Intelligent Game Reviews

What seems like forever ago now MicroProse released a little “conquer the universe” game called Master or Orion. Sort of a Civilization in space, it had a style and appeal of it’s own and set the benchmark for turn-based grand space strategy games. So when MicroProse announced that they would be creating a space strategy game based on the Star Trek: The Next Generation license I was hopeful that the seemingly interminable string of terrible Star Trek licensed computer games would come to an end.

Basics of Play

Birth of the Federation allows you to play the leader of one of five different Star Trek governments: the Federation, Klingon Empire, Cardassians, Ferengi and the Romulans. As the game begins you control your home world, a scout ship and a colony ship. You can see a small amount of the galaxy around you and it is up to you to explore the area and lead your group to ultimate victory by either exterminating your two biggest foes or by controlling 2/3 of the galaxy directly or with an ally.

Each planetary system can have multiple planets, but you treat the system as a whole. Colony ships can terraform planets to make them suitable for colonization. Your ships can explore all over, but only within a certain range of a base. This makes building outposts important to extend your range, and they also serve as defensive installations.

You can set the starting technology level for each race independently, there are five levels, and you can also determine the galaxy shape and size. The three sizes are not as different as you may think, but it does impact the game.

In addition to the major races, a wide variety of races that were encountered in the television show are included, such as the Mintakans or Bentic. These races control a single planet but otherwise function much like a major race. You can conquer them, make alliances with them, and so forth. You can choose to play without them if you want, or add more or less based on a pre-game preference.

Game play is similar in many respects to other examples of the breed. You control your ships to move around the galaxy, direct research and construction of your systems, negotiate treaties and alliances with other races and wage war either directly or through espionage.

Research and Technology

Research is focused in several areas and you can adjust how much of your science “output” goes into each area like in Master of Orion. Research breakthroughs will generally yield either a new type of building you can construct, and upgrade to an existing basic structure or upgrade your weapons or hull types.

The upgrades to structures seem like a neat idea at first, but in practice they make for a lot of tedium. Upgrades allow each worker assigned to a structure to produce more food, energy, manufacturing, science or espionage each turn. But you don’t upgrade for free. You have to upgrade all of your structures by building the upgrade. The more buildings of a type you have the longer it takes to upgrade. If you let your AI “auto build” structures for you to reduce the amount of management you’ll often find that upgrades take forever. That’s because the AI will build unreasonable numbers of structures and never tears them down. So you might have a planet with 20 “labor units” and 20 buildings of each type, all level 1 even though you have had level 4 buildings for eons. So you end up having to tear down a bunch of buildings in order to save costs when upgrading. Which begs the question, why let the AI build anything. Ah, more tedium, good.

Command and Control

Controlling the game is one of the other things that nearly drains any enjoyment from the experience of playing. The interface is among the most flawed I have ever seen. Doing anything requires an inordinate number of clicks of the mouse and there are virtually none of the convenience features of modern “empire management” types of games. For example, while you can get a summary screen showing what your systems are building, their morale, etc. you cannot adjust anything from it. You have to double click a system to bring up it’s window, click a few more times on that and then bring up the summary again to edit the next one! The entire interface is just not streamlined enough. And that makes the micro-management needed to control things even more serious a problem.

Aside from the annoying design flaws that crippled the game there are also serious stability issues. The game crashed to the desktop on several occasions and in mid game was prone to an annoying jumpy mouse behavior. This made controlling the already awkward interface impossible. Exiting and restarting the game brought some relief, but it occurred with annoying regularity. Pretty clearly based upon reports in various newsgroups and in other sources this was not just my system acting up either. It makes you wonder, why was the game rushed out in this condition?

The Tactical Combat System

When units of two races occupy the same square on the map combat may ensue. If it does you can allow the game to resolve it automatically or control the tactical combat screen yourself. The interface is a quasi-3D look at your ships. You can rotate camera angles to view the action and can issue tactical orders for each ship. These include things like “Charge” or “Encircle”. The various tactics have a bit of a rock-paper-scissors feel since one tactic is best against another enemy tactic. At least in theory.

In practice I found the battles gave so little control to the player in any real terms, despite the turn based nature of them, that it was just another way to slow down the already glacial pace of play by the middle game. For each turn you tell your ships what to do and who to do it to, and then click the “Turn” button and watch ships fly around, fire their weapons and blow things up. It’s neat the first few times, and it can look quite nifty for brief moments. But really there isn’t enough depth or eye candy to hold your interest and after the first game or so most people are pretty likely to let the combat be resolved automatically.

The AI

At first I thought that the AI in Birth of the Federation was excellent. I got my hat handed to me on the simplest setting four games in a row. What I came to realize is that the other major races do a strong job at the outset of expanding and building. But they can’t keep it up, not in the least. If you can figure out the “tricks” to early success the AI turns into an unworthy opponent.

To make matters worse, random events will occur seemingly just to annoy you. The Borg will show up to smash your fleet, your planets will get messed up with comets hitting them, or what have you. This happens with amazing frequency, especially if you are “winning.” This does slow down your inevitable victory, but it made me mad. Rather than make the AI competent (and you can tell it isn’t if you watch how the “Auto Build” AI works for your own planets!) the game designers resorted to trickery to throw obstacles in your way.

Diplomacy

The diplomacy system might have been the best part of the game. But the fickle AI players are maddening. They enjoy hating you, no matter what you do, and will break treaties over and over. While this is especially true of the Cardassians and Ferengi who have no honor whatsoever, you’ll even witness the Federation demanding things and then launching an all out attack on you when you have done nothing to them or their allies. And while as the player fighting with other people as the Federation is a quick way to watch the morale of your planets sink into the gutter, it seems to have little or no impact on the AI players.

Graphics, Sounds, etc.

There is no question that the folks at MicroProse have done a stunning job on the graphical look of Birth of the Federation. The distinctiv
e interface for each race helps to add to the game and really does evoke the feel of the various races from the television show. Sound is also customized by race with good voice acting and music appropriate to each.

The main map is colorful and nice looking, although the zoom levels leave something to be desired. In the large size zoom, especially with a large galaxy, things are impossible to manage. In the small zoom you can see so little that it is only adequate at the beginning of the game.

At first blush the manual seems pretty complete, but that doesn’t hold up after the first bit of play. There is no hard copy tutorial for example, you have to read it online or print it out yourself from the Adobe Acrobat files. While the printed manual is lengthy, 156 pages, it is high on picture and graphical content and low on information. My pet bugaboo of the game, morale, is explained in a terse two paragraphs that raise far more questions than they answer for example.

The Verdict

In the end Birth of the Federation is yet another disappointment for fans of Star Trek. While the game has some good ideas and could have really been fun, the difficult to use interface, bugs, and overwhelming need to micro-manage every last detail in order to win the game seriously detract. The bottom line is that it’s about as good as Star Wars: Rebellion, which is a step up in the Star Wars/Star Trek relative comparison but is in itself very faint praise indeed.

Birth of the Federation Screenshots

The interface looks great, but is awkward to use.	Micro-management is vital to optimizing your empire’s growth. The auto build feature is a recipe for disaster.
The tactical combat system is weak at best, better just to shut it off.	While diplomacy is, in theory, a big part of the game, the AI opponents are fickle and completely inconsistent in their behavior.

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