NOW PLAYING
Building a space empire in SLIPWAYS, one trade route at a time
Turns out it takes longer to learn a skate trick than to build an empire.
Every strategy game or management sim I play, the same thing happens. I love it at first, but then my city, space empire, civilization, or whatever it is grows to a certain size, and the micromanagement becomes unbearable. The joy is sucked out of the experience and I quit, destined never to finish a game.
I’ve lost count of how many abandoned empires are sitting in my Steam cloud saves, destined never to be completed. So when I heard about Slipways, a new strategy game that lets you build a space empire without the busywork or time investment, I felt like someone had made a game specifically for me.
Start a new game, and you emerge from a wormhole into an unexplored, randomized galaxy. Launch probes from the wormhole and planets are revealed, which can be colonized. Each planet, depending on its biome and available natural resources, supports a different kind of industry, such as farming, robot manufacture, water production, and many more.
The key to building a successful space empire is connecting these planets with slipways—think sci-fi shipping lanes—in such a way that your planets work together. An agricultural world will be able to produce a small amount of food on its own for the factories on a nearby planet, but production will speed up dramatically, and the factories will be happier, if you supply them with a steady flow of workers.
So if you’ve settled another planet in the region that produces workers, connect it to your farming world with a slipway and you’ll create a supply
THE MAGIC OF SLIPWAYS IS HOW MUCH FUN CREATING THESE LITTLE ROUTES IS
chain that boosts your profits and keeps the factory workers happy.
But here’s where things get tricky: The planet producing the workers needs resources too. A clean water supply, perhaps. So you’ll need to connect their world to a planet that produces water with a slipway, otherwise they’ll experience a resource shortage and the happiness of your empire will suffer. And if people grow too unhappy, or you go bankrupt, it’s game over.
MILLIWAYS
But the magic of Slipways is how much fun creating these little routes between planets is. The game’s interface is readable, snappy, and simple to use, and establishing slipways is as simple as dragging a line between two planets.
Watching the slipways form, and tiny resources being beamed back and forth through them, is extremely satisfying. And not an inch of the UI is wasted, presenting all the key data in a way that allows for quick decision making.
It’s one of the best-feeling games I’ve played in ages, with a clean presentation and a relaxing ambient soundtrack that perfectly complements its laid back vibe. I also love that there’s no combat whatsoever. This is really refreshing, and as someone who just likes building stuff, only makes me love it more. Slipways is out later this year, and it’s worth keeping an eye on.