"Yes. Conflict. Soon."

Confrontations are enabled by 'declaring war' on your rival station overseers. This will close any bulkhead doors to their sections of the spaceport if they've previously been opened, and will generally put everyone on edge. The huge doorways dividing sections are deadlocked between you and your enemy, and this presents a challenging scenario.

You will literally have no idea what your rival is doing on his side of the bulkhead. He/she may be amassing an army, or might be trembling in fear at the army you're amassing on your side of the doors. This blindness of a kind may be offputting to some, but it leaves you on tenterhooks as you formulate your strategies.

Which deck do you launch the attack from? The beating heart of Engineering? Do you dare disrupt your visiting shoppers, gamblers and disco-dancers by launching an assault from the Pleasure Deck? Or will you forge forth from the serene artificial countryside of the Bio-Deck, beneath its canopy of glass that shows that immense galaxy beyond?

Spaceports that gain a significant amount of prestige attract the attention of the snobbish, aristocratic Polvakian Gem Slugs.

Time will tell who launches the assault first, and the tension that builds if you see one of your bulkhead doors being 'hacked'; forcibly opened and cracking at the seams as the enemy's Security Scuzzer robot breaks the encrypted lock; is of a kind many games would love to emulate themselves.

Whether by you or by your rival, those doors will open; the enemy segments of space station are revealed, and the bloodshed begins.

The AI will intelligently allocate your troops targets (only four races under your employment will fight, and the others, as well as visiting beings of any species, will run around panicking). Should you prefer to give a target precedence, clicking them repeatedly prioritises them; the more you click, the more units in your strikeforce will turn their attentions to that target. Click once to give a little more attention; click frenziedly and your entire army turns on one hapless individual.

"Rehabilitation successful. You have been paid 1000E."

But obliterating the enemy army is never enough, especially when the point-and-click employment system allows players to pluck strangers out of the crowd and instantly assign them to the army. True victory lies in capturing your opponent's segments of the station.

Security Scuzzers are the order of the day here. Ordering the closure of the section in which your little war is taking place will send one scurrying to the far side of the sector, diligently attempting to hack into your enemy's lock and close them out of their own section.

Make no mistake, Startopia's war is a sneaky one.

Success means the immense doors close once more, shutting your enemy out of the opened sector and claiming it as your own. Any structures caught in the bulkheads as they close revert back to crates rather handily, and the entire sector is locked under your ownership until either you choose to unlock it and press ahead, or your opponent hacks back in and tries to reclaim it.

Look after your Scuzzers. They clean, build, maintain and repair your spaceport; and even better, they don't get potentially moody and quit like the organic beings you employ.

Naturally, this is a two-way system; be sure to watch out for any of your enemy's Security Scuzzer droids sneaking past the battle in an attempt to seal you out of your own property. Savvy spaceport supervisors swiftly learn the value of building automated defense turrets beside the consoles controlling the opening and closing of sectors; hopefully, that robot will eat hot electric death before it has the chance to reach your precious bulkheads.

This simple tactic of snatch and grab is the main course of the Startopia battle system, yet for the more cunning or sadistic, other delectable side-order strategies come into play.

For example, capture every segment under the ownership of a rival on, say, the second tier (the Pleasure Deck), and the game cheerfully informs you that said player, be they AI or human, has been 'dislodged' from that level, effectively removing them from it forever.

This is a crippling blow, as it means that player (or, if you're not careful, you) can no longer access that region of the station for the rest of that game. This neatly cuts their access to station facilities and potential income by a third; if you're especially cruel, you can take both the Pleasure and Bio-Deck and leave your foe sobbing in the lower grime of the Engineering Deck, cursing the instant he thought snatching that Love Nest of Dahanese Sirens from you was a good idea.

"There is a solar flare in progress. Shall I reconfigure the Collector to gather some solar energy?"

A final and absolutely crushing strategy is to obliterate your enemy's Energy Collector. Situated on the Engineering Deck, this huge structure and its floating globule of metallic power (which dynamically resizes itself in correlation to how much Energy you have, the game's only resource and form of currency) is the pulsating heart of your station.

The Energy Collector powers everything in the spaceport, and only sizeable stations need more than one. Expensive to install, they nevertheless are a glaring vulnerability if they come under attack; spare no expense in defending them, because if you lose your only solitary Collector, everything you own powers down and crashes and you're removed from the game.

Startopia doesn't hold its punches. Spies and saboteurs can place bombs or wreak havoc with your equipment. Aforementioned space-kittens can evolve into hideous monsters that slaughter all in sight. Fail to regulate your energy supplies and entire regions of your spaceport shut down and go offline; fail to satisfy your employees and they simply quit and leave.

Sadly, despite the variety of alien races, their trade-ships all look identical; though watching the cool Star Dock animation as they latch onto your spaceport is always fun.

Yet Startopia very rarely feels unfair or unsatisfying. Watching the aliens go about their business and line your pockets brings a sweet satisfaction, and you can even follow them about courtesy of a handy shoulder-cam function, though this disengages if they enter buildings you can't follow them into.

Furthermore, if you don't like any of the features, or can't be having any of the messy warfare interfering with your bureaucracy, sandbox and multiplayer modes allow you to turn them off, and even switch off victory conditions so you can happily run a peaceful space station indefinitely. Rivals are optional, too, so you can have the entire place to yourself and need only worry about how to afford opening all the bulkheads to expand your commercial empire.

There's so much more we could delve into, and so many options you can explore. Why not run a trading outpost, buying low and selling high to meet the supply and demand of the various species? Or you could run a penal colony, locking criminals in your Brig and being paid by the authorities for their brainwashing into subservience rehabilitation.

Greys' stories of 'that time in Roswell' never fail to fail to impress.

Turrakkens will work in your Laboratories, and everything in the game can be thrown into the Analyser, unlocking and refining new technologies, or giving detailled autopsies if you're dark enough to fling corpses into there.

Dahanese Sirens will commission you to max out your Pleasure Deck, and these beings themselves run the dubious Love Nests, where lovelorn aliens will pay to have little pink hearts thrown at them. Let's not forget, this is a very tongue-in-cheek game.

And it's one that's worthy of your attention. Yes, it may look dated now, and not everyone will be as receptive to its quirks, its ways of doing things or its cheeky sense of humour.

Startopia will never pretend it's taking itself seriously; but then again, you'll never want it to. You'll be busy growing your crops, letting the Zedem Monks convert visitors to their religion, welcoming trade-ships to your Star Dock and figuring out how exactly you're going to live up to the promise you just made to that passing ship's distress call of curing their spontaneously combusting passengers in your Sick Bay.

All the while, you'll be receiving messages from wily merchant Arona Daal, and being reminded of your pressing duties by the suave but sardonic VAL. Hours will pass, and you'll get that nagging sensation that you really should be paying attention to real life by now, and have things you should be getting on with... but then, look at that, there's a message just arriving from some Groulian Salt Hog traders, and you've been waiting on a new Recycler all afternoon...