Star Trek: Birth of the Federation

Pros • Watching the 3D space battles • Lots of minor races • It's Star Trek baby! • Incredible diversity of ships • Playing online • Each major race has specialty techs that other empires can't get • Visually beautiful - each race has a very specific look • Tons of replayability	Cons • If the Borg show, 90% chance the game is over • Playing online on MSN • The only way to get a minor race to join you is to give them money • You think you've moved your ships but you haven't • Not enough beneficial random events • 2D galaxy map • What does that intelligence report mean???
Bottom Line If you're a Trekie and a fan of the Empire Building genre (Civ, MOO), then you'll likely spend a stupid amount of time playing botf, otherwise what in hell are you doing even reading this review? If this game didn't have the history of Star Trek behind it Having played Civilization II and Master of Orion II to death, it came as no surprise to me that I spent the first few hours making the inevitable comparisons between them and Birth of the Federation. I complained about what Microprose hadn't carried over from those games, but now, two weeks later, I can't seem to remember what those complaints were. When you really get down to the quick of it, it's the same sort of game with less planetary administration, many, many more races and the rich Star Trek universe to draw from. Minor races include: the Vulcans, Bajorans, Nausicaans, Tamarians, Sheliak, Betazoids, etc, etc, etc.

Universal conquest? Hey, sign me up.

You start the game by deciding your tech level, galaxy size, number of minor races, difficulty level; that sort of thing. Next comes the choice of which Galactic Power: the money grubbing Ferengi, the limp-wristed Federation, the scheming Romulans, the bloodthirsty Klingons, or the scum sucking Cardassians. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages (you can find out which by reading the manual) and each have certain technologies that only that specific race can acquire.

One of the things that makes this game different from others of this genre is the amount of minor races that you can encounter. Each one of these races has a special ability, and if you can get them to join your empire through bribery or conquest, then you can capitalize on it. Some are good for scientific research, others for espionage, others for ground combat, and so on.

Having played Civilization II and Master of Orion II to death, it came as no surprise to me that I spent the first few hours making the inevitable comparisons between them and Birth of the Federation. I complained about what Microprose hadn't carried over from those games, but now, two weeks later, I can't seem to remember what those complaints were. When you really get down to the quick of it, it's the same sort of game with less planetary administration, many, many more races and the rich Star Trek universe to draw from. Minor races include: the Vulcans, Bajorans, Nausicaans, Tamarians, Sheliak, Betazoids, etc, etc, etc.

The 5 Galactic Powers:

The United Federation of Planets
The game is skewed in favour of these goody-goody, oh-let's-be-nice-to-people pests. The only players who disagree with this are those who choose the Federation to the exclusion of the other four races. The Feds have around twice as many ships as everyone else does, much better tech, and almost every minor race loves them from the moment that they stick their prissy human faces into everyone else's business. Their one disadvantage is that almost every action that marks them as the aggressor sits unfavourably with their population.

The Ferengi Alliance
Strangely, lots of the minor races seem to like the Ferengi. The Ferengi get and give tons of money, so those that don't like them soon will. With all the money they make, they can buy a huge fleet and step all over your head in relatively short order.

The Cardassian Union
Not as tough when controlled by a human player. If the computer commands them and the difficulty level is hard or impossible, do whatever you can to wipe them out quickly. Once they get their intelligence network up and running, you'll be drowning in Cardassian spies and saboteurs regardless of what type of treaty you have with them. Even though the Cardassians have a kickin' ground attack, it's one of the harder races to play at the lower tech levels because just about everyone justifiably hates your spoon-headed guts. So, while the Federation and the Ferengi gobble up the minor races via love and cash, you might just need to get in there and bust some heads. If the minors didn't secretly want to be dominated, then they wouldn't have been born so near Cardie star space now would they?

The Romulan Star Empire
A powerful intelligence network combined with cloaking devices makes the Romulans remarkably dangerous whether played by computer or a real person. When running the Empire, it doesn't seem to matter what kind of political choice you make: war or friendship, bombardment or invasion, your people
invariably like your tactics.

The Klingon Empire
The only thing that upsets a Klingon is breaking your word or making peace. Other than that, kill away. The Klingons have powerful ground combat, 2 of their ships can cloak, even their non combat ships are armed, and a few of their ships have superior speed earlier in the game.

The diplomacy AI is the best I've seen so far, which really isn't saying much, but it does give you a sense of playing at real life politics. The AI for pre-battle tactics however, is truly miserable. There is no thought to what could overcome a specific threat. For example, I played a game where the Borg arrived and attacked my allies the Ferengi.

Did they cry, "Hey, we're being swallowed by the Borg, let's coordinate our fleets to meet in sector j6 and kick some cybernetic ass!" No, no! Instead they said, "help us against the Borg! Oh and by the way, we're
going to use our fleet, that combined with yours could defeat this threat, to instead invade a planet that poses no current danger to us. What we will do though, is send in a single ship at a time, watch it die and hope that you'll do something smart, because we certainly won't."

And speaking of the Borg, could they be any harder to kill? Personally, I like the excitement of having them show up, but unless you're at the highest level of technology and have about 25 ships in one fleet, you're not going to win. To make it worse for yourself, every time the Borg destroy all life in a system, (planetary defenses are frustratingly ineffective.), the species there is considered assimilated and another cube is created. So even if you do have a fleet that can kill one cube, expect to lose about 8 ships each time. If they assimilate faster than you can make ships, then the best tactic is to scream "The Borg are everywhere! We won't go back!" and turn off the game. Let's see them deal with that kind of power.

The best part of botf is when you go online and battle people who are just as devious and just a treacherous as you are. All the manipulation, forged and broken treaties, lies, backstabs, and betrayals can make this a really exciting game.

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