been playing the new "Star Trek Infinite" game. it is a lot less like Stellaris than people assumed at first, though you can definately see that said game served as a core skeleton for it.
while i haven't progressed past the initial tutorial mode game session (want to run through it till 'victory' date just to see how it goes.. though honestly there isn't much challenge at this point since at tutorial settings, it was really easy to build the federation into a powerhouse and outpace all the others.)
general impressions though.. i feel like there is a gameplay vs aesthetic vs narrative disconnect in it, and it is something thay can't really address without major reworks.
because you start the game with a fairly tiny federation that has little more than the 4 core members and a few of the surrounding systems. you are expected to expand this, discover your neighbors like the betazoids, the Acamarians, the hypurians, the Trill, Bajor, etc.. and then using diplomacy or conquest (depending on how you play, you can actually take the 'section 31' route to things) incorporate those into your nation.
all well and good. core stellaris tyle 4x gameplay there. actually has an improvement over stellaris, since you can use diplomacy to intergrate NPC powers more directly, rather than having to go the convoluted route of creating client states first. and the incorporation of logistical concerns makes you have to think more about deploying your fleets (only science ships and 'hero ships' like the enterprise D can go anywhere). it makes for a good balance given they got rid of stellaris's hyperlanes.
the disconnect is two fold..
first, the timeline feels weird. because as i said, you have a tiny federation, one that matches say, the late 22nd century, right after the romulan war and at the birth of the federation. yet the narrative timeline is that it is right after the Khitomer massacre, in the early 24th century, long after most of the minor powers on the map are supposed to have already joined the federation. further, the units you build are anachronistic. your basic corvette type ship is a Miranda variant, sure. and your cruiser is a Excelsior.. but your Destroyer type, which you pick up very early? the Intrepid class. which feels very out of place. you actually get the intrepids before you get the Enterprise D and Galaxy class. which is just weird. i feel like they should have picked a different class for that destroyer role. Constellation class maybe?
making it weirder, the technologies just don't feel right either. despite taking place (narratively) just prior to TNG era wise, you don;t actualyl start with any of the classic technologies. you don't have photon torpedoes, you have "plasma charges", you don't have phasers, you have "particle beams". at least in the ship construction side, it feels more like the early federation/ENT era that the map does. the fact you have to do a ton of research to get phasers and photon torpedoes is another disconnect from the narrative setting. though the planetary side of things feels more TNG at least, when it comes to tech and upgrade naming.
and as you play you get more and more narrative dissonance.. you have random events with references to ships going to the gamma quadrant not long after the khitomer narrative event.. despite the fact that there is no bajoran wormhole. like wise you get a whole chain of borg related events, including janeway showing up.. yet at no point is there any build up for such, like mention of a ship going missing.
and so on. i feel like it suffered some mid-development detours.. like it probably was being envisioned originally as using an ENT/TOS era framing, but then someone decided "no we need to have picard and janeway and sisko" and thus we ended up with a veneer of TNG ship models, some TNG namedrop events, and some half hearted renaming of the planet management options.
i can only hope that updates fix some of this, either through fixing the weird anachronisms of the map, ship models, and tech tree, or through the addition of 'era variants' for ENT/TOS visuals and alternate event chains that better fit the feel.
don't get me wrong, it's fun to play, and if you like stellaris style grand strategy, it'll probably be ebjoyable to you. but as a trek fan, some of the decisions they made are really baffling.
