Ages of the Federation is a new total conversion mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. This mod takes place in the Enterprise and Original series eras, focusing on the conflict between the early Federation and Klingon Empire. A resurgent Romulan Star Empire, angry and still licking its wounds after their defeat to Earth and her allies waits in the shadows, ready to take advantage of any of misstep by either the warring powers. The Xindi, new to the galactic stage are also eager to forge their own path.
One of the best Trek mods out there!
Damn good mod, great models, great effects, great sounds. Still holding out hope for the Maxloef.tm sound pack though.
Wonderful work. Love the details and shield effects!
I love the world of Star Trek and it's impressive how well this has been integrated into Sins of Solar Empire. I find the details of the individual ships and special effects in the space battles very impressive, especially considering the age of the graphics engine.
Love it.
A different and more engaging experience.
Beautiful mod, interesting era, would love to give this a 10, but some glaring issues.
First and worst, the author put in a anti-murderball mechanic into the game whereby clustering 20 ships together results in such incredible penalties to accuracy that 2 fleets of 5-6 ships will pretty easily destroy the larger fleet provided you swap ships out.
That's actually wonderful design... except he forgot to tell the AI about the change, which results in them fighting you with 100% or more accuracy penalties until you slaughter the AI's fleet to a more reasonable size. It is very, very difficult to play a challenging game against AI... either they slaughter you early game before you and they have enough ships to seriously trigger the mechanic, or they lose.
Unless they're Romulan. Plasma torpedo burn damage doesn't get reduced, so their murderballs actually murder. And since you're facing their murderball with your 6-ship fleets so that you can actually hit something...
Second, a lot of the capitals are near-clones of each other compared to original sins. The carrier ships are 100% identical across factions, the "defense" capitals are as well, and most of the others share most of the abilities. The biggest difference is in the titans, and the fact that the Klingons split their Fleet mobility/accuracy/debuff enemy accuracy across 2 capitals instead of 1.
However the truth is that no matter how unplayable the single-player mode has been made to be, you still WANT to love this game. If the ships are somewhat clone-ish of each other, it's because that's the easiest way to balance factions. The anti-murderballing idea is great... if only its first victim wasn't single-player playability.
Note: The actual difficulty sliders mean almost nothing now. Because of the game mechanics, map selection is the primary determinant of difficulty. Like Armada, the AI simply is too incompetent to colonize, and a major reason is because there are so many colonization techs and the AI has to pay attention to getting them and it doesn't, in Armada it'll throw down 5 military labs and run out of spaces to put down civilian ones so it can colonize its nearest planets, which denies the extra slots needed for more labs, etc. In this game it likes to put up culture buildings instead of science labs.
Let me begin with some of the things this mod struggles with. First is bugs/crashes. They happen. But not with the kind of frequency that would suggest incompetency, merely the limits of what the game engine is capable of handling. Also, the ai is...well. It is. I imagine teaching the ai how to work with new systems is difficult, so I won't touch on that. Also the simple fact that the AI has nothing on human players.
Now, let's talk about what it gets right. The mod is highly atmospheric, especially the particle effects, and the way the ships move in and out of combat. Between that and the UI, you feel as though you're playing a self-contained Star Trek game, not a mod. The quality is simply that good. Each of the factions feels unique, accomplished through a mixture of unique technology and strategy that best promotes their style of play. There's few things more satisfying as carving apart a flotilla of Coalition ships with a wing of Romulan Warbirds, or sending forth the Xindi probe as the vanguard of a grand expedition to claim the entire star system.
My advice? Play it, and give it a good try.
Has potential. Good graphics, however the stability issues prevent full play through and alot of features not available. Seems rushed to get it out before its ready, and start on other projects. Will wait and see. Update: have downloaded new version-same issues still unstable even when lowering settings which should not have to compared with other mods. Good premise but rushed. Hopefully the stability issues will be fixed. Would love to give it a higher rating.
Just fantastic, not much else to say