stars! was that you could design your own ships. You had weapons, hull types, engines, sensors, shields, armor and more. You would “design” your ship by dragging appropriate “systems” (weapons or armor etc) to your “naked” ship hull. Different ship hulls could hold different amounts of these systems, and different types. Some slots would be “General Purpose” so anything. Others would be weapons, so any of the weapon systems would fit, torpedos or lasers. Some might be sheilds and some might be armor. There would be a number of systems allowed in that particular slot too.
This way you could create a fleet of super destroyers, that lack sensors, in favor of an additional weapon. You might then make special viewer destroyers (with the same hull) that had almost no weapons, but lots of long range sensors. Mixing and maxing fleets like this allowed you to “get the most” out of your fleets. It also gave endless amounts of replay time. Trying to make a ship that would beat an opponent favorite ship type.
This was a game that came out when the internet wasn’t well known and the web less so. It came out before there ever was an MSNBC (I remember this because where I did see the game first was on MEU (Mind Extension University) which was replace by MSNBC.
This was a turn based game that I think (if I remember) allowed people to all do their turns at the same time, then see the results. It allowed for turns based upon, get this, email. So that’s how old it is.
Stars! was ahead of it’s time, and the developers were convinced that good game play was more important than flashy graphics and other multi-media additions. So the games comes off as very simple. It’s far from that though. It may not be open-gl driven and allow you to zoom in and out like todays games like Sins of a Solar Empire (which I love). But it was a very fun and interesting game. I still play it today.
Here are the links I could find for Stars! today
http://support.empireinteractive.com/default.aspx?MID=60568495217F&PID=7B550F5D-2BED-4D5A-8ADE-78B9D6528995
is the only link I can find that has the last patch…
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/stars/review.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gssummary&tag=summary;read-review
Other Stars! resources
http://www.myhreweb.com/todd/games/stars.html
http://aaedesigns.com/stars/index.php
http://starsautohost.org/stars.htm
