Star Trek: Infinite Review (m3fallen)
The TL;DR: If you already have Stellaris, wait for fixes and further patches. If you do not have Stellaris yet and are a great Star Trek fan, it it ok to get for 30 bucks.
My experience, mostly from Federation play:
The good:
- It is looks very nice, really gives you a big Star Trek feeling. That is a really, really big plus, they did that so well.
- Besides that, it is a Stellaris fork. Automation actually works. It is slow, but hey - you could have done it yourself.
- Pirates are an actual menace. They appear from somewhere and I need to scramble to stop them. And no, they did not spawn somewhere, they simply came from where I could not see them
- Many, many small lore events and characters you know and love
The bad:
- There are a few ship weapons that are just plain better in all situations. Why even offer the others?
- While we are at ships, the auto generated ship designs are plain awful. MUCH worse then in Stellaris. It does not even use all the slots.
- The Federation has so many bonuses to not only diplomacy, but also growth and colonization that it actually plays like a rush faction. If the others do not contain the Federation early on, it will blob and snowball
- Planets on the other hand are too balanced. Every planet I saw had roughly the same amount of energy, mining and agriculture bonuses, making every planet as good as the other for most things
- While the design is really really great, the music is forgettable. Maybe it is not loud enough, even on full blast, but it seems just to be a boring, nice tune in the background all the time
- A few textures went missing sometimes, like 1 leader and a few checkbox marks
- In popups, a few important words are bold. But you cannot get any info about them. It should have a CK3 like tooltip mechanic or at least some ingame lexicon to check on those bolded words.
- There are a few bonuses to be on friendly terms with minor factions, but you can also annex them which is not only plain better but gives additional bonuses. Why even add a bonus for being on friendly terms if you never want to keep that state?
The ugly:
Many functional issues where I wonder how that came through the QA check. Hell, how that came through dev at all:
- The Federation somehow has 2 human species that are exactly the same
- It has 4 founder species but for some reason humans are not marked as a founder species
- The other 3 founder species all come from Earth...
- and the humans have an unknown home planet. Yes, really
- And the actual home planets of these races did not have the home world bonus
- The federation is only a federation in name, no senate or special events are happening
- When a minor faction gets annexed, they vanish (as a faction) from the game. So in the galactic tension screen you will have unknown factions suddenly
- While we are at it, you only see that a galactic tension happens and to whom, but not due to whom. Would be kinda nice to know who the baddies actually are
- Messages/Notifications are baaaaad: We cannot make our own breaks for e.g. research finished, and messages for construction finished? Appears only once, and has in title and text the same message: "Construction finished". Uh.... where? And what?
- The mission/focus tree. So far I only checked out the Federation one, and outside of the question if you like it in general or not, it has big issues. Mostly the pacing/triggers. E.g. the very first mission takes a few years at least, but after that you can have 3 or 4 missions in a row that are already done. On the other hand, I had a mission I could not trigger - because...
- It has the old TotalWar mechanic that when you are strong, you cannot do diplomacy well. There is a diplomatic malus for being strong. So I could no longer finish my mission to have 3 commercial contracts at the same time...
- Some story events cannot be fulfilled - e.g. I figured out the supernova early, and was told to build some sort of ship I did not have and could not research. Great. I was also asked to do a mission against the Borg queen, but I could not reach the location with my military ships, so the timed mission failed. GREAT. And when I reached the place, my fleet cannot attack the Borg cube for some reason. EVEN GREATER
- You cannot play a minor faction or add your own custom faction to the ring