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DEVELOPER
: Quicksilver
and 14 Degrees East
PUBLISHER : Interplay
System Requirements
Pentium 200 Mhz, 32 MB RAM, 200 MB Hard Drive space |
Recommended
Pentium II 266MHz, 64+ MB RAM, 8 Megs Video card |
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Ratings
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Issues
Graphics:
10 - Simply beautiful. Detailed and
well-skinned models. Weapon effects could be used in the
next Trek series without changes. Each race has
distinctly different interface and appearances.
Audio:
9 - Compelling, theme-inducing dynamic
(event-effected) music; useful AI sounds. Only thing
missing is more use of voiceovers during game.
Interface:
7 - Complicated game requires complicated
interface. Buttons get awfully small at 1280 resolution.
Nearly 100% iconic - little English needed to play skirmish.
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Play
Issues
Solo
gameplay: 9 - Skirmish mode
completely configurable, campaigns for all races dynamic but
with some scripted "story" embedded.
Only some AI issues keep it from a perfect score.
Length
of play/replay value: 9 - 6 races,
30 year campaigns for each, special missions. Real
variety from one race to the next. Finite campaigns the
only complaint (and that's not a bad one).
Multiplay
quality: 8
TCP/IP,IPX, supported by MPlayer. Up to 3 ships per
player, 6 players max makes for huge battles. No real
cooperative multiplay.
Learning
curve: 4 for non-SFB players, 9 for SFB
gamers
Almost a direct port of the boardgame, the conversion to
realtime really the only change. Otherwise a
little complex.
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| Other/Notes
Documentation
quality: 8 141-page spiral bound
docs, ship-recognition poster (which has some small errors).
Certain aspects of game familiar to SFB players (such as
Damage Allocation) not explained quite as well as could have
been.
Pros: Great overall
feel – an accurate Civil War game, yet reachable for non-Civil War fans.
Cons:
Narrow focus might put off non Civil War fans, no editor.
Stability:
5
Stable, but a pretty extensive buglist. Notably,
none of the bugs are game killers and the programming staff
are knocking them down pretty quickly.
Other
comments +1.0
the market has been waiting for so long, through so many bad
ST titles, for this game!
Overall
Rating: 9.3
for non SFB players, 9.8 for SFB fans
"This game is a MUST HAVE for anyone at all interested in
Star Trek ship combat. There is no other
conclusion."
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Star Trek occupies a special place in computer gamer's hearts. Asking most 20- and 30-somethings what their favorite TV shows were will undoubtedly elicit Star Trek somewhere in the list. In fact, the original 78 episodes of an overacted series spawned an entire media genre. This speaks clearly about the subject's ability to reach not only a single generation of viewers, but successive ones as well. Several original-cast movies, a short-lived animated series, 3 spin-off series (currently; scuttlebutt is that there is a 4th in the works) which have also had their own successful big-screen film titles, merchandising for all of them, as well as computer and role-playing products, have all propelled Gene Roddenberry's creation into consideration as one of the most broad ranging, successful, and profitable concepts ever in television.
One of the very first spin-offs (in the late 70's) from the series was a little cardboard-counter wargame called Star Fleet Battles. Stephen V. Cole - the author and main driving force behind SFB - took the available Star Trek source material and built it into a coherent whole. What he developed was a very popular game that required a great deal of thought to play. Somehow, SFB stumbled onto a very successful formula of carefully-balanced ship designs, with a broad variety of truly different systems that elicited a variety of tactics for their employment. The multiplicity of races, each with their own ethnic "specialties" in terms of ships and weapons, made for great depth of play. The well crafted point-value system for ships meant that any group could get together and quickly whip up a battle for any number of players in almost any situation and - critically - it would be BALANCED.
The problems with Star Fleet Battles were, in my mind, fourfold: First and foremost was the same spectre that haunts wargames to this day - finding an opponent. Few had the time to commit 2+ hours to a game, and the difficulty in finding an opponent whose schedule synched with your own is/was perennial. Secondly, SFB has been very successful. Consequently, its publisher Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) who has been rigorous in responding to fan demands by publishing more rules, more systems and more expansions. The count of supplements to the game - by my rough estimate - stands at TWENTY today. This is at the very least unwieldy, and at its worst it invites "rules lawyers" who know chapter & verse by heart (blech!). Third, the game had a hard row to hoe: representing the minutae of split-second ship-to-ship combat required the introduction of a novel (but complicated) "impulse" based movement system, dividing the turn into 32, 24, 12 or 8 "impulses" in which players would move their ships along pre-plotted movement courses at each phase. It worked really well, but logically it became a HUGE chore when you ended up with a dozen ships per side, a cloud of fighters and drones in the middle of the board, and everyone moving different speeds. Such was the necessity of trying to simulate a simultaneous-move system in a boardgame. Finally, one of the coolest parts of SFB was that you were seemingly representing complex starships. For each capital ship the player would have an energy-allocation budget that had to be managed with minute care; engines would produce a limited amount of power for weapons, shields, movement, etc forcing a constant balancing act between mobility, offensive lethality, and security. As systems were damaged, lack of power forced the players to make ever-more-critical choices about what was worth powering and what was not. But while this was interesting for one ship (or even a couple) it became a tedious chore when managing 5+ ship fleets - a fairly common occurrence.
Despite this, Star Fleet Battles was a great game that took far too much of my time and money in the early and mid-80's. Fast-forward 15 years. I haven't even looked at my SFB stuff in months, and then it was only to clear shelf space for other un-played boardgames and unread books. I have no time to burn hours sifting counters and waiting for a couple other guys to finally finish their energy-allocation so we can execute our moves. Then, as if by magic, lands at my doorstep the package from Interplay. Starfleet Command has arrived!
Starfleet Command - programmed by SFB-lovers at 14 degrees East - is essentially a direct port of the board game. For dedicated Star Trek fans who are NOT SFB players, this takes some explanation. This is not the same as the series' incarnations currently on television. As noted above, the SFB "universe" took on a life of its own at birth; a dramatic series like the TV show can freely invent concepts and re-rationalize logic at the drop of a storyline. Wargames, however, have to be consistent. The arena of play must be largely thought through at the beginning, so most events can be ruled upon in advance. SVC took the materials extant at the time (books, movies, even the ship blueprints) and divined the totality of the Star Trek universe, likely beyond what Roddenberry himself had envisioned at that point. Therein lie the differences. As we know from The Original Series (TOS) and its media descendants, there are Fed's, Gorns, Romulans, Klingons and Orions (among others). Later, these are joined by Ferengi, Cardassians and the Borg, with ST:Voyager running into new "empires" just about 3 times a day. Wormholes join far-flung points of the galaxy, the Feds and Klingons have learned to love each other, and the only people that ever seem to shoot at anyone (other than the Borg, who are even now being given very postmodern rationalizations) are the minor races that haven't technologically 'evolved' to the higher, peaceful (Federation) ethic yet.
The SFB universe is a much more FUN place. There's still the Federation, the keepers of all that's well and good in the Universe, and clearly the place where everyone drinks milk and eats their vegetables. There are the Gorn, friendly sluggish dino-guys. There are the scheming Romulans, sneaky Orions, and the feral Klingons. So far, so familiar to any pre-ST:Next Generation fan. Well, when SVC wrote SFB, there other races that were suggested by references in the series or added for strategic balance issues:
Kzin: yes, Larry Niven's Ringworld-universe Kzin. An erstwhile Fed ally, they made an appearance in the animated series never to be seen again.
Lyrans: a Kzin-analgoue, allied to the Klingons.
Hydrans: tri-radial methane breathers, fighting both the Lyrans and Klingons, and generally losing.
Tholians: extra-galactic refugees with exotic tractor-beam tech; xenophobic.
The Interstellar Concordium: a federation on the far side of the Gorns and Romulans. Hate everyone.
Andromedans: more extra-galactic visitors, using more strange tech, huge nasty ships and set on conquest.
Importantly, there are no Ferengi, no Cardassians, no Bajorans, no "delta quadrant" nor the races there from. This is important to understand because it can be very disconcerting for new Trek fans that are interested in SFC. We have two divergent histories and a game that only simulates one of them. With a new Star Trek game, to which line should the game hew? This is important, because when 14E and Interplay went to pursue the licensing for SFC, the question became - to whom should they ask? SVC and ADB held the license for SFB and its derivatives from Roddenberry. Paramount holds the license for all new Trekkia. I'm not privy to the legal details, but somehow they worked it out, and SFC ended up with Feds, Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, Lyrans, Hydrans, and Orions (as an NPC race only).
The different "futures" notwithstanding, SFC has proved very appealing to new fans as well as old (the USENET postings of "Where are the Borg!?!?!" notwithstanding). Appealing indeed! It's an attractive game from the moment you fire it up. It supports software rendering (and is decent looking), but the models, skins and textures of the playing field are only revealed in their full glory with 3d acceleration. Ships are fully-rendered 3d entities, with a set of 6 color bars displayed on the 2d "playing surface" directly below the ship to indicate current shield strengths. Missiles, torpedoes, and direct-fire weapons are all represented by glowing sprites (the tractor beams are particularly cool) that actually fire from the correct ship locations! Damaged ships vent trails of warp-plasma. When an enemy ship explodes (or yours, for that matter) the FX are spectacular, with a white-hot plasma shock radiating from the blast followed by the tumbling, recognizable chunks of the target.
Every race has at least 4 or 5 ship models, representing the various hull classes and the innumerable variants (usually frigates, light cruisers, heavy cruisers, and dreadnaughts, but also including tugs, freighters, fighters, and a number of bases). Monsters (a staple of SFB non-combat missions) are also given the same loving treatment. The Sunglider (a star-shaped yellow beastie) is particularly neat. The backgrounds too have gotten a lot of attention - the planets, nebulae, and black holes are interesting in their own right, although since there is an attempt to scale them properly it is hard to tell exactly one's position relative unless you use the top-down (F1) view. Despite this visually intensive environment, my system (AMD K6-2 300MHz, 64 meg RAM, Voodoo2 8meg) maintains a very-respectable 37+ frames per second animation rate.
The sound - music and SFX - have received particular care. First, the sound effects are superb. Each weapon has a distinct sound, and each race has a set of distinctive sounds (such as the "red alert" klaxon) that really support the atmosphere of playing distinctly different races. Sounds play a very important part in the game, warning you when shields fall, when a transporter has functioned, or when the enemy takes internal damage. There is great deal to pay attention to in the playing of SFC, and it is to the credit of the designers that they realized that a number of game events could be signaled aurally without necessarily impinging on the player's concentration or obscuring some other simultaneous information with a popup. As it is, playing SFC without headphones or speakers on functionally reduces a player's effectiveness at least 15% - THAT'S how important the sound effects are for the gameplay.
Secondly, the music is great. Full orchestral reprising the themes of any of the Star Trek series echo while you are configuring ships and missions, while in-game the music dynamically changes to address the circumstances. When you detect an unidentified warp signature, suspenseful minor chords put you on the edge of your seat. As an aside, it's worth noting that the 'suspense' soundtrack DOESN'T start until you detect something. I always hate games with dynamic sounds that are poorly coded, allowing you to unfairly anticipate enemy action by listening to the music. In SFC it's completely REactive, a good thing. When you've succeeded, a shift to major keys and exultant harmonies really help you feel like you've accomplished something.
The only (slight) detraction from the sound is that, while you have helpful voiceovers in the tutorial missions there is really no voice feedback in the actual game, probably having to do with time or CD space limitations. Not a big deal, but since we've all been raised on Nurse Chapel aka "COMPUTER", it would have been a nice touch, easily implemented (all the messages are currently text).
And, if you succeed at SFC, there should be no doubt that you have accomplished something. The operation of a starship and it's multitude of functions is a complex task, reflected by a rather complicated interface. A lot of beta testing and work was done to try to find the balance between a useful number of controls immediately visible, and clutter. By and large, they've succeeded, but it's still pretty complicated and was the source of a number of complaints about the demo (mainly because there was not much of a manual with the demo, leaving users frustrated trying to figure out what buttons did what). At the highest resolutions (1280 is available) those buttons get pretty tiny, though.
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Reviewed by Steve
Lieb
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