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Starfleet command orion pirates how to#
This can be a frustrating experience, as the tutorial missions don't go into quite enough detail about just how to control the ships, and the instruction book may well make your eyes bleed with the 6-point font.īecause this is a 'stand-alone expansion pack', the original SFC2 ostensibly doesn't exist in this package. Even though the computer does most of the micromanagement for you, there's still a lot of things to do, settings to tweak, and controls to fiddle with. Controlling the ships means keeping track of their shield levels, where they have their power diverted, their direction of travel, and a host of other variables that are constantly shifting as the game progresses. The battles are never going to be faceoffs between twenty different ships the sides are usually small in number. This sort of dual ebb-and-flow is intriguing, although you may just find it to be one more set of information to keep track of.Īnd Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates deals with tracking information a lot.
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The map now has two 'layers', if you will the top one shows the various empires and their zones of influence, and the bottom one shows the cartels and their zones of influence. In the single-player campaign, you can pick to be any of the original races from SFC2-Federation, Klingon Empire, Lyran Commonwealth, and so on-or you can be one of the factions of the Orion pirates. Orion Pirates supports the dynamic multiplayer right out of the box, however, which is good. The latter was one of the shortcomings of the original release of SFC2, as the company who was supposed to host the servers got reorganized and couldn't do it. People who don't own SFC2 have a much easier decision Orion Pirates is every bit of the game that Starfleet Command II was, and more.Īs in SFC2, you'll find yourself participating in either the single-player missions or a (working!) Dynaverse campaign.
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As the game is damned near identical, you have to decide whether the addition of the cartels and some skirmish missions is worth the price of the box. Deciding whether or not it's a worthy purchase is another challenge altogether. If you liked SFC2, chances are good that you'll get a kick out of Orion Pirates. Good stuff.ĭeciding whether or not to like Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates is simple. The music is solid, staying in the background but keeping you gently aware of itself. Prepare for the whine of the phasers, the satisfying (but unrealistic) boom of ships exploding in space, and even the klaxon when you put your shift into red alert mode. The explosions are nice, and while the 'world' is of necessity much emptier than most strategy games, the graphics are sharp enough to keep people from complaining.Īs for sound, there will be a lot of familiar audio here too, even if you've never played SFC2. Just like SFC2, Orion Pirates supports variable levels of zoom, which let you get up close and personal with both your ships and the enemy's. The interface is foreboding at first, with all of the buttons and lights and whatnots, but after some time with the game, you'll find the graphical displays that it presents you with to be very useful. There are new ship designs, and things seem to look a little sharper overall, but for the most part you're going to be watching ships float around in the vastness of space on a 2D plane. As such, the graphics are pretty much identical to those found in SFC2. Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates uses the same engine as Starfleet Command II: Empires At War, as Orion Pirates is a 'standalone expansion for the original title.