It looks like Star Trek video games might be having a bit of a renaissance. As soon as I finished a video about how there's been a dearth of Star Trek games in the past decade or so, multiple studios announced new Star Trek games.

As I was finishing up the editing of that video series, both Star Trek: Voyager: Across the Unknown and Star Trek: Infection were announced. And now, not even a year later, 2 new Star Trek games have been announced: Shadow Frontier and Outposts Unknown.

I had specifically talked in my video about how there haven't really been any true Star Trek-themed RPGs. Yeah, sure, there had been the point-and-clicks, which fill a similar niche. Across the Unknown might be the closest to an RPG so far, with quests and characters who gain experience and level up skills. But more strange is that 2 of my favorite game genres are horror and city-building. 2 of these new games are horror games (one of which is in VR!), and the other is a city-builder. Well, more technically, it's a "colony-builder"

This isn't to say that there haven't been any Star Trek games at all. It's just that most of the Star Trek video games in recent memory have been mobile games or console versions of mobile games. This includes the likes of Legends and Fleet Command. Arguably, Voyager: Across the Unknown also fits this description.

Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown got a lot of criticism (and sometimes praise) at its release for how difficult it is. This actually caught me off-guard when I played, because I played the demo back in November or December, and I thought the demo was really easy. Boy did that demo not do justice to the challenge of the actual game!

I struggled a lot and had to restart the game multiple times, and save-scum sectors over and over again, in order to learn how best to approach the game's challenges. Without giving away any specific spoilers, I particularly struggled to get through sectors 4 and 5 without running out of Deuterium. These sectors are, in my opinion, the peak of the game's difficulty. If you can get through sectors 4 and 5, I think the rest of the game should be mostly downhill. That isn't to say that the remaining game is easy. It will still require careful and methodical play. But if you get past sectors 4 and 5 in relatively good condition, then you should have developed the infrastructure and techniques to give yourself enough buffer for sub-optimal play that the rest of the game will feel a lot less stressful.

With that in mind, I want to coalesce my experience with the game and offer some tips to help new players get through sectors 1 through 5, without having to necessarily go through all the trial-and-error that I had to go through. These tips will be specifically focused on the early game, and I'm going to try to avoid any specific spoilers, as this post is intended for people who are stuck in the early sectors of the game, or people who have not played the game yet, but are considering doing so. Also, please check out the full review.

Across The Unknown can be unforgiving and difficult.

I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.

But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!

Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.

The platonic ideal of a mobile game?

Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.

Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.

The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.

This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.

2 years ago, after playing both Star Trek: Resurgence and Star Trek: Infinite, I started thinking about how the ludic genres of "point-and-click"-style adventure games and grand strategy games are both very good ludic genres for the Star Trek IP. I had originally planned on creating a short, 20-30 minute video talking about these 2 games, specifically, and how they manage to faithfully adapt the source material. And I wanted to contrast these 2 games against a few other Star Trek games in other ludic genres, such as Elite Force (a first-person shooter), and some of the old starship operation games like Starfleet Command.

However, as I worked on the script, I kept wanting to talk about more and more Star Trek video games, and I kept reading about other Star Trek games that I had never played. So I expanded the scope of that original project to start to include more examples of adventure and strategy games, as well as to talk about Star Trek games in other genres. I bought some games to try out, and fell into a rabbit hole of playing every Star Trek game that I could get my hands on, and watching let's plays of all the games that I couldn't play.

Before long, that 20-30 minute project had ballooned to over an hour of script. At that point, I decided that this was too much for a single video, and I decided to do 2 things:

1. I would split the video up into multiple parts (originally, I expected 3 or 4 parts),
2. I would make each video be about games in a particular ludic genre (such as adventure games, shooters, strategy games, etc.).

This necessitated more research, and more play-time with other games in other genres. Eventually, after 2 years of on-again-off-again work, I ended up with over 2 hours of videos talking about the different ludic genres into which Star Trek had been adapted. I talk about which ones work, which ones don't work as well, and also what I would like to see from Star Trek games in the future.

In the meantime, just as I was getting ready to finally release this epic project, 2 new Star Trek games were announced: Voyager: Across the Unknown (not to be confused with a Star Trek tabletop game called "Into the Unknown"), and Star Trek: Infection. So I may talk about those games in a future update video. Infection, in particular represents an entirely new ludic genre for Star Trek games, since it's a VR horror game -- the first true horror game that I've ever seen for the Star Trek IP.

The first part of my retrospective series is now available on YouTube, after a short period of Patreon-exclusivity:

The other 4 parts are already available to Patreons at the following link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/exploring-new-of-137678510. I will be releasing each new episode every few weeks, but Patreons are able to view all 5 episodes now.

I already reviewed the other expansions released between 2019 and 2023 (the Andorians, Vulcans, and Breen), but I wanted to save the Dominion for a separate post because the Dominion come with a whole host of additional features beyond just the new faction. Technically, the expansion is called "The Dominion War". In addition to adding the Dominion faction, this expansion adds rules for new Gamma Quadrant system discs, a wormhole system that connects the Gamma Quadrant to the rest of the map, and a team-based variant game mode with different setup and several new rules.

The Dominion faction can be played with or without the Gamma Quadrant rules in play. But for the most part, I'm going to assume that if you're playing with the Dominion, you're probably playing with the wormhole and Gamma Quadrant as well. Maybe that's a safe assumption; maybe it's not. It's how we've always played the Dominion.

The Dominion War expansion replaces the Bajor system disc that was included with the Cardassian expansion. The new Bajor is a larger piece that combines the Bajoran system, wormhole, and Idran system into a single cardboard "disc" which is placed at the center of the board during setup. This system is fixed and cannot move, and every player knows exactly where it is located. Further, Bajor is a level 3 wap-capable civilization with its own starbase, which makes Bajor very difficult to conquer or hegemonize until the late game.

The combined Bajor / wormhole / Idran system is always located in the center of the board.

Combining Bajor, the Wormhole, and Idran into a single system severely limits the possible configurations of the board when using the Gamma Quadrant. Thus, Bajor has to be at one edge of the Alpha/Beta quadrant portion of the galaxy. Bajor cannot be centralized (like say, being in between the Federation, Cardassian, and Ferengi territories).

I think I would have preferred if the Wormhole tokens were separate pieces that could be attached to any system similar to Starbases, or if they are special effects written on otherwise normal system discs, and that they simply treat the two systems as if they are adjacent. If I recall correctly, this is basically how the Borg Transwarp Conduits work. This would allow the Gamma Quadrant systems to be more of a separate play-space altogether, and the Alpha/Beta quadrant could still organically grow around wherever the wormhole happens to be. This not only more closely resembles the geography of the canon Star Trek galaxy, but it allows for a much wider variety of board configurations and greater replayability.

The Dominion coming through the wormhole

The Dominion is similar to the Vulcans and the Breen, in that all 3 feel kind of like they are simultaneously the hardest factions to play, and also the easiest. Much like with the Breen, the Dominion (if using the wormhole) has tremendous potential to be a turtle faction. The wormhole serves as a bottleneck, and it is very command-expensive to traverse that bottleneck. Ships and fleets must stop at Bajor or Idran, and then spend an additional command to cross from Bajor to Idran (or vice versa). Idran is also a level 5 hazard, which means any ships crossing the wormhole must also survive a die roll. This makes sneak attacks against the Dominion very difficult to pull off, since it may take an entire turn for a player to move fleets through the wormhole, only to not have enough commands left to actually attack any of the Dominion's holdings. Further, if any player takes control of Bajor, then that player serves as the gatekeeper to the Gamma Quadrant, and can potentially block other players from entering the wormhole to threaten the Dominion.

Crossing the wormhole can be very costly.

If the Dominion can build 3 or more culture nodes in the Gamma systems and fortify the exit of the wormhole, they can easily go into turtle mode and secure a relatively un-contested victory. And if the Alpha Quadrant powers fight amongst themselves over control of Bajor, with the Changeling Infiltrators interfering with everyone's movements and making their play less efficient, it's easy for the Dominion to sit back, cleanup whatever is left of the Alpha fleets, and coast to victory This might be why the Dominion does not have any abilities that grant opportunities for free culture (like every other faction has).