Starfleet Command III

I picked up this little gem at the weekend, after Haegemonia had fuelled my thirst for more space based gaming. Now I know it is a Star Trek game. And I'm not a big Star Trek fan (in all its forms). But what drew me to the game was the idea of piloting a large spaceship down at the combat level. 'Heg' had given me the Homeworld buzz of commanding a whole fleet - SFC3 seemed to promise me the option of zooming in to a single space hulk and commanding the battle from there. It's a fairly involved procedure commanding a ship in this Next Gen combat simulator. Luckily the quite lengthy tutorials, voiced by Picard himself, are very well paced to give you a fighting chance. Having said that some of the tutorials take a while before you acquire the knowledge and dexterity to command one of these babies. ', 'It's definitely bewildering to begin with, especially if you haven't tasted any of the Starfleet games before. And you seem to have to practice certain manoeuvres a bit before you get a feel for them. The best thing about the game is the way combat is a slow paced but very strategic affair. Turning these lumbering starships is a skill in itself. Each ship has four shields, one either side, one fore and one aft. To do any damage at all to an enemy you first need to take down at least one of these shields (and they regenerate at a given rate - depending on the quality of the shield and the power assigned to them). Once you've punched a whole in a shield, which takes a while since you've got to hit the same shield with many salvos to disable it, you can begin to do hull damage. If you get in close enough to the ship with the gaping shield wound, then you can transport a sabotage party across to try and take out key ship systems (which you specify), or you can attempt to send a whole group of marines across to take over the ship. This is a tricky operation to pull off though, because up close and personal is where you can also take damage easily, and those shields are regenerating all the time, so you won't be able to transport any more troops over unless you keep the wound open. You have two common weapon types at your disposal, beams and torpedoes, primary and heavy respectively. Each weapon mounted on your ship has a firing arc, and requires a considerable charge up time. You have to time your engine and retro thrusts to keep your ship (and its weapons arcs) focussed on the achilles heel. This takes quite a bit of skill to achieve as a cohesive manoeuvre. You have a crew of officers who start out with little experience - but the more victorious you are, the better they become. After each victory, you are awarded prestige points which you can use to refit your ship with more weapons, better versions or indeed buy another ship class altogether. You can hire even better officers if you have the prestige spare.

Other combat devices at your disposal are shuttles, mines and tractor beams. You can launch shuttles with several mission objectives, to defend, to attack, to snipe, to distract - they provide you with a small decoy or a small additional amount of firepower. You can purchase mines, and lay them in combat as a defensive mechanism whilst fleeing to recharge your shields - or you can lay them in the midst of a battle to provide additional damage. You can use tractor beams to hold your prey preventing them from turning their damaged shield side away from your guns, you prevent them from engaging their warp drive, and the most effective use it for one ship to hold the enemy in place whilst another pounds the living daylights out of its vulnerable side.

There are other speciality devices that allow you to use shield inversion and some tricks that are race specific (like the Borg cutting lasers, and the klingons and romulans cloaking device). You start the single player game playing as a Klingon, and your flighty but weak shielded Bird of Prey requires a cloaked hit and run tactic. Whilst cloaked you cannot engage in combat and your shields are down, immediately after uncloaking there is a small delay when your shields and weapons are recovering - so are very vulnerable. Timing of your un-cloaking is key to bringing down a much larger Federation vessel.

The slow paced tactical battle unfolds over quite a long period of time, you have to employ all the advantageous mechanisms you have at your disposal to come through it with a ship in tact. Last night, for a laugh, I tried the Multiplayer Campaign (or as its known the Dynaverse). It's basically the same sort of game as the single player one - however most of the AI ships in the single player game are replaced with online players running through their own campaign. A bit like Battle.net, in that your dynaverse campaign is stored (or at least is tied up) on their server. You need a Gamespy account to create a character in the Dynaverse. I went in as a fresh Klingon (mainly because I'd started to get the hang of the Klingon cloak, warp, uncloak, attack strategy.

The world map is a large hex map and you move through the world from your races starports, perhaps running a single mission against AI opponents, refitting as necessary. But, the big plus is that you can form Fleets with other players. The fleet moves as one, and you can then start to explore deeper into enemy territory (federation, romulan and the borg collective). I teamed up with two other Klingons warriors, both a little higher up in terms of prestige and ship development, and we scoured a Federation space lane, and initiated attacks on some borg vessels. The world map is essentially a hex board, where you move around, with an IRC chat client below it - where you can discuss with all your races players (in a specific Klingon channel) or bad-mouth the other races in the general channel. So you team up, move around until the Leader finds a quadrant where theres some action, and then you are taken into the battle. Suddenly all your single player tactics seem to change. Cloaking was not really necessary as I often found myself in the position of tail gater. I would fly round the back of the enemy, whilst they were busy with my other fleet members, and I would eat away at their weaker back shields. Once through all ships could begin transporting troops and I could shift back and forth laying salvo after salvo of torp and beam into the hull of the ship. Admittedly I would have been toast if it were not for the other two players constantly engaging the enemy in waves. Often tractor beaming him into position so I could come about easy enough to lay a torp smack on. Now, I think I had an easy ride last night, because I was with two players who seemed to understand the mechanics of their ships and it felt a bit like my newbie bird of prey was being powerlevelled. But I can see how a large force could be established and if the opposition did not rally together all of their ships - the Dynaverse could fall after a few massive and lengthy major battles.

What would be interesting would be to affect a co-ordinated effort by a single group to enter a Dynaverse and spend their time building an efficient killing fleet that could stomp over all the opposition. Would take a bit of doing, which is why Dynaverses don't fall that often, theres always a constant niggling of each others boundaries. But I saw some clanned players there, Klingon High Council or something. Overall, I didn't expect to enjoy the online game much - but even though map wandering is a bit tedious, the actual combat is very good - there were a number of head to head players who spent their time chasing each other and fighting it out, and then brag flooding the general channel. But on the whole, it was very enjoyable. I think its a much more tactical piloting game based on specific science fiction mechanics pulled out of the Star Trek universe - and as such the battle is very involving, much more so than the likes of Earth and Beyond.