New Addition to Supported Games

Greetings and salutations, fleet members!

The Security Office has been playing around with expanding our Supported Games Policy for a while. It was not our intention to limit our activities to two games, not when there are several Star Trek games out there that support multiplayer action, not to mention all the games out there on all the platforms. It is truly an endless selection out there. So why not make a third game available for the fleet?

The New Game

In 2023 a couple of Trek games came out, but one of them we targeted specifically for our group, Star Trek: Infinite. Star Trek: Infinite is a 4X Strategy game made by the developers behind Stellaris, but it is truly its own game as the mechanics of space travel are entirely Star Trek. Strategy, combat, resource management, and those pesky Borg, they are all represented here. You can tell there is a lot of love for Trek in the game, almost every step of the way has references to species or planets or other groups that were featured in a show.

For this game, the Security Office will be supporting Campaign Ribbons and Combat Action Ribbons; Joint Action Ribbons will not be available as the type of game does not support the actions (players versus environment) to make Joint Action Ribbons possible. To qualify, play together with your fellow Bravo Fleet members and send in screenshots of the Victory tab screen when either completing a game or ending a session, whichever a group is able to achieve first.

Campaign Ribbons

Campaign Ribbons with Star Trek Infinite are going to be slightly different than other games. Currently these are the only single player awards available. There are a few basic ones, like First Diplomatic Victory and finishing off the Mission tree, which are pretty easy functions of the game. There are two different Campaign Ribbons categories that we are going to pilot on this game, and if successful we will adapt them to other future (or existing) games:

1. Campaign Ribbons will be awarded one each to a group of four players, with one additional ribbon for the organizer, if a team of four people is put together and has a play session of any length. Getting four people together to game a multiplayer session of a game of this type should be celebrated, and what better way to do so!
2. Campaign Ribbons will be awarded to players that complete achievements set out by the developer of the game, on a 1:1 ratio. As of this writing, according to Steam this game has 50 different Achievements ranging from easy to very hard, but they are only awarded in Ironman mode which means if your empire falls you cannot return again to a point in a session, just resume where you left off.

Combat Action Ribbons

The scoring mechanic for Combat Action Ribbons was actually the harder piece to come up with for Star Trek: Infinite. Points are calculated on every game as a breakdown of what you currently have for assets within the game – populations, controlled systems, and parts of your empire you have expanded into. We had to factor this in, and what better way to do that than to use the Victory tab screen. By taking the Victory score as a base, we can award ribbons based on performance as well as session duration – the longer the session, the higher the Victory Score and therefore more ribbons to earn. An example of this screen can be found here:

The formula for this game is as follows:

One Submitted Game x Member Multiplier x ((Victory Score - 500) / 500) x Win/Loss Modifier = Total Ribbons

As always, we can tweak this ribbon structure as needed as we go along, and the more data we have by people playing this game the better chances we have at refining this formula.

The Future

This will be available for awarding at server time noon on January 2nd, 2024. Why? Because everything will not be installed until Tuesday and Captain Harriman wanted to rush out of spacedock again.

Over the coming weeks and months, I ask that we get a few sessions played so that we can try to refine the formula – see what works, what does not, the like. Also couple of people have expressed interest in getting Stellaris adapted to being a supported game in Bravo Fleet so we may see this next, as the scoring and victory conditions are very similar to Star Trek: Infinite. Then again, we may also be supporting something straight from the depths of Hell in Diablo IV.