PC Review

The Star Trek franchise has been highly successful in many areas, except for one of the more critical realms in today's world - computer software. In general, all Star Trek games and software for the computer have met with a decidedly cool response. Unfortunately, Star Trek: Birth of the Federation (BoF) does not lift this curse on the Star Trek genre of games.

I admit, I had high hopes for this game. I have always loved sci-fi, and Star Trek has always been one of the best sci-fi series out there. Plus, I really wanted to see the Star Trek game curse lifted. So it was with a smile that I placed the CD in the drive, preparing the installation. Install was clean and easy, mainly because there were no options to installation other than selecting a directory. The default directory is c:\botf, which struck me as somewhat odd, since most programs these days install to the Program Files directory. No big deal.

After an unimpressive opening sequence, I was treated to an opening interface that had a total Star Trek: The Next Generation feel to it. Unfortunately for the game, Microprose only has license to use Next Generation, not the original series. This was a critical failing, as will be explained later. The opening interface is easy to use, having all standard selections, such as single player game, load game, continue last game, multiplayer, high score list, and the like.

Setting up a single player game is very easy. You select what level of technological advancement each of the five empires has, the size and shape of the galaxy, whether you want domination or vendetta victory conditions, the number of minor races, random events on or off, and tactical combat on or off. No, you cannot select how many empires you want in the game - all five must be present.

What empires are these, you ask? They are your standard Star Trek races: The United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Ferengi Alliance, and the Cardassian Union. Each race has different skills, which should come as no surprise to anyone experienced at this type of game. The Federation is highly skilled at diplomacy, while the Klingons excel at war. Romulans are excellent at sneaky spy work, and the Ferengi are masters of trade. The Cardassians are "ruthlessly efficient", which doesn't seem to have any real effect on gameplay.

The main interface is an excellent piece of work. It is customized for each race, giving a different look and feel to it. Even the mouse pointer adds to the immersion, as it becomes the race's emblem, and animates while the game is busy in-between turns. The left side of the screen offers information on structures and ships in the system, while the bottom of the screen displays planets and ownership, and also command menus for ships. The majority of the screen is taken up by the map interface, which is fairly easy to understand and use. Your systems are shown by an overlay of your race's color, which signifies what areas of space are claimed as your own. As you expand your empire, the shading expands with it. The game does not revolve around stars such as in Master of Orion, but rather around sectors of space which may or may not have a star in them. This approach is much more realistic to the Star Trek universe, because if you have seen the show, almost all things take place in deep space, and usually nowhere near planets.

The way to navigate between different screens is unique. A right-click of the mouse anywhere on screen will bring up a graphical menu, allowing you to select between the main view, your system build menu, your science, your diplomacy, your intelligence network, and the main menu. This interface is exceedingly easy to use, once you get used to it.

Building items is very easy. Simply select the system you wish to build from, and bring up the build menu with a right-click. BoF has a different industry system than Master of Orion. There are five types of buildings you are able to make: food, industry, power, spy, and science. These are differently named for each race, but all have the same function. Then, your population is needed to run these buildings, one population point per building to get full effect from it. There are many, many other things you can build, but the five basic buildings are needed for every system. Unfortunately, planets barely start with anything, just a couple of food buildings, and maybe an industry building. This means that you must purchase an industry building and assign a population point to it to begin constructing other buildings instantly, or else your system will take an incredibly long time to build up to a point where it can do anything for your empire. Also, one must remember to set up a build queue at the beginning of the game for your homeworld, or risk falling behind very quickly.

Shipbuilding is very limited in BoF. You can build as many shipyards as you like, but you may only run as many of them as you have dilithium resources. Dilithium is fairly rare, being found mainly on homeworlds and minor race worlds. This places a limit on the number of ships you can have in production at one time, which increases the value of each ship. Gone are the days of having half the galaxy producing ships - now you must build carefully and keep your ships alive as long as possible.

The diplomacy is easily one of the best engines I have run across in this type of game. You can offer treaties of non-aggression, friendship, and affiliation to all races. You can request an alliance with another major race, while you can offer membership to the minor races. Requests for other empires to give you cash or cede disputed territory is easy, while asking another race to help you go to war against a third can be quite helpful. Diplomatic messages take time to get through to the other side, representing message transit and considerations, then take time to get back to you.

Science and intelligence are basically the same as they are in other games of this type. You can assign percentages of your intelligence network to espionage and sabotage of one of the other major races, while keeping part of it back for internal security. Science is divided into six areas of study, and you can assign percentages of your science to each. Research takes a very long time in BoF, so do not expect to leap ahead of your competitors very quickly.

The general gameplay is fun at first, but can become very tedious. The game is simply too long. I once started my empire at the highest tech level, while placing the others at the second lowest, in a small galaxy. Even then, it took me over two hundred turns to exterminate all other races. I shudder to think of those who have started a game in a large galaxy with all races at the lowest tech level. They will be playing for a year. The game also seems extremely difficult. Even on the lowest difficulty level, from an equal start, the other races are frighteningly tough. However, it would probably be simple to beat the game on the highest difficulty level, if you placed your empire at the highest tech level, while placing the others at the lowest. I have not tried that, but it is easy to imagine.

The combat in this game is simply excellent in most respects. Instead of a grid-like combat interface, BoF gives you a three dimensional battlefield. Instead of moving each one of your ships, you issue orders, such as charge (attack at close range), assault (attack at long range), harry (circle and fire at close range), circle (circle at long range), flyby (zoom past while firing), and even a ramming command. Once you have issued orders to your fleet, you hit the turn button. Both sides move and fire at the same time, while your fleet captains make comments. Unfortunately, all races have basically the same two weapons - a beam weapon and a torpedo weapon. Different names for each race, same effect. However, watching the threads of phaser and disruptor fire link two ships, and watching the dots of torpedo fire fly toward the enemy is rather impressive. After each 10-15 second combat turn, the game halts, allowing you to issue new orders to your fleet, or you can move the camera view and replay the previous turn. Explosions seem to be kind of weak, but seeing half a dozen Galaxy-class starships explode one after the other is rather impressive (I'm evil, I know). The best part of combat, in my opinion, is playing as the Klingons. The voice of your fleet commander yelling insults at the enemy as they retreat is simply hilarious. "HAH! They were afraid to DIE in BATTLE!"

Sound is fairly good in BoF. The weapons fire effects are perfect Star Trek sounds, while the explosions are weak audibly as they are graphically. The music is different for each race, but gets somewhat repetitive. Unfortunately, the game constantly accesses the CD, disallowing any chance of popping in your own CD. This may be the only time I ever say it, but this game needed a larger install option, to get rid of the constant CD accessing.

Multiplayer consists of IPX, TCP/IP, serial, modem, and MSN Gaming Zone connections. However, I did not personally try multiplayer due to many factors, such as the length of the game, a lack of time to get involved in such a long game, and other factors which will become apparent shortly.

Up until this point, this review has been generally good. Now it is time to reveal the dark side of the Federation - bugs galore. One reason the game is so long is because it actually slows down the longer you play it. The turns take a noticeable amount of time to calculate, even on a P2-300. Tech support for this problem was totally useless. They recommend rebooting every 50 to 75 turns to keep the game smooth, and say that the programmers are working on it.

Second major problem - the mouse. After about 15 to 30 minutes of play, the mouse begins to lag and jump. Moving the mouse no longer results in a smooth move, it results in the cursor jumping halfway across the screen. It can take a couple of minutes simply to move the cursor to the "end turn" button. Recommendation from tech support is to lower your Windows graphic acceleration. To do this, go to Control Panel -> Display -> Advanced -> Performance (Win98), and move the slider to the left. I moved the slider one notch to the left, and noticed no change. Any further change prevented the game from loading.

Another mind-boggler in BoF is the tutorial. The designers did not include a tutorial in the game, or in the manual. Instead, it is on the CD, in a PDF file. So, to learn the tutorial, you have to alt-tab between the game and Acrobat Reader, which is a totally unnecessary bother. At least they included Acrobat Reader 3.02 on the CD.

Combat is severely unbalanced at times. A fleet of four destroyers, small warships, can destroy an outpost (which is somewhat like a small starbase) in no time. As any person who has seen Deep Space Nine or played StarFleet Battles or even watched Star Trek will tell you, you simply do NOT mess with a starbase or anything close to it unless you have a rather large fleet. At other times, a small upgraded destroyer can wipe out a battle cruiser or dreadnought without taking a scratch. That just makes no sense at all.

Random crashes plague a lot of games, and BoF is no exception. The phenomenon of the game suddenly hyper-coloring and dropping you to Windows is well-known. BoF only did this once to me, which is actually a fairly good record compared to some other games. Unfortunately, when I reloaded the game and hit the next turn, I crashed out again. Load up, load game, next turn, another crash. Even after a system reboot, I crashed out of the game. That signifies something severely wrong in the game.

Sound sometimes echoes and distorts itself once into the game, mainly because of the constant CD access. The voice acting for some of the races, especially the Klingons and Ferengi, fail to sound like the real Star Trek voices. Fortunately, the combat voiceovers are quite humorous for most races, and there are enough of them that it doesn't get too repetitive.

The final blow against this game isn't really the fault of the designers. Only having the Next Generation license is very confusing in a game such as this, because everyone knows that the original series came first. Building ships from Next Generation right off the bat just doesn't make much sense. It would have been a lot more fun to build ships like the Constitution-class original Enterprise, then moving on to the Next Generation ships. It is a shame that Microprose does not have the license to the original series, because the detail there would make a great difference.

In conclusion, Birth of the Federation doesn't come anywhere near breaking the curse over all Star Trek games to date. This game is nearly impossible to play, until they get a patch out for it. The only way I would recommend this game is if you are a die-hard Trek fan. This game has a lot of promise, and it could be a lot of fun, if only it wasn't so slow and buggy. Maybe a patch will fix it, but a company shouldn't have to patch a game simply to make it playable. I find it impossible that Microprose's QA department did not find these problems. Chalk BoF up to another game rushed out the door incomplete, with the programmers already working on a patch. Shame on you, Microprose. You could have done so much better.