On this whole "buy Trek and SFC 4 will come", consider this:
SFC 1 came out when slapping "Star Trek" on a game box was an "ironclad guarantee" that a game would sell close to 500,000 copies. See the Klingon language disk and Borg "games" for proof of that. We just got lucky that a dev-house thought that making a SFB-based game would hopefully translate into a blockbuster.
And I 've been thinking of something else. Perhaps the biggest thing holding back SFC 4 is, well,
us. Consider:
At "our" behest, 14 deg. East and Taldren both broke from their respective publishers in the release of patches, see SFC 1.03, every EAW patch between 2.0.7-ish to 2.49.99999999, and what happened with SFC III. (Interplay knew Taldren's patching-wishes for OP, and said "okay, patch OP in your own way, we'll save the QA dollars"...)
We've essentially "voted" for what we "demand". Every forum from I-play through Taldren to here seems to insist that the SFC crowd will not be happy unless a game is released that is a 100% faithful translation of every SFB-edition from plastic-baggy to Captain's, with over 100 switches to turn on-off all the optional rules from every ruleset... Being that every successive edition of SFC has sold
worse than the earlier one (after we flame it for not being SFB-accurate), well, think like a suit for a minute at what kind of game will sell to us...
Back that sales number up with the flamewars that are probably sitting in some internet-archive somewhere and...
And top that off with issues of complexity. Reviewers complain that SFC is too complex for even the RTS crowd, managing power while maneuvering for range and arc while considering what position you need to be in to maximize damage from your guns and minimize damage received from a subset of 20-odd different weapon charts overwhelmes even the most stat-minded "I know every number on my RTS outfit's forces..." player. And the code seems to be as complex as a Microsoft production, being that there are still bugs in this game after 20+ different builds.
To me, there's only one way we can dream of SFC 4 coming out. Let them start with Tac-ops, and hope that it's not too complex for the twitchy DS players out there. Once we hook a new generation (of about 500,000 PC and handheld owning houses) on the basics of SFC-operations, make a sequel or 2 where various SFB-ish things are added in
slowly, so that in a year or 2, when the 4th Tac-op derived game is released, it's our wish, ie, SFC 4...