Topic: Buying Star Trek Games

[Anthropoid]

Few questions:

1. Any suggestion on how/where to buy Starfleet Armada?

2. What about Starfleet Command 2?

Good Old Games has SFC1 (which I recently purchased) as well as 25th Aniversary, Judgement Rites and Starfleet Academy (which I'm not presently interested in).

3. What are the best mods for SFC 1?

I've downloaded and will try to install everything that looked interesting in the Downloads area of this site, but what I'd really like to find is an overhaul mod that changes a few of the things I dislike about SFC 1:

a. Less repetitive missions
b. Slower gaining of rank
c. More ships per fleet
d. Reworked or "optionalized" Organian story line.
e. Anything that makes the campaign more sandbox

[TarMinyatur]

http://www.dynaverse.net/market/5-star-trek-starfleet-command-orion-pirates.html

SFC: Orion Pirates is your best option for mission variety and length of campaign. I highly recommend the High Definition Patch 2.562. I think the maximum ships you can have in your fleet is 3, plus 3 captured ships in any Dynaverse mission.

If you're feeling bored with AI opponents, grab SFC2: Community Edtion 2.679 for multiplayer action. It's not ideal for singleplayer because of AI wonkiness. SFC2: EAW is better for folks who are not interested in PvP.

[Anthropoid]

Thanks Tar!

[ObsidianShiar]

1. Any suggestion on how/where to buy Starfleet Armada?

You mean Star Trek Armada? 

Apart from the games you see on GOG and the non-free parts of ST Online, you can't legally buy ST games outside eBay/Amazon/equivalent sites. Their former publishers no longer have the rights to distribute them. That's where piracy comes in

[Anthropoid]

Ah yes Star Trek Armada!

I somehow missed out on Star Trek games entirely while they were in their 'heyday' . . . grad school: I didn't play any computer games for 10 fricking years . . .

I'm now surprised how many there are.

I really like Starfleet Command, but it feels somehow like a "Preliminary" game, which really deserved a sequel that added more content and complexity. For example, somewhere in the in-game documentation it mentions a "30 year career." I have so far restarted the campaign as Fed probably 10 times, finding a particular mission to be difficult and reloading a couple times and then getting disgusted and going back to start over.

Its not like I'm an 'inexperienced gamer' so the fact that I'm supposed to be embarking on a "30 year career" yet its dynamics are obscure enough that I have also felt compelled to restart many times just doesn't seem like "good" design. It seems like good "preliminary" design. If it was just meant to be a scenario game: fine, its pretty close to 'really-really good' (not perfect but really-really good). But as a "campaign" it just feels lacking. The whole "it generated a space shell monster" thing is a turnoff to me, but then I guess there were a few episodes of TOS that had stuff like that . . . I vaguely remember some Horn-Like giant space ray emitter the Enterprise tangled with once . . .

And so I'm lead to conclude: Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates, if not Starfleet Command 2 (or else this thing you guys refer to as EAW) is the sequel that upped the game in a satisfying way . . . only to learn "can't buy that for anything less than $65 dollars" and then you are getting a mail ordered CD (so old-school . . .) . . . I cannot believe I just thought/typed that . . . I once was "opposed" to Steam! 

Anyway, any additional commentary you guys can provide to help me orient into this suprisingly large and diverse (and largely inaccessible) world of Star Trek games is appreciated.

BTW, what post count do I have to hit before this CAPTCHA stuff turns off? Sheeze, you guys must have had lots of problems with bots in the past, and hopefully NONE by now!

[TarMinyatur]

SFC2: Empires At War and SFC2: Community Edition are available at http://www.dynaverse.net/market/. The patches for those games are linked here.

No game (other than maybe Star Trek: Klingon Academy) has the tactical depth of Starfleet Command. SFC isn't a roleplaying game with great fictional story arcs. Its strength is tactics -- inspired directly from Star Fleet Battles, the table-top war game. 

As far as a 30-year career...yeah, SFC isn't spectacular. But it could have been. The community has the tools (an API)  to write new missions and add them directly to the Dynaverse. A few scripters wrote several missions for EAW and Orion Pirates. Although we had 3000 active players back in 2001, only a handful were writing scripts. Most were playing on MPlayer or Gamespy, competing or just having fun with free-for-alls -- which was great, too.

[ObsidianShiar]

Anyway, any additional commentary you guys can provide to help me orient into this suprisingly large and diverse (and largely inaccessible) world of Star Trek games is appreciated.

Well, avoid most Trek games that weren't made between 1999 and 2003

Birth of the Federation and Starfleet Command 1 were the games that started that period when Trek games weren't shallow excuses for software with the Trek license. There's several genres that were covered: RTS (Armada 1 & 2), FPS (Elite Force 1 & 2), combat "simulations", in lack for a better word (Starfleet Command series and Bridge Commander), TBS (Birth of the Federation), TPS (The Fallen), even a Commandos clone (Away Team). If you get the chance, try these titles out.

BTW, what post count do I have to hit before this CAPTCHA stuff turns off? Sheeze, you guys must have had lots of problems with bots in the past, and hopefully NONE by now!

Once you make 5 or 10 posts (forgot exactly), you won't see Captcha anymore.

[Anthropoid]

So I understand that: the publishers of some of these titles have "lost" their legal rights over the Intellectual Property (or parts thereof anyway) and as such, no one (other than Paramount I suppose?) has really the legal right to repackage and redistribute some of these original titles?

I suppose Good Old Games might be able to negotiate with Paramount? I wonder, why were they able to get SFC 1, 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites on their catalog?

[ObsidianShiar]

So I understand that: the publishers of some of these titles have "lost" their legal rights over the Intellectual Property (or parts thereof anyway) and as such, no one (other than Paramount I suppose?) has really the legal right to repackage and redistribute some of these original titles?

The gist of it, yes. But Paramount didn't make the games, so I think it's even more complicated than that

Happened to EA when they (willingly?) dropped the Lord of the Rings license, and nobody has ever sanctioned the pirated releases of Battle for Middle-Earth games in the five years since the license drop.

I suppose Good Old Games might be able to negotiate with Paramount? I wonder, why were they able to get SFC 1, 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites on their catalog?

They somehow managed to make a deal with CBS Studios and Interplay, and Interplay mentions these titles on their website, so Interplay probably got limited rights to a selection of their ST games. In old Warhammer 40.000 games (like Chaos Gate and Rites of War), GOG is credited as the publisher, while SFC1 and other Interplay titles on GOG have Interplay as the publisher.