Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Volume II: Empires at War

by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• New Metaverse campaign mode allows missions to have greater context, flexibility, and impact on fate of your empire
• Each of original 6 races has new ships--over 1,000 total variants
• 2 new races: Mirak Star League and Interstellar Concordium
• New fleet interface allows players to monitor target and control entire fleet as one ship easily
• Several multiplayer gaming options, including online Metaverse campaign

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005BVN7
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: November 14, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,208 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Developer

This sequel to the award-winning Star Trek: Starfleet Command opens up whole new vistas of adventure with new races, new ships, and the all-new Dynaverse II. Enter a boundless universe where players from across the globe struggle for control of the galaxy, one sector at a time. A continuous online matching system reflects the current state of the campaign as eight races battle for dominance. Choose your species, choose your ships, and choose your friends wisely!

Product Description

Star Trek fans and strategy gamers loved the mighty starship combat in the original Starfleet Command. Interplay listened to gamers' cries for a sequel and made the all-new Starfleet Command II: Empires at War look better, play better, and overall even more impressive than the original. The single-player campaign is now called Metaverse, which comes from the term metagame, meaning game within a game. Each campaign has about 60 individual missions that feature greater context, flexibility, and impact on the fate of your empire. Metaverse is available for online play. There are two new races in addition to the original six: the savage Mirak Star League and the Interstellar Concordium, which aims to enforce peace at any cost. New ships are available, including escort vessels, patrol craft, and fighters, bringing the total variants to more than 1,000. A hex-based quadrant system now regulates movement, increasing the map resolution and the number of sectors. A new fleet interface makes for easy target monitoring and allows fleets to operate as a single unit or for individual ships to move autonomously.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could be Better, April 23, 2003

By 

Yu-jin Chia "Yu-Jin Chia" (Cupertino, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Volume II: Empires at War (CD-ROM)

This is one of those games that could really be great, if but for a few serious disappointments. While I would never call myself a Star Trek fanatic, I did enjoy this game... for a while, at least. It is generally a decent game, but has a steep learning curve and can be extremely frustrating at times.

The first and most obvious problem with the game is bugs. LOADS of bugs, and many of them very serious (i.e. game breaking). Fortunately, the SFC 2 community has been working to address these problems, and is still active and helpful. If you get the game, definitely get the latest patch. It will save you a great deal of pain.

About that learning curve- only a Trekkie who wants to push every one of those funny colored lights on the TV show would ever appreciate an interface like this. There are enough buttons to make starting the game discouraging for beginners, though the tutorials do a relatively good job of explaining things. In single play you can also pause to issue orders, but for multiplay you really have to know the hotkeys. There are more hotkeys in this game than any other I've played- literally the entire keyboard is used.

One of the worst problems with this game is difficulty. I'm not sure how the designers come up with missions for you, but I suspect it's purely random. It's entirely possible you'll accept a mission that is utterly impossible, given the firepower you have at any particular point. Until you have three battleships, it's recommendable you save in a new slot after every mission. My first mission in SFC 2 was a blast- literally- when they stuck my poor little frigate up against a space monster that didn't stop firing plasma torpedoes. The good news is you can't ever get completely wiped out, since they always give you a frigate to play with. The bad news is if you keep getting wasted, you'll never get anywhere and the required missions will quickly become impossible to complete.

Though the game has a 3-D look, it's not really a 3-D experience. You maneuver along a single plane with no Z-axis to speak of. Pretty much all the maneuvering you do is throttle up and down, and steer left and right. You can't reverse or roll your starships. What is kind of funny is that there's no collisions despite the fact that you're all on the same level. You can fly right through enemy ships, and you really should because it's impossible to miss at that range. I can see why the designers didn't allow you to maneuver with depth, as this would make lining up your weapons even more impossible than it already is, but this makes the game play in a very 'fake' manner. It also makes it impossible to hide from enemies, even if you have cloak.

The starships in the game behave more or less like they're 'supposed to,' which does NOT mean that everything goes like it does in the movies. Photon torpedoes seem to have terminal homing problems and almost never hit in 'normal' mode. You can load up your ships with missiles, mines, shuttles, and fighters for more reliable damage, but things largely degenerate to phaser/disruptor slugging matches. Those, by the way, take so long to charge that even an easy battle can last ten minutes.

The game's graphics are good, even for now. Weapons look like they do in the movies, and the ships have good detail. There are enough unique types of vessels to make the game fun to watch, though there aren't actually as many unique designs as advertised. The vessels you see here are largely the older Trek ones- not including Next Generation, DS9, etc. There are also many ships that don't appear anywhere, but Taldren made up. They did a good job modeling them, however, so they don't look goofy.

The game's sound really needs work. The soundtrack is good and the weapons sound like they should, but you'll immediately notice how scarce the voiceovers are. Essentially, you get alert reports, some damage reports, and Sulu's voice in the tutorial. That's pretty much it- the rest is text flashed on the screen in ridiculously small print, and sometimes faster than you can read. Most of the plot is conveyed in this manner, so keep a finger handy on that pause button for these times.

The missions, in addition to being occasionally bugged, are sometimes ambiguous. You are given orders at the start, and it's all or nothing to the finish (no saving in the middle). Some are characterized by long stretches of flying through empty space, which is exceedingly dull. You command up to three starships, but only one directly. You can issue general commands to the others, but they sometimes behave quite stupidly. They also follow you no matter what, which can be good or bad. Sometimes you really want one of your ships to withdraw from battle, but the only way to do this is take command of it yourself and fly off. Unfortunately, the others will also tag along. Then again, this is exactly what you want when you run into an impossible encounter.

My last gripe is the naming conventions. They use a rather counterintuitive system of letters, pluses, and dashes to designate ships. Even worse, each race has different designations for equivalent ships. It's very important to know what the designations are, since you really don't want to charge your frigates at a line of dreadnoughts. The only good way to do this is to spend an eternity in the tech library, which is somewhat less than fun. If Trek ships looked more distinctive, it could be easier to tell the various types apart. I think they do in newer episodes of the series, but these are the old ones and they all look similar.

Though in general I think SFC 2 is a good game, it could have been a whole lot better. I'm curious to see where this franchise is going, and might even get the sequel. However, due to the problems with this one, I think I'll wait for it to get cheaper.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best., June 7, 2003

By 

N. Holloman "kahrytan" (Leeward, Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Volume II: Empires at War (CD-ROM)

The new version Starfleet Command 3 is out but You might want to buy this game next to it. This version has better interface and gameplay. SFC3 interface is worse. Only difference is the time difference. SFC2 is Orginal Star Trek. SFC3 is Next Generation

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Star Fleet Command 2, December 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Volume II: Empires at War (CD-ROM)

This game is a good game. It is a good naval simulation of starship combat. Although the campaign mode is flawed, it is still has a variety a different missions to complete, altough after the campaign is completed, some of them get slightly monotonous.