SaneAmongInsane said:
Is there any game that really would give one that command experience?
Star Trek Online is probably the best current bet. It's got a combination of space combat and ground combat, and as you level up and play through missions you get Bridge Officers you can assign to specific positions on your ship/away team. Each officer has their own stats and abilities; in space they'll give you active or passive abilities that boost your damage/defense/ship speed/firing speed/etc., on the ground you get a full party to run around with. Space combat plays out a bit like a typical hotbar MMO, but it's a lot more fun in my opinion because you have the addition of three-dimensional space that you're actually moving through. Plus, you can automate all of your weapons so that you don't need to continually bash keys to keep firing. Ground combat plays out like a pretty generic third-person shooter. It's serviceable, but unless it's been updated heavily since the last time I played (admittedly a while ago now) it's definitely not the high point of the game. And unfortunately the game's story/missions are a bit hampered by the fact that it's an MMO, so you aren't really subject to a lot of tough decision-making or anything.
Otherwise,
Star Trek Online takes its space gameplay cues rather heavily from an older title called
Star Trek: Starfleet Command III. It's a bit of a pain to get running on modern systems and it won't run at widescreen resolutions, plus the combat of the game plays out more like naval combat than space battles, but it's still quite solid EDIT: and heavily moddable. I'm not sure what state the two games preceding it are at on modern PCs.
The diplomacy, the making tough decisions?
Unfortunately, not too many approach this. The one recommendation I would really consider is
Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, which is a turn-based 4X game that bears many similarities to
Masters of Orion II, if you ever played that. Basically, you start the game by choosing one of five factions (Federation, Romulans, Cardassians, Klingons, or Ferengi) and setting up all of different factors you want (technology starting levels for all of the factions, galaxy size, presence of minor races like the Bajorans, Random Events, difficulty, etc.) and then it throws you into a big old expansion and conquest strategy game. You can form alliances, get minor races to join your faction, go to war, etc. etc., but the AI can be a bit picky-choosy at times and really loves getting stuck in loops of forming and subsequently breaking non-aggression pacts. Also, the game is plagued by a memory leak that will still impact modern systems, and tends to slow everything down a few hundred turns into a game.
Was the game based off the new movies any good?
By most accounts, not particularly.
If you're a fan of real-time strategy games,
Star Trek Armada and
Armada II are pretty decent. And the aforementioned
Voyager: Elite Force is a rather solid first-person shooter (its sequel was apparently quite good as well, but I never played that one).
