Startopia Preview

Your relations with your opponents will be rough and dangerous. Your goal is to take control of your opponents' space station and broaden your area of influence. One of the ways to achieve this is to surpass them technologically, and the other is to use sabotage. You will have interesting options, like to infect one of your workers with a dangerous disease, and then send him on a holiday to your opponent's station, or put rats in the crates with merchandise headed for his station.

You will also have an option to infiltrate your men in the opponent's workforce, and then start a strike that would block his production and directly send all his business to you. You will have to keep a close eye on the intelligence and spy reports in order to keep the situation under control.

The fact that you will be able to build up to sixteen different chambers on three decks containing up to forty different objects (with all their accessories) clearly shows that all future space-station-managers, will have more than hands full of work. Every part of the station is essential for the game. The first deck of the station contains the basic elements such as the hospital, sleeping facilities, lavatories, and nutrition chambers. The second deck is full of entertainment facilities and hotels for the richer clientele that would not satisfy themselves with the first deck. The Biodeck is a specific part of the station, in which you can use bioengineering to program the environment to resemble the home worlds of your guests, and hence make them feel "at home". You can also use it to create new fruit and vegetables and then sell them.

Trading with visiting merchants is yet another interesting option. For instance, you need the blueprints for a hospital, and only one merchant happens to have them. If several merchants had the same artifact, you would be able to bargain and pick the lowest price.

I've left one of the most important aspects of Startopia for the end of this preview. The screenshots show how good the entire thing looks, but they could hardly capture the atmosphere and the level of detail present on each object. The camera moves freely in 360°, and features a free zoom. You can zoom in on practically any animate (rat running around and scaring guests) or inanimate (the floating keyboard on the Sickbay computer) object. The graphics are fantastic; it will probably just take you some time to get used to the camera control and object construction.

Startopia will defiantly attract attention of Sim fans, especially those with better computers, and Maxis is in danger of losing a part of its audience.