Star Trek: Birth of the Federation
A Star Trek based colony development game. This could have been a great game. I suppose I'm giving away my final impression of the game
already. The game does have some things going for it though. The interface is beautifull. The display is different for all 5 of the playable races.
The sounds effects are also different based on your race. This creates a great atmosphere.
The game has three major problems. The cd spins continually, unless you turn the sound completely off, which eliminates one of the best
parts of this game. Secondly, the mouse really turns slugish after you've been playing for a while. And, towards the end of the game the computer
turns take over 30 seconds, seems like a couple minutes of just staring at the screen. I'm being nice and saying 30 seconds because I'm sure
it seems much longer that it really is. These three problems make the game sort of tedious to play. Which is a real bad thing for a game, which
one normally plays for enjoyment.
The cursor scrolls the screen at a very slow pace. This can be solved by double clicking near the edge of the screen though, so I'm hesitant to say
it's a major flaw. The planetary building queque is a little small, only 5 items there are lots of times you want to put more items there. The diplomacy
model revolves completely arround bribes. This is really shallow, and is another source of annoyance. Espeacially since the compter players are
seriously schziophrenic. After looking at the end game score graph, it appears that my score is altered by the huge pay out of bribes, a series of huge
spikes. Whereas the computer players graphs were more linear. I can conclude that the computer doesn't have to play by the same rules. I'm forced
to nearly banktrupt myself to bribe independant planets, and the computer player simply magically aquires them.
The differences between the various races manifest themselves mainly in the form of how your peopel react to the things you do. If your populace
is happy you basically get production bonuses, and vice versa. Some races are at a huge disadvantage here, namely the Federation. If the Federation
goes to war voluntarily they get massive negative public reaction. If they go to war involuntarily they get minor unrest. It's very difficult to maintain
a decent morale and conquer the universe. If the Feds lose planets and battles thier morale goes down as well, if the conquer planets thier morale goes
down. If the affects weren't so dramatic it might be ok. But only a masocist would play the feds, it's no fun imposing police states all the time just
to maintain a mediocre production level. The Feds are an extreme case, but the other races aren't much better off. If the other races get on a roll
and take over a lot of stuff atleast thier people are happy though.
Why are the Ferengi in the game anyway, It says that females of that race aren't allowed to leave the homeworld. How do they colonize planets then? I am not a big fan of new star trek, but this race is a pathetic play-doh head mistake in the game and anything else. Atleast the Cardassians can pull off
a reasonable image in a galactic conquest game.
The pathetic diplomatic model. And the extreme effect of public morale really just ruin this game, not to mention the three major bugs it currently suffers
from. I think it's best to stay away from this game unless you are a complete star trek nut, and just need to have every star trek game good or bad.
It's a shame really, the sounds and interface graphics are excellent. They should have spent another 5 minutes play testing it. This game gets a
lowly 5/10 from me, and only that because the graphics and sound are so great.
-- Zathoros
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