StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Man....I don't know where to begin.

Sure it's a budget title (I picked it up new for only 30 bucks for the Wii)...but stay the far fuck away from it.

The premise is basically a squad conquest game. You get to pick from one of several Trek Races (Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Breen, Cardassian, Dominion) with unlockable races (I beleive including the Borg and Ferengi) later on.

It opens up with a standard galactic map, showing the neighboring systems, you build a fleet, and go about conquering your way to domination by capturing enemy Homeworlds.

But..here's the kicker.....out of all the entire length and breadth of ship designs for at least the Federation....your stuck with three. For each Race.

For the Federation side, it's Defiant (Scout class) Intrepid (Cruiser class (wtf?) ), and a Galaxy Class (Dreadnaught....why oh why...).

As you go around, you have choices when you come up against enemy fleets, either a "Instant" where based on fleet strength, victory is decided, a Sim type, in which you see the ships shoot each other (and for some reason, the computer controlling your fleets NEVER shoots at the same target.....yet on it's own fleets it'll fuck your world up) or "Arcade" in which it's very reminiscent of the previous Bethesda Trek console titles in play.

In combat, your ships and Starbase reload times are abysmally slow, even if your diverting power to weapon systems. Shields go down on your ships like a five dollar hooker on Welfare Day, and thus fuck you to enemy fire in short course - meanwhile enemy ships seem to be able to turn on a dime and always give you their strongest shields for your weapons to hit.

Oh yes....you can only have three fleets...maximum...at least you can have up to seven ships in those fleets....

Oh..and the VA is just attrocious....at least in Encouters and Legend, they maage to get the actors (or at least Shatner) give voice over.....this time, it's not even that.

The game is just...horrible...

I regret buying it now as much as I was looking forward to it...but this game continues the tradition of horrible, crappy Star Trek games.

Avoid it at all cost.

I was afraid this was going to happen. Hardly any previews, limited release... when a developer tries to sneak his game into shops it's rarely a good sign. When it happens to a licensed game, abandon all hope ye who shoppe here.

Sounds like the Civiliozation clone Birth of the Federation is better.

Typhonis 1 wrote:Sounds like the Civiliozation clone Birth of the Federation is better.

I was about to say that too. Why no ST:BotF2? The first one was good and I liked the battles but how come no sequel?

Enigma wrote:

Typhonis 1 wrote:Sounds like the Civiliozation clone Birth of the Federation is better.

I was about to say that too. Why no ST:BotF2? The first one was good and I liked the battles but how come no sequel?

Microprose folded and the license changed hands?

BotF was pretty terrible - being better than later ST games isn't much of an accolade. If someone made a decent mod for GalCiv2 that'd be pretty corking, and none of the retarded combat UI of BotF.

It's pretty sad that the last ST game I really enjoyed were based on SFB, not ST.

The last good one I played was EFII, which is really just Quake-with-phasers. We need Interplay back

Bounty wrote:The last good one I played was EFII, which is really just Quake-with-phasers. We need Interplay back

What we need is the dev team that actually made Klingon Academy, and give them the resources they want. Interplay itself nearly killed KA before it ever got released.

Plus I don't know what it was with Interplay but they could never get the fucking Excelsior model right.

I'm quite fond of Bridge Commander. The original game kind of sucked, but the massive amounts of user-created content is largely on the awesome side of things.

Star Trek Armada, Dominion Wars and Bridge Commander seem to be the highlights of the Star Trek gaming genre. Bridge Commander was quite innovative in the perspective of taking command of your own ship but the storyline was fairly bland and the content equally so.
The various fan creations make it massively more playable and if they really want to make an MMO of Star Trek then Bridge Commander would make the most practical way to do it.

Most of the Star Trek gaming genre is basically reduced to copy catting other successful games like Quake / Elite Force. Now all the games that come out are just shit with the Star Trek name on it to promote the die hard fans to buy it.

I don't really think Bridge Commander is that innovative. Oh boy, you can look around the bridge and see the various bridge officers and they'll talk to you! And you can click on the various bridge stations! That's certainly a breakthrough in gameplay innovation.


Bridge Commander was not a good game. It was an okay engine (buggy as shit though) with mediocre content, and rather little content at that.

A cross between Bridge Commander and Klingon Academy would be excellent, if someone had bother to do so.

Stark wrote:BotF was pretty terrible - being better than later ST games isn't much of an accolade. If someone made a decent mod for GalCiv2 that'd be pretty corking, and none of the retarded combat UI of BotF.

It's pretty sad that the last ST game I really enjoyed were based on SFB, not ST.

At the time of release, it was decent to pretty good (this was a time when the major comparison was MOO2) with very innovative combat (that admittedly didn't go the distance and had several severly unbalancing issues).

Time wasn't so good to it though.

Star trek 25th anniversary!

MKSheppard wrote:Star trek 25th anniversary!

That is certainly the best Trek game I've ever played. Corny but it captured TOS perfectly.

Starfleet Command II.

THREAD OVER

That's right, taking SFC1, removing the campaign, and adding the absolutel worst 'campaing map' system in existence is how you improve! Needs moar fiddley! Ironically, SFC2s poor UI (outside combat) is probably why SFC3 was so dumbed down.

Then again, Armada was terrible and I thing Armada 2 was actually worse - just like SW RTS's, they were just 'RTS with ST looking ships in them'. I mean, Nebulas are point-defence ships now. Obvoiusly! And in Armada 2 retreating was basically impossible, as any hit to rear had a chance of kiling your engines.

KA is probably my favourite (and most ambitious) ST game. Like U235, I kinda wish it hadn't been fucked in the ass by Interplay. A KA/BC hybrid made by people who give a shit would beat all this Legacy/Conquest bullshit.

Remember, BC let you use TWO ships, and it was almost wholly uninteractive. KA let you *wiggle the BOP's wings*, which is 100% win.

Stark wrote:Remember, BC let you use TWO ships, and it was almost wholly uninteractive. KA let you *wiggle the BOP's wings*, which is 100% win.

The main game of BC was complete and utter garbage. But with mods (and there are quite a lot of them), the game can be pretty fucking awesome. One guy made a bunch of Star Wars ships, that are actually to scale, and dwarf all the Trek ships in both size and firepower... they were pretty damn sweet.

SilverWingedSeraph wrote:

Stark wrote:Remember, BC let you use TWO ships, and it was almost wholly uninteractive. KA let you *wiggle the BOP's wings*, which is 100% win.

The main game of BC was complete and utter garbage. But with mods (and there are quite a lot of them), the game can be pretty fucking awesome. One guy made a bunch of Star Wars ships, that are actually to scale, and dwarf all the Trek ships in both size and firepower... they were pretty damn sweet.

The mods don't cut it. First, a lot of them conflict with each other, and getting all of the ones you like to work right and play together can involve a lot more effort than should have to be put in. Second, the game is still fucking buggy, so even the best of mods have a decent chance of causing random crashes. Third, so much of the user-added content simply does not mesh up with each other; you've got some ships which are way overmatched against some other ships.

Yes, there are compilations out there which purport to scale everything properly, but the instant you add another ship which isn't part of the compilation, all of that "balance" goes straight out the window.

Finally, a staggering amount of the BC mods out there are just masturbatory garbage, and asking someone to wade through that sea of shit to try and piece together a half-decent game is preposterous.


Bridge Commander is a failure. The ability to mod it prevents it from being a total failure, but it is still a failure. BC brought a few good ideas to the table, but overall if I were to decide whether a new game would start from the Klingon Academy approach or the Bridge Commander approach, I would not hesitate to pick Klingon Academy.

Yes, there are compilations out there which purport to scale everything properly, but the instant you add another ship which isn't part of the compilation, all of that "balance" goes straight out the window.

The closest BC has gotten to a unified mod is Kobayashi Maru. It's got most Dominion War ship with proper balancing, most of the scripting mods and it's pretty stable.

You can do some fiddling with balance yourself when the mod ships with the .py files, too. It takes time and effort, but I'm willing to waste an hour on scripting if it means having a good Oberth class to joyride in.

Finally, a staggering amount of the BC mods out there are just masturbatory garbage, and asking someone to wade through that sea of shit to try and piece together a half-decent game is preposterous.

S31 Intrepid! Assimilated Sovereign Dreadnought! GOD SHUTTLE!

I actually enjoyed the regular campaigns in ST: Armada -- to a point. I got sick of it 'round the time the Romulans, Klingons and Starfleet went to the Delta Quadrant.

Where Armada I has the potential to really shine is in its mods. With the right mod, I maintain that Armada's by far the most fun Trek game.

Trick is, what's the right mod? That's easy: "Project: Armada." I was one of the team's testers. The effort put into the mod started to slack off when Armada 2 came out, but I think the project leader was close to releasing the updated Romulans. Previously only the Feds and Klingons had been fixed.

But when I say fixed, I mean it. Every canon ship made it into the game. ALL of the models were top-notch, scaled perfectly and the ships' stats seemed in-line with what you'd expect; e.g., a Negh'Var beats a GCS, is a rough match for a Sovereign but falls to the future GCS from "All Good Things."

It's hard to match up single ships with this mod, though, since the AI is insane and fleets of hundreds aren't unusual. No shit: HUNDREDS of ships can come at you at once. The enemy usually had 8-10 shipyards running, minimum. Unless you turned on the Infinite Dilithium option, you'd suck a map dry but fast.

I burned my copy of Armada out playing that mod. I think the best battle I played was hours long and saw upwards of 2,000 enemy ships destroyed Wow.