Review: Star Trek: Ascendancy:: After 7 plays, I don't want to keep playing

by Kartana

When I first got this game, I was excited to have a good star trek game, being a huge star trek fan. I also like large diplomatic games like dune, and was hoping to get into 4X games with this. The rules were a bit hard to learn at first, simply because there are a lot of different rules, but each individual thing in the game (movement, building, combat, etc.) have simple rules that are easy to remember.

However, as I played with mostly the same group more and more, the meta seemed to change to be more and more combat focused. It seemed like every game, people were attacking earlier and earlier, and this would largely determine who would win. In some of the 3 player games and all of the 4 player games, there ended up being someone early on who became clearly behind and had no chance at winning. Eventually, in my most recent game, the following occurred (I'm playing federation against cardassians and klingons):
Turn 1: Each of us expands to 2 planets, Cardassia and I start projects while klingons encountered a level 1 civilization with a production node, and got it through hegemony.
Turn 2: I go first, I have a system where I can build one node of each type, so I spend basically all of my resources doing this, and put a starbase there for an extra command next turn. The Klingons then expand right toward the cardassians, and swap 3 production trade agreements, and the klingons build a starbase near the center of the board.
Turn 3: I cannot bid on turn order because I have not been contacted. The Klingons go first, build an assault fleet of 6 ships, upgrade weapons, expands toward me, and easily take my one planet. On my turn I now have lost most of my resources, and my starbase, and no real way to recover or defend my home planet. I have 2 ships that are off exploring and 2 production.

I realize that in theory in a position like this, cardassia should consider teaming up with me against the klingons, but they're just as likely to jump on me now that I'm weakened to try to get my home planet for themselves rather than let the klingons get it. I don't feel like I made any mistake and now I've basically lost before getting my third turn.

Trying to focus on culture is also very frustrating because if you build too many culture nodes you will just get attacked by everyone, since if they don't you'll probably just win before they can. It sometimes feels like the right move is just to stop building culture nodes if no one has more than you, unless you only have 1 culture node or are really behind, otherwise people will just attack you.

The exploration cards can also really help you or screw you over: some can give a free project with no cost, others can make you lose 2 commands on the first turn.

The advancements also feel very weak. They require a lot of time to complete and are mostly worse than the weapon and shield upgrades. Having a single upgrade more than someone is a huge help in combat. You maybe want a single one that costs 3 and either does something really powerful or gives a warp. A lot of them also do very little, like the ones that help with exploration or more advancements, especially when you get them late in the game. At first I was a bit skeptical of this, but sitting next to someone who ignored projects, and focused on upgrading weapons and shields really convinced me of this.

I realize some of the optional rules may help with this, but the only two I can imagine really helping are focused research (which seems like it will just lead to people grabbing the couple good cheap projects and won't really help with most of the projects being useless), and humble beginnings (which seems like it will make the game take longer than I think anyone I play with wants, and may make getting good exploration cards early on really strong).