Star Trek Birth of the Federation

[McAvoy]

So I got into a Star Trek Birth of the Federation kick recently. Not the original, but the fan made mods to them. There are alot of them. The one I am using is Star Trek Dominion War.

It's closer to the original but with added stuff. First off is the Ferengi is swapped out with the Dominion. The Ferengi are made into a minor race. The other thing about minor races is that not only are there new ones including for some reason the Maquis, but they get upgrades to their ships. Like the Breen, have three versions of their ships with the last one pretty powerful and it can cloak.

The other thing is they made a huge map. Far larger than the original. I wouldn't use that. It's the reason why I stopped playing years ago. Turns used to take like 20 minutes to go through. It also created huge fleets, which could easily take an hour to go through assuming it doesn't crash. You could easily have two fleets each over a thousand ships fighting each other.

This time I went with the medium size map which I think is the original large map.

The ship models are far better this time. And there are more of them. You start off with the Connie Refit with your big ship and then progress from there. I know other mods would go further with having the NX class.

The biggest limitation to the game is that it's relying on a game engine that is well over 20 years old. I always liked the original, and if you just want to play the original, they have it with alot of the issues fixed.

[Madner Kami]

Loved the game and, back in the day, the Babylon 5 mod. Haven't played it in ages, but still enjoy the memories. Would instantly buy it, if it were on GoG. Would instantly drop my money at whoever creates a remake.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I liked playing the Star Wars Rebellion mod that they made for this game.

[McAvoy]

Loved the game and, back in the day, the Babylon 5 mod. Haven't played it in ages, but still enjoy the memories. Would instantly buy it, if it were on GoG. Would instantly drop my money at whoever creates a remake.

You could always download the fan mods. They are different enough from the original to kinda make it into a sequel.

Like I said though it is limited by what the game engine can do which is still 20 years old though with some upgrades to it.

[Beastro]

BotF is the perfect example of a simply, sleek game based upon an easy and addictive style of gameplay. It really needed a sequel to expand upon it, but keeping the same combat and other features.

My only issues are the poor AI and how badly it can expand (I kinda fix this in the editor every game to give them closer, better systems to colonize to kick start their economy) and how the system capture and mood system works. It's simply too much work to capture systems and keep them with foreign races beyond choice minors that you can't lure to your side and better to just clean the system of life and recolonize it resulting in the game becoming a war of genocide.

It's simply better to devote your credits to flooding a minor you want and split them off to join your side rather than occupying them.

And it was insane in the vanilla game how the mood effects from different actions that left the Federation having to pause every so often to regain lost mood from bombarding systems or Klingons that hated a minor joining them. Good that mods eliminate that.

Oh, and Romulans > all. This and the Armada games are pretty much the things about Trek that made me love them.

It's insane what they could do with cloaking and their bonus' compared to the weaknesses the Klingons have with limited classes that cloak and horrible security weakness. I do enjoy using scout fleets to suicide with both to knock out choice warships with their decloaking first hits before they'd wiped out.