To Buy or not to buy, that is the question

[Ser Clegane]

I'm intrigued by all this talk of Birth of Federation. I am a Star Trek fan - is it worth getting this game (e.g. on E-bay)? At the time, the reviews were kind of mediocre (7.5 or thereabouts) but the talk here makes it sound significantly better. What did people like about it? How is the combat? GalCivII sounds like it may have better gameplay, but I find it hard to get attached to generic fantasy settings. By contrast, a game set in a Star Trek world would be instantly appealing to me.

I think what makes BotF so much fun is really the Star Trek license and the excellent atmosphere it creates using this license.

I enjoyed this game tremendously, but if I take an objective look at it, it would probably indeed be a mediocre game without the Star Trek license.

The tech tree is rather linear and the battles (while nice to look at) only involve very limited tactics (quite a rock/paper/scissor approach is used for battle maneuvers).

If you love Star Trek you will very likely enjoy this game very much as it is definitely not a bad game (and the graphics and sound are quite nice).

Some advice if you buy it:
- definitely patch it (there was a horrible memory leak in the first version)
- turn of the Borg (they can absolutely ruin a fine campaign)

EDIT: sorry for going further OT