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LTTP: Star Trek Conquest - Oh shit the Borg!
bash
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So for whatever reason I can't search the forum and a search by hand didn't find anything so here we are: Star Trek Conquest. I happened to be at Fry's yesterday and was looking through Wii games. I'm kind of Link and Mario'd out at the moment and can't seem to beat Waylon Flies Again in AW - DoR so I picked up ST: Conquest for the bargain price of $30. Some people love it and others hate it, it's pretty fun for a Trek game and not badly priced at $30. The skirmish mode is fun when you want to blow some shit up in space without a big time investment.
You get to pick from six factions: Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Breen, and Dominion. You can field up to three fleets at any given time and each fleet can have up to seven ships. You can pick from a lightweight scout, a cruiser, and a dreadnaught. The scouts are fast but don't pack much in the way of weaponry while the dreadnoughts have guns mounted on top of guns. Nothing really surprising there. Each faction's ships have different combinations of weapons, hull strength, speed, and shields. You actually have to do a little fleet planning, a fleet of dreadnoughts isn't always the best configuration. Combat can be either automated or you can take command and fight it realtime. There's plenty of situations where the AI will completely fuck up what should be an easy victory so it often pays to play non-trivial battles out in realtime.
The goal of the game is to destroy all of the other factions. In campaign mode you can pick the number of opponents, their factions, and the difficulty. You can mode into linked systems in order to take them over. Most of the time they'll contain a small fleet of neutral ships like the Orions, Xindi, Ferengi, or Borg. Sometimes the neutral fleets are complete pushovers and other times they actually put up a decent fight. When you take over a system you can build starbases, mining colonies, or research stations. Mining colonies increase the amount of money a system outputs at the beginning of your turn and research stations give you upgrades and special weapons of which every faction has different options. What's interesting about starbases is they only allow you to buy new ships for an existing fleet, you can only create a fleet at your homeworld. This also means if you can cut off an enemy homeworld is can't field any new fleets, just potentially repair existing ones.
The realtime combat is nothing new and unless you've got a completely underpowered fleet taking on pretty much anybody is not terribly difficult. What's nice is the ability to move into a system and let the computer roll the battle, there's even instant battles for when you know the outcome e.g. dreadnoughts vs unarmed mining colony. There's a skirmish mode that lets you just play realtime sessions. As you play different factions in the campaign mode you can unlock new sets of ships for the skirmish mode.
The game's big failing is a complete lack of multiplayer. There's no multiplayer even in skirmish battles which is pretty weak. You work through campaign (there's no coherent campaign just a big conquest battle) to unlock ships and stages but you can only play against the computer. It would be really fun to play online and it seems perfectly suited for it. In the "campaign" mode once you get to a certain point finishing the rest of the map is boring, you don't need to conquer every system but it's pretty much assured that you're going to win and you just need to go though the motions. Also the game is Star Trek is name only. There's no Picard, Sisko, or Enterprise to be found. There's also little if anything specifically Star Trek about the setting other than the names of the factions and ship designs. You could replace the Trek ships with Star Wars or Babylon 5 or some non-licensed IP and the game would be identical.
Screenies:
Screens from the PS2 version
Screens from the Wii version
You get to pick from six factions: Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Breen, and Dominion. You can field up to three fleets at any given time and each fleet can have up to seven ships. You can pick from a lightweight scout, a cruiser, and a dreadnaught. The scouts are fast but don't pack much in the way of weaponry while the dreadnoughts have guns mounted on top of guns. Nothing really surprising there. Each faction's ships have different combinations of weapons, hull strength, speed, and shields. You actually have to do a little fleet planning, a fleet of dreadnoughts isn't always the best configuration. Combat can be either automated or you can take command and fight it realtime. There's plenty of situations where the AI will completely fuck up what should be an easy victory so it often pays to play non-trivial battles out in realtime.
The goal of the game is to destroy all of the other factions. In campaign mode you can pick the number of opponents, their factions, and the difficulty. You can mode into linked systems in order to take them over. Most of the time they'll contain a small fleet of neutral ships like the Orions, Xindi, Ferengi, or Borg. Sometimes the neutral fleets are complete pushovers and other times they actually put up a decent fight. When you take over a system you can build starbases, mining colonies, or research stations. Mining colonies increase the amount of money a system outputs at the beginning of your turn and research stations give you upgrades and special weapons of which every faction has different options. What's interesting about starbases is they only allow you to buy new ships for an existing fleet, you can only create a fleet at your homeworld. This also means if you can cut off an enemy homeworld is can't field any new fleets, just potentially repair existing ones.
The realtime combat is nothing new and unless you've got a completely underpowered fleet taking on pretty much anybody is not terribly difficult. What's nice is the ability to move into a system and let the computer roll the battle, there's even instant battles for when you know the outcome e.g. dreadnoughts vs unarmed mining colony. There's a skirmish mode that lets you just play realtime sessions. As you play different factions in the campaign mode you can unlock new sets of ships for the skirmish mode.
The game's big failing is a complete lack of multiplayer. There's no multiplayer even in skirmish battles which is pretty weak. You work through campaign (there's no coherent campaign just a big conquest battle) to unlock ships and stages but you can only play against the computer. It would be really fun to play online and it seems perfectly suited for it. In the "campaign" mode once you get to a certain point finishing the rest of the map is boring, you don't need to conquer every system but it's pretty much assured that you're going to win and you just need to go though the motions. Also the game is Star Trek is name only. There's no Picard, Sisko, or Enterprise to be found. There's also little if anything specifically Star Trek about the setting other than the names of the factions and ship designs. You could replace the Trek ships with Star Wars or Babylon 5 or some non-licensed IP and the game would be identical.
Screenies:
Screens from the PS2 version
Screens from the Wii version
bash on
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