a few days ago I was wandering around a site where it had an article titled "reasons why it's worth being a PC gamer" in the strategy category it listed Star Trek Supremacy, and being a good little star trek geek I hurried here to check it out. I played Birth of the federation years ago (I know this isn't an actual sequel) and the more I read about the game the more interested I got, so I downloaded the preview and jumped in. The first thing I noticed was the somewhat steep learning curve, but as it's a preview I was more than happy to muddle my way through it. I'm still learning a lot of the stuff, but I'm having a blast, there's been a few errors here and there, and I'll post bug reports for them if they occur again (not sure if it's the game or just a couple system hiccups). I've told a few friends of mine about supremacy and they're all interested in the game, even those who aren't really interested in turn based strategy games. I'm really interested to see what's coming, so I now I have two independent star trek projects I'll be following closely, Supremacy, and Star Trek: Excalibur, both look amazing right now and they aren't even done yet

Welcome to the forums Binarygeek. We will be working on some ways to make the turn based thing more lively.

Hey BinaryGeek, welcome to the forums!

As you can appreciate, the game is still at a very early stage of development; many of the features are currently incomplete or simply missing. The game is also being updated on an extremely regular basis - sometimes several times a week. (Although admittedly Mike hasn't released an update since christmas because he is working on a rather big update) For that reason, it's difficult to make a guide to help players; as soon as it is written it is out of date.

Supremacy is also meant to be a spiritual successor to BOTF, so many of the game mechanics are the same or similar. We expect most people that play Supremacy will have at least some experience with either BOTF or 4X games, so it shouldn't be too hard to pick things up.

...But we do plan to eventually write a guide of some kind to help new players, once the game is closer to completion. In the meantime though, if you do run into any difficulties, then feel free to post about them. We're all friendly people and are willing to help where we can.

...

As for the bugs you've alluded to, if you're talking about the game freezing during turn processing, i'm sorry to say that it is a well-known bug that we haven't found the cause of. As far as we can tell, it's nothing to do with your hardware though.

If the game crashes, (Crashes not freezes) it will generate an error report in your main Supremacy folder as either "Error.txt" or "ServerError.txt", depending on the type of error the game encounters. If either of these files are present after a crash, please post them on the forums. You can copy-and-paste the contents or attach them to a post or PM. HOWEVER, the game will delete these files the next time you load it up, so you will need to do it straight away.

...

I notice that you've missed out BotE (Birth of the Empires) from your list of games; i don't know if this is because you don't like it or because you don't know about it, but i'll assume it's the latter.

BotE is a game that is similar to Supremacy; it's meant as a spiritual sucessor to BOTF. It's being made by a group of Germans (But has been translated into English) , and they started making their game severla years before Supremacy came on the scene - for that reason, it is much further along in development. Unfortunately, because the BotE team were worried about the legalities of making an unlicenced Trek game, they scrapped the Trek content and created their own oddly familar sounding races.

...There is going to be a Trek mod of the game though.

You can get BotE from the downloads section of our Site Portal. You will need to sign up to it before the downloads section is accessible though. The portal uses a separate login system which is why you need to sign up again. Sorry about that, we haven't figured out how to bridge the two databases.

Once you've signed up, the download is in Downloads Downloads Birth of the Empires. You might also want to check out Downloads Downloads Combat System. Yes, the combat system really is what the name implies, but it is currently a separate program to Supremacy because they will be merged together later on once they are both complete. The combat system MUST be put into C:/Demo - not D:/Demo, C:/Program Files/Demo, C:/Demo/Demo, or any other location or it won't work.

Have fun.

thanks for the recommendation,I'll be sure to check out BOTE as well now, as for the legality, as long as you aren't making a profit off something, I believe fair use comes into play. One of the bugs is freezing during processing, seems to happen once I hit a certain tech level, I'll give the details later on. one of the bugs was actually caused by my graphics card driver disliking a background process, that problem is fixed now. As for updates, I can wait, I'm a coder and can understand how chaotic things can get, haven't coded in years, but I've been there. I read somewhere about the AI not being in place, again, another area I understand, I've dabbled in heuristic AI code, and any AI takes a while not only to code, but to test and debug, then stress testing it (a process which has sent more than a few code monkeys to the room with the padded walls). But I can wait for updates, the mere fact this game is being made is enough to thrill me, so take as long as it takes to get it stable, I'm not going anywhere.

Hmm...could you describe the graphics/process problem in more detail? I've never heard of a problem like that before, so we need to find out what we can about it in case other people run into the same issue in the future. How you managed to fix it would be useful info as well.

If you've got experience in programming AI's, (And don't mind risking our sanity ) you might want to contact Mike and tell him what skills you have. You never know, he might have something you can help him with.

the driver just went screwy, used to happen in Star Wars Empire At War, the screen would turn orange and red and other colors then flicker, it was fixed when I updated the graphics driver to 182.08, I run an NVidia 9500GT 1GB card. the process was an old app which I don't use now in anycase.

I didn't get far in Supremacy, but I liked what I saw. Also, Supremacy is getting 'official notice', so to speak. For instance: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/start ... index.html

Yeah, we know about Gamespot's coverage of us. They used to have a couple of threads on the game that I participated on, but they got moved to Gamefaqs for some odd reason. Several of the screenshots that Gamespot has were made by me though. I uploaded a video too.

Supremacy is covered on a lot more websites though - just do a google for "Star Trek Supremacy" and see how many hits you get. I actually signed up to a site last week coz I noticed their info about Supremacy was horribly out of date. They had a download of the game available that was barely half the size of the current version, and they didn't even know about these forums! I set them straight and gave them a link to the current version of the game.

Which is the downside to forums - probably 99.9534% of what people are going to say is here, somewhere, just next to the Ark of the Covenant.

bri

That doesn't matter, as people randomly find out about the forums, they will tell their friends, who will tell their friend, and so on. And Googling and signing up to sites can also help to spread the word. Word of mouth and Google are our greatest allies.

but with larger video game media outlets cluing into Supremacy, even if the information is outdated, it gets the name out there, and then people will search for the game on their own. Take me for example, I found supremacy completely by accident and 5 of my friends are now following the game, and some of them aren't fond of turn based games, but they really enjoyed playing supremacy. It's the old marketing philosophy, word of mouth is always the best advertising (or it can destroy your business). 1 person tells their friends how good something is, and they'll check it out, they might not get into a game, it may be the wrong type for them or countless other reasons, or they might love the game, but at least they looked at it.

i noticed latley since the last update the game wont start up at all...and crashes completly

Try looking at this post LordGoden.
Check down the page for your issue.


viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2730

This is the bit you need to look at, LordGaden:

If this doesn't work, please let us know.