MCLAUGHLIN: True, you do not have the same diplomatic list options that the computer opponents have (remember Colonization, a Sid Meier Microprose game). If you hit them hard, however, they will sometimes offer to give up disputed territories. You can, of course, offer at any time to give them control over the disputed territories – which is a good way to make them like you a whole lot more.

ARNESEN: Oh I don't deny that. I just wish I could threaten a little like I can in Sid Meier's game. Makes it personal. While on diplomacy, why, in my last game, can't I seem to recruit certain planets that are independent? They don't even show up on my diplomacy screen once I have discovered them. Also, once I liberate a planet, it usually either joins the Federation or just sits there and sends them a happy message. I cannot form any deals with these planets other than to just offer them gifts or declare war.

MCLAUGHLIN: This is one of the unique features of this game. Just as in the Star Trek universe (and in the real world), there are people who just do NOT want to be your friends, no matter how much you give them. To quote an old movie star, "Dahlingk, I yust vant to be alone."

Certain planets are independent and just damn well want to stay that way (Like Switzerland or parts of Oregon).

Fortunately you can tell these apart from those who might be induced to join you, as most of the diplomatic options are blanked out for these systems. They will be your friends if you fight their hereditary enemies; otherwise, they want nothing to do with you. Your options basically are either bribe them and declare war on their enemy or conquer them. Of course, they treat the computer the same way – basically they are Switzerland-like buffers. Most are very expensive to take out, and their presence means you can't win the game just by bribing all the minors.

ARNESEN: If I liberate them afterwards, I can't even OFFER them a alliance, or non-aggression, etc. Just bribe and war, basically. This only happens later in the games to some conquered planets.

MCLAUGHLIN: That is the difference between "liberating" a planet and conquering it? Sort of like what happened when we "liberated" France in World War II. See how nice De Gaulle was to us? Liberate only means the locals will help take the system away from the enemy – then they are eager for you to leave. (Again, just think "Frogs in Space." Oops, sorry about that, I meant "French in Space.")

ARNESEN: Late in the game, the turns take WAY too long on the largest galaxy size. I have a fun game going but I cannot stand how long it takes to do turns (sometimes a minute or more on a 300MHz Pentium with 64M of RAM with dedicated swap partition). Also, we all know about the INCREDIBLY horrific problem with mouse slow-down. If I try to go around a large area I control, the scrolling is intensely slow. I want to be able to page up or page down to jump to the next set of planets – in essence to page either right, left, up, or down an entire set of star systems at a time. Also the large map is UNUSABLE to select fleets effectively.

MCLAUGHLIN: On the slowness later on, my current game is at turn 313 and it still moves pretty well – provided I save and reboot every 20 turns or more. There is a known memory leak (which I note in the review). You MUST reboot your system every 50 turns or so at the beginning, and every 20 turns or so later on or (a) it will slow down and get mouse-buggy or (b) your system will lock up – this is one of those memory leaks that seize memory.

As for the map, what I do is click to the large map, move the cursor to the part of the map I want to look at, click it, and then click back to the small map. The new small map centers there.

I have also found that if you group your fleets or send long-range moves to consolidate new ships into new fleets, you do not need to make as many moves. The same goes for the systems: after the first 30 or 40 turns, I limit myself to going to the individual systems every fifth or tenth turn to tweak things; a few turns less of micro-management does not make that much difference in a game of this size.

ARNESEN: No I just mean the turns, not just the mouse problem. Even after a reboot, the turns take for freaking ever in the late game in the largest galaxy setting. Made me give up my current game where I was kicking butt as the Feds. As for clicking on the big map and then back to the small map, it is time-consuming and annoying. Sorry, this part of the interface sucks.

Also, let me name my fleets and ships. It is very frustrating to keep fleets coordinated. I want to put a fleet near Klingon space and call them "Klingon Border Patrol" and forget them. What would also help, is

with that, a fleet list that I can double-click on and it take me to that fleet on the galactic map.

MCLAUGHLIN: As to letting us name fleets: amen. I too wish it were so (see, I am not a Microprose toady in disguise). I tend to keep just a few big fleets for assault ops and then set some small squadrons on intercept and leave them there.

ARNESEN: There should be more penalties for declaring war by enemies and breaking treaties. True, many of the races in Star Trek are incredibly belligerent, but treaties seem to mean next to nothing. In Civilization II and Alpha Centauri enemy civilizations would intensely distrust folks who broke treaties.

MCLAUGHLIN: As for the break treaty thing, it depends who you play. As the Feds, if I break a treaty, all hell breaks loose at home. I also notice my diplomatic ratings go way down with minors and other majors. On the other hand, if I am Cardassian, Klingon or Romulan, it seems to make little difference. Like the Harkonnen of a different (Dune) universe, nobody seems to believe us anyway.

ARNESEN: To a point, but I am talking about a problem with other races. Civilization, Civilization II, and Alpha Centauri do a VERY good job of handling prestige with other powers. This game doesn't.

MCLAUGHLIN: I disagree, at least from a Federation point of view. I find I have to wait for them to break a treaty and declare war or else lose a lot of my investments at home and with the minor and major races.

ARNESEN: I would really like to be able to design custom ships. I doubt this will happen but it GREATLY cheapens the game.

MCLAUGHLIN: I am not upset by the inability to customize ships. I have found that such routines usually screw up the game (like in the latest Civilization) because invariably I create the wrong kind of ship, and waste a lot of time and resources on doing it.

Besides, there are SO MANY different types of vessel in this game, and each race has their own, that I would no more screw around with this than I would seek to build my own battlecruisers in a World War II game. Part of the fun of this game is that it is the Star Trek universe and not "Mark McLaughlin's Space House of Fun." I’ve played those kinds of games. Now I want to play Star Fleet.

ARNESEN: Yeah, but they should include an option. If I want to play standard Star Fleet (which I do), fine. But as a former Star Fleet Battles junkie, I like tinkering with spare parts.

MCLAUGHLIN: As for naming ships and designing them, my feeling is "oh God no, not again." Been there, done that. What I like about this game is that I am in the Star Trek universe with Star Trek ships. Maybe it is because I am an old Trekkie and an old Star Fleet Battles player, but I know and like using the real ships (just like I prefer naval games with real ships rather than customized ones).

By the way, each minor also has its own kind of ships, although you can not build more of theirs – which is a shame; once you get a shipyard there, you can only build your own ships, not more Talorian cruisers etc.

ARNESEN: Yes and I love this feature. I just wish you could have them build them at their planet AFTER you acquire them.

Also, the tech chart is, well, just plain boring and too linear, with no special advances. There are no "cool" technologies ala Master of Orion and Master of Orion II, and I think part of this can go down to the vanilla feel of the ships and fleets that you cannot redesign or rename.

MCLAUGHLIN: Tech is pretty straightforward, but each race does have five or six specific things (some of them are really neat, like the Cardassians’ forced labor camps that gain productivity at the cost of morale). Even the minors can each build one unique thing. True, no "cool" Master of Orion stuff, but also no "magic foozball win the game in one shot" kind of stuff like we find in, say, Heroes of Might and Magic (which I stopped playing once the computer began getting all kinds of things I could never get). The playing field here is a pretty level one.

ARNESEN: Yeah, but unfortunately a boring one. The only thing I care about is getting to starbase tech.

Speaking of that, why does it take SO LONG to build starbases? I can have extremely powerful Galaxy-class starships cruising around but NO starbases, just outposts to man my outer regions. This is very outside of the Star Trek feel for the game. You can't build them earlier on. I have like fleets of Galaxy-class ships cruising everywhere and I can't build a Starbase? Makes no sense, Star-Trek-wise.

MCLAUGHLIN: I’m not sure what you mean about long time to build starbases. Do you mean time to get the technology or what? If you have the tech (which you can START the game with) and send TRAINED transports, they build pretty quickly. If you start the game from the bottom line (one system, level one tech), it will take a hundred turns to get the technology, but you do not need to do that. You can jump-start the game with two or three systems and level three, five or even eight tech. The game plays the same.

As for actually building the base once you have the tech, the MORE TRAINED transports you send, and the better trained they are, the faster they get built.

ARNESEN: The manual should have been thicker and had much more info on tactical battles. Trial and error help here, but understanding which tactics are better versus what is a hard road to hoe in this game.

MCLAUGHLIN: As to tactics, I feel they are kind of self-explanatory but, yeah, I would like to know which rock-paper-scissors combo is best. The explanation for each tactic on the screen gives you some input, but it really is kind of intuitive – remember, the faster ships can zip ahead of the big boys, which means they will draw fire and give the big boys time to get into position.

ARNESEN: Yeah, but I wish they would have given a more advanced tutorial on this. After a while I am getting the feel, but sometimes some of my combat sequences make little sense.

MCLAUGHLIN: Is this game perfect? No. It is still, however, for my money, the best of its kind out there. It has boldly gone where others have gone before, and has gone there in style.

ARNESEN: Nope and I agree with you. The game is fun and I like it but it is a FAR cry from Alpha Centauri or Imperialism II. The Star Trek license and feel boost this game tremendously. One thing they did a VERY good job of is making each race FEEL different.

++++INTRUDER ALERT. WARNING. INTRUDER ALERT +++++++

At this point an intruder was detected on deck nine. He left this message in the computer and then beamed out. (Here are some additional comments from that alien intruder, Scott Jennings.)

JENNINGS: Some problems I encountered:

(1) Horribly inadequate game manual - most of the game rules are hidden in a PDF "tutorial" on disk or worse yet, in the inevitable "Official Strategy Guide" (which is actually pretty decent, but I resent shelling out another $20 for what is essentially the game's rulebook)

(2) Memory leak that makes the game unplayable after turn 150 or so – Microprose promises a patch but it should have never shipped with this.

(3) Internet play broken.

(4) Interface is clumsy at times; only two zoom levels available: too close and too far.

(5) The advertised "Borg invasion" is actually a random event and often happens when players have no hope of repelling it; unless you have a fleet of 30+ advanced ships handy and not busy elsewhere, you've lost the game.

Overall it does have some nice features to it; the tactical engine is pretty decent, and the game does a good job of reproducing the "look and feel" of the Trek universe. It's a long way off from "best space strategy game ever," though, and I have to wonder why Microprose didn't just modify the

Master of Orion II engine with Trek races and ships; it would have been a MUCH better game.

MCLAUGHLIN: I can't argue with the Borg or Internet comments. Some of the other random events are very hard to beat (although you can usually outrun or outlast them. Like your relatives who drop in unannounced in the summer, if you ignore them eventually they get bored and leave).

As for the manuals, as my review on The Wargamer notes, everything you need is on the disk - you just need to find it (and don't waste the $19.95 on the book).

As for which is the best space game, it depends on your point of view. Ian Trout of SSG had a lovely game in Reach for the Stars, which is now being re-done. Still, of all the Star Trek games and of all the space games I have ever played on the computer, this one wins hands down.

Is it perfect? No. But it is the best this old Trekkie has ever seen.

Read the Star Trek: Birth of The Federation review.

Read other interesting articles.

Mark McLaughlin is a free-lance ghost writer in the field of international affairs. He is the author of two history books and the designer of twelve published boardgames, including the Avalon Hill classics War and Peace and Princess Ryan's Star Marines. (As well as Viceroys and Columbus for Task Force Games). A beta-tester and computer columnist for more than twenty years, he also collects, paints and plays miniatures (historical and science fiction). Mark is married, has two children and lives in Connecticut. He is an unabashed, unapologetic fan of Christopher Columbus, who has always been one of his personal heroes.

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