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Starfleet Command 2
by James SterrettSo, is it better?
Some aspects of SFC2 are improved. The graphics are even better, with more hull types on display, and damage textures added to the ships as they get pummeled. The sounds are improved, and your bridge crew both acknowledges orders and occasionally calls out observations on the damage done to your ship or an enemy ship. The acknowledgements eventually get annoying, but I find the damage calls are sometimes helpful for situational awareness; and they all do help to maintain the atmosphere. Some are even humorous, such as your Klingon crew replying, “Today is a good day to die”, when you activate the Self-Destruct on their ship.
Nimble Klingon whomped by hard-punching Hydran
George Takei still provides the voice-overs for the tutorial missions. There are far fewer tutorial missions in SFC2, probably because most people never bothered to play the majority of the tutorials in SFC1, some of which were pretty esoteric; but the tutorial missions that remain are the important ones. There is only one skirmish mission packed with the game, the extremely flexible and customizable Hostile Skirmish, probably for the same reason there are fewer tutorial missions: few of the other skirmish missions in SFC1 got much playtime.
Fortunately, Interplay did not skimp on the manual, which weighs in at around 250 pages of large print. It’s a fairly comprehensive little brick, and you ought not need to buy the strategy guide to understand how to play the tactical game. However, the manual can be rather cryptic about the Dynaverse overgame.
Of more import than better bright lights and loud sounds, SFC2 adds two more races. The Mirak (who went by a different name in SFB, for which the copyright could not be obtained) are a race whose ships use missiles as their primary heavy weapon – a powerful system, but limited by its ammunition stocks. Miraki ships often dominate the pace of the engagement, but if their enemies can outlive the Miraki missile stocks, the tables are turned. In addition, the ISC comes to play, bringing slow but tough ships with heavy banks of phasers, plasma torpedoes, and the Plasmatic Pulsar Device, a nasty long-ranged weapon (whose graphic display is truly impressive in motion, but which defied all my attempts to capture its terror in a still screenshot.)
Mirak under missile attack
Fleet control has been updated and improved, and the AI ships now sometimes understand that “capture” is not accomplished by causing an enemy ship to explode (though sometimes they forget). The control still isn’t perfect, however. The AI is incapable of reading my mind and understanding the point on the power curve that I want its ship to be, and thus it tends to act poorly as a fleet member. Better than SFC1? Yes. But there’s still room for improvement. The simplest means of accomplishing this might be to allow the player to set a toggle under which the computer won’t take control of the other ships in the player’s squadron: as a result of which, the player could slow the game speed way down and still manage to effectively control more than one ship. As it stands, when you move to control another ship, the computer takes over the first ship and starts flying it as the AI thinks best, which often bears little relation to the way you wished the ship to be handled.
Every race now deploys either fighters or “pseudo-fighters” (PFs are either really big fighters, or really tiny ships, depending on how you look at them) and carriers (tenders for PFs) for them. Fighters and PFs are heavily armed, but fragile: sudden death and suddenly dead. Properly used, their firepower is devastating, but it is takes work to use them properly.
Pseudo-fighters and tender
If you count up all the variants and subvariants of all the ships, fighters, pseudo-fighters, bases, freighters, space monsters, and planets (many of which sport defences which rival or outclass a starbase) in the game, there are 1418 of them, and the bulk of that number is playable combat starships. Balance issues raised by SFC1 have been tweaked. This has caused discussions on the Taldren discussions boards, including at least one thread for every race in the game claiming that the race in question had been shafted in some manner. Since all of them think they are unable to guarantee victory, the game is probably balanced. All in all, SFC2 does an even better job than SFC1 of living up to the depth of tactical options presented by SFB.
Federation Heavy Carrier and its fighters
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