Starfleet Command series – what did you think?

[T J]

Hi all! I pulled out these games recently after putting them away a long time ago after not really playing them, by them I mean:

Starfleet Command
Starfleet Command II: Empires at War
Starfleet Command II: Orion Pirates
Starfleet Command III

I was not a big fan of the 1st game but am planning on trying it again. I’m in the middle of EaW and it’s not bad. I will admit I’m not above cheating and made it possible to have all the prestige points I need (I hate playing a mission a dozen times).

SFC III was also cool and it was fun playing with TNG ships and the Fed cut scene at the end was pretty cool.

I’m wondering what everyone’s opinion of these games were. Any interesting tid bits about the games? Criticisms? I must admit I liked the design of the Unity base in III and the carrier ship in II along with the fighter squadrons.
:thumbsup:

 

[Unicron]

I only have the third game. It's good though I wish the conquest mode was better. It's too time consuming. I also like the Romulan ships, as they'd all look good onscreen.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I remember being absolutely blue balled waiting for the first Star Fleet Command game to come out, there was nothing like it on the market before that. I enjoyed SFC2 just as much when it came out, I never get around to trying the OP edition. But as much as I loved playing both of those games, I never really felt like I was playing Star Trek. Even having Sulu featured in the game couldn't hide the fact that this was Star Fleet Battles, not Star Trek in my honest opinion.

That is why I was so excited when SFC3 was announced, I followed development of that game right until the day it was released, I bought it the day it came out, it didn't take me very long to be disappointed it in. I won't go into everything that was wrong with that game, I'll just focus on the worst AI I've ever seen in a game, and the many many bugs. By he time they released a patch (an unofficial one BTW) to address the issues, I had lost all confidence in the game and had stopped playing it.

 

[Unicron]

Yeah, the AI does some dumb stuff. Romulans and Klingons always cloak at the start of a fight, which is stupid cause they can't fire back. The AI has no clue how to fight tactically in a lot of respects.

 

[CaptJimboJones]

I found all of them to be entertaining, especially SFCII:OP. Lotsa fun. But as has been stated, they were very un-Trek like in their absolute focus on ship combat. So they were a lot more like Star Fleet Battles than any episode of Star Trek you've ever seen.

 

[Unicron]

I'm not sure that's entirely true, insofar as the specific campaigns are concerned. Though of course, that's only SFC3.

 

[ChessMess]

I still remember the first time I fired up SFC and felt the elation of hearing the ships firing and shields dropping and all the awesome atmosphere of the game. Stuff we take for granted nowdays was really special back then!

 

[RookieBatman]

I only have SFC1, and it's had it's moments. I'm not a hardcore gamer, so all the intracacies of strategy pretty much go right over my head (I'm more into arcade-style games like Klingon Academy or Legacy), but it definitely did have some good qualities, and sometimes when I turned about and did an "alpha strike," it really felt like being in command of a starship.
I also spent a whole lot of time effort to mod the ship models so that the different ship classes would all have accurate models to reflect different eras. This improved the game a lot for me, as I'm a much bigger fan of the TOS era than the movie-style ships. But ultimately, it's doing the same thing over and over again, and I think when I stopped playing it, it was really because I realized I was just not that good at it.

 

[LiChiu]

I have played the third one and loved it. I hope they make another someday since Legacy was a flop.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Having grown up playing table-top (or more appropriately, FLOOR-TOP) games... Not even the Amarillo stuff, I'm talking the "Starfleet Battle Manual" that FAR preceeded that, where you didn't have a hex grid or anything of that sort!.. well, playing that game felt exactly like the old game had, except for no need for grease pencils, yardsticks, and little coils of fishing line...

 

[Saturn0660]

I have II. It's not on the harddrive right now.. But, i've changed the specs on the battle ship. gave it all P-4's FX arc.. Loaded to the hilt with torps. Then you can alpha strike and kill in one salvo..

 

[nx1701g]

Unicron said:
Yeah, the AI does some dumb stuff. Romulans and Klingons always cloak at the start of a fight, which is stupid cause they can't fire back. The AI has no clue how to fight tactically in a lot of respects.

Making matters worse if you ran a cloak scan the moment that the level started you knew exactly where they were when cloaked so you could to an Alpha Strike while their shields were down.

Then again I enjoyed it because I had a Sovereign before I think the third official level doing that.

 

[MANT!]

As a player of Starfleet Battles I loved the first 3..was actually under-whelmed by SFC3 ( the simplified controls made me batty)...but as a series they were great...and I never cheated them..it was too fun winning the levels honestly...

 

[MIB]

Starfleet Command was a decent game, but was held back from being truely legendary by greedy and inept marketing, on the part of Interplay. Interplay continually insisted on releasing the games long before they were actually finished. This, of course, turned off alot of people to the franchise. The only saving grace was that the games followed the more obscure "Starfleet Battles" universe which made it stand out a bit more. But even that was taken away when the SFC franchise was handed over to Activision.