Hi all, my first post here. There wasn't much online about the Starship Creator games (1998 and 2000) except people saying they're boring, but I've played it on and off for 25 years and I think there's a bit more to it. I wrote a deep dive into it, tried out everything like importing my ships into Dominion Wars.
It turns out the missions in the game were created badly which is why people think the game sucks, so I ended up writing a part 2, writing custom mission scripts to try and create as many choices, multiple endings and ways to tackle the story as possible. Immersive sim is a bit tongue-in-cheek but it can do an impressive amount.
Well written missions can really be like mini episodes of the show, so I think it deserves a bit more credit than it ever got!
Thanks for this. Played it a lot as a kid but always felt like I was missing something with how excruciatingly terrible the missions seemed to be. I kinda chalked it up to being shovelware, yet the game definitely had some solid ideas that were never competently executed. They put in the effort to implement the command prompt-mimicking text interface "boss mode", yet any modicum of interactiveness in missions was apparently too much to ask for.
I agree, it didn't do itself any favours, you have to dig very deep but it could have been good. I think we were among many disappointed Star Trek kids!