Star Trek Birth of the Federation

[Tribble]

So I recently put one of my old computers back together, and decided to give this game a try. Alas, it's been 10+ years since I last played it, and I'm a little rusty.

If I remember correctly, the 5 groups you could be are the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Federation, the Klingons and the Ferengi (yes, really!).

Which would be a good one to start playing with? Does anybody have any good tips/strategies?

[Enigma]

I really liked that game. It would be nice if they'd update it.

[Iroscato]

Sounds interesting. I might have a l'il look myself...

[Tribble]

Well so far I started and advanced game on normal as the Romulans. My first (re)impression is that they are pretty overpowered. All their warships can cloak, which gives them a good first strike, and their intelligence forces are only matched by the Cardassians.

That being said, it's been an interesting game for far. The Klingons decided to attack the Cardassians right off the bat and were curbstomping them. The Ferengi and the Federation didn't like that one bit, so they declared war on the Klingons and attacked them. Not wanting to be left out of the action, I eventually declared war on the Federation and the Ferengi in order to help the Klingons. With their combined fleet of 30+ warships it would have been a really good fight, but they made the mistake of splitting up to attack two different Klingon colonies. This let me battle them in two separate engagements and pretty much slaughter them all.

Now I'm basically the dominant military power in the galaxy, as everyone else's main fleets have been blown to bits. Hopefully the Borg won't decide to make an appearance during this orgy of destruction because if I remember correctly they are really nasty.

[Darth Tanner]

Cloak is a really major advantage. If you have sufficient force you can usually end the battle in the first round and take no damage. The diplomacy seemed broken to me, even the Federation would end up aggressively hostile in the end despite no provocation.

I seem to remember there was a brilliant mod that replaced the Ferengi with the Dominion.

Good memories... does it work on modern PCs? I fancy reliving the good old times.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Didn't this game have a massive memory leak? I remember I had a PC with 512mb of RAM at the time and it used it all up after an hour -turns would take 2 minutes to process!

[Tribble]

...... So, any tips? lol

[Iroscato]

Yeah, I downloaded it and had a look. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing, and there doesn't seem to be a built-in manual. Maybe it's just from before my time?

[montypython]

Yeah, I downloaded it and had a look. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing, and there doesn't seem to be a built-in manual. Maybe it's just from before my time?

The game plays like a simplified version of Master of Orion, since it uses a variant of that game's engine with a Star Trek graphical wrapper on it.

[Darth Tanner]

Yeah, I downloaded it and had a look. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing, and there doesn't seem to be a built-in manual. Maybe it's just from before my time?

It from the day and age when the manual was printed and came in the box.

[Tribble]

Well as I suspected the Borg are quite nasty, far more TNG than Voyager. Fleets are required to take down a single Cube, and so far the best tactic seems to be to ram the damn thing with as many ships as possible and hope that they'll take the Cube with them.

Which is to my liking of course, I'm glad to have a game where the Borg are actually a threat! Because if you don't deal with them quickly, not only will they totally destroy every civilization in their path, they seem to spawn even more Cubes.

[Steve]

Ah, good times with that game. I still have the ship database mod program for it too. I used it to slash the building and maintenance costs of every ship and alter the weapon and defense stats to make battles actually last, to allow everyone to have larger fleets, and to make starbases actual threats.

Oh, and, I gave the [i}Defiant[/i] and Galaxy-X cloaks.

I think my record was a fight of 60+ UFP ships versus 100+ Cardassians. My fleet won because despite the numerical disadvantage, I had more heavy ships and I had better crews.

And yeah, I remember that horrible memory leak.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I love that game, consensus is that the Romulans are the easiest to play as because of their cloak advantage- where possible in a new game I'd avoid starting anywhere near them because of that. I notice that they get curb stomped by the other AI powers more often than not.

There is a config file you can alter that disables the Borg from appearing if you have random events turned on, since the AI simply has no clue how to handle a Borg cube.

If I had one tip, it's this: Starbases are awesome. Not because of how powerful they are, but because the AI always targets them first. Given that it takes most of them several turns to get close enough to inflict any damage on the base, your own ships are able to wade in and hit them hard. I've laid waste to many, many fleets far bigger than mine by having my heavies charge in and tear the attackers a new one as they're trying to reach my starbase

Some trivia- the Federation Heavy Cruiser (Gal-X class) actually has a lower maintenance cost than the standard Command Cruiser (Galaxy) that it's based on, when it outperforms it in every way. Regardless of which race I play as, I'd always crank out the battleships/hvy cruisers instead of fast attack ships! And the Defiants- late to arrive because of their high tech level, they're easily the best of their type in the game and no other race has an equivalent. Unless you count the Klingon K'vort, since it fills a similar role but with the benefit of a cloaking device- a handful can slaughter a group of Cardassian destroyers...

Fundamental tips- of course colonise all systems in your space, but prioritise those with high max populations, and those with dilithium first. In general, have systems with high populations dedicated to ship production since their higher industrial capacity means they can build faster, while those with less are best used for intel & research generation.

[Patroklos]

Man I just happened to dust this off a few weeks ago as well, but as mentioned the memory leak has always kept me from enjoying it to its fullest since I role play which means generally not curb stomping factions when I can. I have never finished a game.

Tip: Bribe nearby minor races into max relationship points to prevent them from being poached by another faction and then let them stay independant for at least the first few dozen turns. They will will upgrade themselves generally much further along than your at large empire is and then when you get them via membership treaty you will have a fully developed system with generally some sort of facility class one or two levels higher than yours without you having to build them yourself. You also get whatever fleet then have in cases like the Vulcans which could be quite a few reasonably powerful vessels.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I've always found minor race vessels to be incredibly weak compared to whichever empire I control. 2 things to bear in mind with minor races- build a comm grid as soon as they join you to make it much harder for ememies to lure them away. And take advantage of when you sabotage relations between a race and the empire it's joined- if your standing with them is good enough there's a strong chance of getting them to defect and joining you.

Once or twice I've had races that have joined me suddenly defect to the enemy despite having max relations and a comm grid- in such cases I simply send in the troops and bring them back into line This happend with the mintakans- lucky I had a couple command ships and a troop transport nearby and quickly retook the system. I got lucky as I'd spent many many turns building orbital batteries, and had they thought to route power to them I wouldn't have had a chance For some reason though they scrapped all the factories I'd built there.

Initially I picked vendetta games but quickly switched to domination. I do have fond memories of playing as the Cardies and the Klingons and finding the galaxy carved up with those 2 empires controlling half each- once when I was playing as the Cardassians and once as the Klingons.

Of course while we had a nonagression treaty it was only a matter of time before one of us declared war and each time I'd build up my forces for the final push Generally though I'd devote resources to building up infrastructure before huge fleets, which would pay off later in the game when it would be total war and I could build ships faster. My fleets were always composed of small numbers of big ships, not the other way round

The memory leak was always a problem with space battles, the first turn with big fleets was always a chug fest no matter how powerful my PC was.

One thing I never figured out- once you research past level 10 and hit future tech, does that actually have any benefit? Whenever I've gotten to that point I've always switched my systems over to intel.