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Starfleet Commander: A Smart New Strategy RPG from Blue Frog Gaming
October 13th, 2009
| By Christopher Mack | 20 Comments » |
A long time ago, an Ohio-based games developer called Blue Frog Gaming released a simple football-based RPG dubbed Football Tycoon. Frankly, it was a decent game, but in the past seven and a half months since then, they’ve been hard at work improving their craft with a new release: Starfleet Commander.
Essentially, the game is a marriage of both RPG (role-playing games) and RTS (real-time strategy) elements, in a space-age setting, and powered through both Facebook and Twitter. When just starting out, the player is presented with a in-game currency bonus for simply logging in (a bonus that increases with each consecutive day you play – up to three days), and 15 menu items of merit. This is a bit daunting at first glance as there is no tutorial to ease a new player in. Thankfully, however, one begins to pick things up extremely quickly by just clicking around (and without the FAQs or Wiki!).
This comes down to the fact that the game has a built-in “tech tree” like most RTS titles. Unlike many of the Facebook RPGs out there, each menu item tends to be dependant upon another. For example, you cannot build a fleet until you have ships, which require a shipyard, which requires resources, which requires buildings to gather them, which requires power supplies to actually function. Each successive structure is dependent on a previous one, so players end up just moving up the hierarchy until they are building the items needed from the menu item needed, allowing for a very natural learning curve. The more the player plays, the more options are available, and thus more complexity.
As expected each building requires resources to create. In this case, the resources are Ore, Crystal, and Hydrogen. Each item takes X amount of time to build that may range from two minutes to over an hour. Furthermore, in the case of buildings, players must also build energy producing structures to actually make them work (think Command & Conquer power plants).
Once a player has gotten past this slow start, they can then begin bolstering defenses, building fleets, and garnering allies as they expand throughout the universe. Also, like in a mafia-style RPG, players can fight one another for profit, plundering areas, destroying fleets, and taking over colonies. Of course, such attacks can be mitigated by significant defenses. Fleets can also be saved by sending them on missions (which garner rewards like RPG style missions). The missions take hours to complete, but keep the ships from being threatened by enemy raids. Nevertheless, there is one key phrase worth repeating: “Taking over colonies.”
This is actually one of the cooler parts of Starfleet Commander. Players are not limited to just their own home world. As a matter of fact, they can colonize up to eight more planets in order to increase production of war machines, resource gathering, or whatever else they might have planned. Unfortunately, that requires a bigger fleet to protect them all, but thankfully players can form alliances with other commanders and ban together for mutual protection.
As for your friends, they too can be brought on as a crew and work as a builder, miner, scientist, or captain. Like the majority of RPGs in circulation, this grants you “Crew Points,” that are required to run tougher missions. However, players can increase these ranks with droids as well, for a cost, even though friends are free, and add extra benefits (i.e. 4% faster build times from Builders).
There is a lot of information to absorb when it comes to this game, but it is definitely worth a go; especially if you are a fan of strategy or RPG games. It has more than enough familiar elements to get any Facebook veteran started and enough new features to keep them going for a while. Granted, it is a bit slow starting out, but all this is merely the tip of the iceberg (advanced play includes multiple fleets, gifts, tech research, and more), and once one does pick up some headway, Starfleet Commander is actually quite fun.
And, while the game is still tiny, according to AppData, it seems to be on an upwards growth curve.
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October 13th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Thanks for the writeup. We really appreciate that you took the time to research/play the game. Hilariously we launched a tutorial on both games at the same time we launched the Twitter app yesterday afternoon, so you just missed it. It was sorely needed.
-Matt Maroon
CEO, Blue Frog Gaming
October 14th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
No nods to Ogame?
October 18th, 2009 at 7:02 am
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October 18th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This is definitely a full OGame rip off, even to the slightest details. But I was wondering when it’d show up on Facebook.
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:58 pm
I hope Gameforge sues the hell out of Blue Frog… This is worse than when most mp3 players got called Ipods… oh wait.
December 8th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
This is a farce. The whole game is a plain copy of OGame, with a few tweaks and renames. The game remains largely the same. If it gains any followers, it’s due to the immense benefits gained by inviting friends to play. This usually results in those players just idling. I cannot believe that the article called it “their craft,” because it’s clearly not. Blue Frog should rethink how they come up with new ideas.
December 27th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
I’m glad I found this post. I went and Googled OGame and love it! It’s a shame I put two weeks into Starfleet Commander. I’ll probably wind up playing both. You are right, it is Very similar.
January 10th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
They require you to be really active to keep up with resources.
If you are really active, then they will suspend you. That’s not really good game-play.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Addendum towards their professionalism and legitimacy, if one makes a public complaint about Blue Frog Gaming to either Facebook, or BBB, BFG will suspend the one’s account.
Be forewarned.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
As a heads up, NuShrike is a disgruntled player that went berserk on their forums today.
He got banned by a temporary bug in the system. He then filed a complaint to the BBB for having to wait more than 10 seconds to hear from BFG’s staff.
After maliciously going out of his way to make BFG look as bad as possible he got permanently banned and tried telling everyone on the BFG forums some SOB story. He deserved it. Good riddance!
January 15th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Why has’nt there been anything said about the legitiment claims about it being based on ogame I have played ogame for two years and starfleet commander for a few months and they are the same game so unless bluefrog made ogame as well there should be credit given to ogame as the tech tree is identical just renamed and the costs and time associated with building the equivalants is identical the only change I see is the addition of the froger for bonus effects other than that the game is a clone I urge you to try ogame so you can see what the people saying this mean it is truely a direct clone I like both games but give credit where it is due
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:27 pm
also the same as Space invasion by Bigpoint (except SI has better visuals) i played that for 2 years, so god knows which was around 1st, but it was not this one. all the units are the same, except slightly different names, an extra fighter class and more cartoony graphics
January 26th, 2010 at 3:44 am
It does sound like NuShrike has got issues. I found this game on facebook and play it every day. The game itself got me confused for a while but now used to it. HINT once you have built up a decent world with decent defence and ships press options in the blue bar at the bottom to take yourself out of diplomacy mode. I only found this out by accident, I was getting a bit bored before I found this out!!!!
January 27th, 2010 at 11:41 am
@ICWHATUDIDTHAR: How can you be legitimate if you haven’t even responded to my “berserk” posts as Arckonicon has called you out on? You automatically loose with your straw-man argument.
My basis for my complaint is that BFG has a history of recklessly bashing/suspending players.
Is it wrong to officially call out BFG on their publicly admitted mistake especially after I waited HOURS for their support to respond after their auto-banning went berserk? Their CEO detailed to me it was their worse down-time ever?
Is that how a good company responds to player complaints for their worst self-inflicted down-time ever? Does your power company shut off power to you after you complain about a billing mistake?
I’ve spent 15 years in gaming/e-commerce as a software developer so I’m not some random, angry kiddie. You can see easily google how much Windows Mobile development I’ve done recently too.
Pot-kettle-black.
January 27th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Now in, judge for yourself how “berserk” things got: http://forum.playstarfleet.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3303
Public name-calling, censorship, character defenestration, and ad hominem replies are not a basis for legitimate and professional response from a company (and players) that’s trying to have a go at a business — although the basic game rules do seem uncannily identical to OGame.
January 30th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
More shiptypes, like 10fighters and couplemore battleships and guys like Pimped, called cheateralliance to heck..
And overpowered zeus to nerfstation, or if not then something to defence structures what can kill those.
February 22nd, 2010 at 12:58 am
WTF? I JUST GOT DESTROYED BY A MASSIVE FLEET FROM TWO DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS. MY FLEET WAS VERY, VERY SMALL. THIS GAME IS A FUCKING SCAM. I CANT BELIEVE I SPENT 60$ OF MY HARD EARNED CASH. THAT WILL NOT EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I WAS HAVING FUN BUILDING MY FORCES. NOT ANY MORE THOUGH. IT IS ALL GONE. THEY FORGOT TO TAKE THE REST OF MY RESOURCES WHILE THEY WERE AT IT. MY PLANET WAS MEGATRON. IF ANYONE WANTS THE REST OF MY RESOURCES COME AN GET IT. I WILL NOT PLAY THIS WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT GAME EVER, EVER, AGAIN. OH AN THE EXTREME VERSION IS ALSO A PIECE OF CRAP GAME.
February 22nd, 2010 at 1:00 am
BLUE FROG GAMING SUXS. THEY WILL RIP YOU OFF.
February 22nd, 2010 at 4:21 pm
@Subcritical
were you in galaxy 34?
March 11th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Agree with Subcritical. this game is the worst ever, as soon as you built up your defenses you get an @$#$%^& who wipes you out, will never come back to this game again