Star Trek: New Worlds

Moby ID: 2251
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Description official descriptions

A Romulan experiment gone wrong has suddenly made multiple planet systems appear out of nowhere in this formerly barren sector. The area is named Tabula Rasa, and the three neighboring races... Federation, Klingon, and Romulan, are ready to exploit the newly found riches... But first they must deal with the natives, who may be friend of foe...

You are in control of a colony for your "empire". You must grow your colony and build defense and offense to secure your goals while mining the resources you came for. Build from the heart of your colony... the colony hub. Build mines to extract minerals from the ground (but they can run out). Build resource processors to get higher efficiency. Build vehicle yards to build better vehicles. Build research facility to get improved technology and better units, and so on and so forth. You must balance energy, growth, exploration, defense, crew, and when you get to it, offense. It is also possible to capture enemy structures.

Each side has a special unit with unique capabilities to make the battle more interesting. Multiplayer is supported over Gamespy. Several tutorial missions are also created.

Spellings

  • 星际迷航:新世界 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

71 People (64 developers, 7 thanks) · View all

Engineering Team
Art Director
Art Team
Design Team
Executive Producer
Producer
Line Producer
Marketing Manager
Creative Services Manager
Traffic Manager
Package Layout and Design
  • Binary Pulse
Manual Layout and Design
QA Project Supervisor
Senior Tester
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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 57% (based on 25 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.1 out of 5 (based on 11 ratings with 6 reviews)

Complexity is not necessarily an improvement

The Good
Interesting subject, as ground ops is a part of Star Trek seldom seen, 3 sides have different units and different tactics, not to mention the "natives", officers can gain experience and affect efficiency of various departments, decent backstory that actually manages to flow together a bit

The Bad
Too complex to be fun, as you can't build anything useful until you're half-way up the tech tree. Scouts and APC's are essentially unarmed, and it's not until the phaser shuttles (i.e. "tanks") and photon artillery units that you have offensive capabilities. Building powerplants and crew quarters is BORING, too many raw materials to juggle. There are three major raw materials, which are refined into 3 useful materials, which are then used to build things! As the ores can run out, you must have a high efficiency processing in order to get the most out of your mines, and that's micromanagement. Actual combat is mainly mob-attack, few tactics are involved except for stuff like indirect fire, cloaked raids, and so on. Units on ground move so slowly they don't feel like hovercrafts at all.

The Bottom Line
Star Trek: New Worlds is an RTS with a Star Trek MOD. The 3 sides have virtually identical units (unarmed fast scout, APC, "tank", artillery) except for one special unique unit. The structures are virtually identical on all three sides and all have identical tech trees. Most of the "growth" is in growing the "colony hub" to level 4 by building the pre-requisites so you can build combat units in addition to the defenses. Since you can't do any offense before then, the game then becomes who can click the fastest (and get the most building done!). As a result, the game has severe pacing problems.

To "mine" resources, you drop mines (and later, advanced mines) in the middle of a resource concentration. Then the building gets built. You will need some workbees to run between buildings, but that's almost automatic, you just need to make sure you have enough of them.

The game itself looks fine. Terrain features are nicely displayed, structures look nice, sky looks good, units bob and weave on their anti-gravs , etc. Even the minimap is actually useful in telling you where enemies can be seen as well as remaining minerals in the ground (tha tyou can mine). Even the sounds are quite appropriate. The problem is in gameplay.

The officer aspect of crew management can be completely ignored and wouldn't affect the game much. Assigning officers to certain specialties (like tactical officer to armory, science officer to research, and so on) is supposed to enhance productivity, but I've never really noticed any notable difference. Perhaps that's the problem of RTS... The different between 4 seconds vs. 5 seconds by feel alone is minimal, even though it's technically a 20% improvement.

All in all, Star Trek: New Worlds proves that complexity in an RTS game and the known franchise name does NOT guarantee good sales. The wrong pacing decisions in the game tech tree design along with added complexity does not make for a more interesting game.

Windows · by Kasey Chang (4598) · 2005

This is an RTS style game based in the Star Trek universe, not an RTS revolutionising effort

The Good
The idea of the story, Star Trek based on the ground. What happens when new worlds are charted and plotted by the galant Enterprise crews ? Well now you can see it first hand.

The graphics are quite sensational and the camera angles and option are truly great. There is nothing like commanding the units from the locked overhead perspective and then changing to the first person view to 'join' in on the action. I wish they had this in Command n Conquer. What would have made the game even better would have been to been able to jump in the unit of your choice.

The scenery is quite nice, from lava cascading down hills, to pockets of gas erupting sporadically to trees, lakes and glaciers alike. AND YOU HAVE TO SEE THE CLOUDS ... they are nearly the best part of the game.

The Bad
The inability to save during the missions, and the lack of multiplay ... a patch fixing some small bugs would have been nice as well.

The Bottom Line
If you are looking for the latest and greatest RTS game, then you will be dissappointed. If you are looking for a ground based Star Trek game with an RTS feel, then you will be happily surprised.

In short, -if you are a Star Trek nut/fan then you will like this game. -if you are a die hard RTS purist you won't like this game.

Windows · by Lil Dave (2) · 2002

Force Commander for Star Trek

The Good
ST: New Worlds is set after Star Trek V. A beautifully rendered introductory movie shows a Romulan weapon test going awry and sucking a new star system into striking distance of the Romulans, Klingons and Federation. Each group has their own motive for exploring/exploiting these new planets, thus setting up the first Star Trek real-time strategy game.

The Romulans, Klingons and Federation each have a fourteen mission campaign dealing with their expansion into the new worlds. In an interested touch, the game's difficulty system is tied into the three factions. Players looking for an easier gaming experience should choose the Klingons, the Federation campaign is the medium difficulty setting and the Romulan campaign is the hard one.

While each of the factions has different motives, the gaming experience is similar for each one. This is a real-time strategy game so your colony must be built up, five different resources must be mined and processed and a technology tree provides paths to different buildings and vehicles.

Personnel management also comes into play. People are needed to staff buildings and operate vehicles, so you'll need to provide food, housing and medical facilities to increase your population. Also senior staff members, such as the Doctor or Chief Engineer, can also be placed in different facilities to increase their efficiency.

The game is playable in an isometric mode, an overhead mode and in a first person camera mode. While the usefulness of these modes are questionable, it may be useful to observe the action from different perspectives. There is also an overhead tricorder mode, which shows where resources are located as well as your buildings and enemy buildings with sight of your units (conventionally, this plays as a radar-view).

The Bad
Sadly, there is little to recommend about this game. While no fog-of-war exists, you cannot "see" enemy structures until your units are upon them. Then, when your units lose the line of site, the structures fade away. Star Trek doesn't have satellites anymore? Also, no good reason is given for not having support from spacecraft. I think any mission could have easily been completed by the Enterprise and a landing team.

Mobygames does not have an AI rating for this game, probably because it is non-existent. If enemy units see your units, then they'll open fire. Enemy patrols might fly through your camp, but they never attack vital structures or run for cover or anything. Some missions require capturing enemy buildings, unfortunately your troops will still attack these structures and you cannot tell them otherwise. It becomes trying, attempting to keep your units close enough to support capturing vehicles without them destroying the building.

You have five resources to mine, but it is often difficult to place mining stations and then they resources need to be converted into usable goods. This feels more like chemistry than gaming. Also, the number of buildings and units is severely limited. From the first mission, it is possible to build everything.

What hampers New Worlds most is the lack of customization. You cannot remap the troublesome camera controls (which rely on the cursor keys) and you cannot adjust the speed of the game. This game plays out very slowly and your space-age hovercrafts literally crawl across the screen. It can take up to five minutes to get to where you want to go. On missions where you need to destroy all enemies, this is painful.

New Worlds also lacks waypoints, unit formations, the ability for all units to travel at the same speed, and easy unit grouping.

While there are three races presented, Klingons, Federation, and Romulans all have the same building types and units available, just under a different skin. There may be some balancing available, but not any I could tell.

Finally, New Worlds does not have in-mission saves. With slow moving units and units that might destroy buildings you need to capture, some missions can last for quite a while. I would not recommending playing New Worlds unless you had a few hours free.

The Bottom Line
I don't see why developers think that the use of a licensed trademark will get players to buy poorly designed games. I wouldn't recommend this game to Star Trek fans or fans of real-time strategy games. I would describe this game as Force Commander for Star Trek.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2002

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Real Developer Mark James (24) Nov 16, 2007

Trivia

Milestones

Star Trek: New Worlds is the first real-time strategy game to use both resource and personnel management.

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa, the name of the new star system, is a Latin phrase meaning "smoothed or erased tablet." This phrase is commonly used to describe something in a pristine, untouched state.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Kasey Chang, Unicorn Lynx, Alaka.

Game added August 28, 2000. Last modified March 15, 2024.