Page 3
Star Trek: conQuest
By Jim "Twitch" TittleMY TURN!
You actually take turns deploying your beings, ships and implements on the screen. You do not, say, move a ship to a strategically advantageous location and run into the enemy and fight while his forces hit your base allowing A.I. to defend it. There is no true simultaneous action.
In fact there is no action by definition. You are not going to find yourself cruising along in a Klingon Bird Of Prey and tangle with a Borg Cube as you would in Star Trek Armada. Instead of playing chess by mail you are playing via the Internet. You can respond to you opponent's move much quicker, but it still has a detached feel to it. Your goal is to capture an opponent or pin him down. Again, very chess-like.
The game has three basic phases: Deploy, Attack, and Move. When you deploy, you place your pieces where you think they will have an advantage. The control points you begin with determine if you can pay the cost of putting the piece into play. You soon learn to watch your bank of value points so as to not go broke, as it were, and be too weak to accomplish your strategy.
You deploy your ships, but only in the home region at first. No sneak attacks out of an asteroid belt or gas nebula to swoop in on an unsuspecting victim here folks. To actually do anything akin to that you must wait your turn to first move through the neutral region and then to the enemy's home region and planet. Ho hum.
Persons or Qs must be beamed to a ship and only then can the ship be moved to the desired locale. Items like tricorders or Klingon battle swords can be deployed anywhere on the map screen in hopes of retrieval later when needed. When you are finished deploying you click an End Phase tab. All of your pieces are blue and the enemy's are red.
