If anyone is interested, I would like to set up a weekly game, for about an hour or two. My idea is to use one of the largest sins maps, random or player created and save the state of the game after the session for the following week. Maybe we could have a 'dm' type player as the borg, or just a really hard AI borg. Each of the factions would be controlled by a player, or we could have more than one person playing a faction, say 3 dominion players on a fairly allied team fighting other multi person faction teams. I say fairly because i think a civil war between factions would be interesting.
If anyone is interested in this type of game, lets talk it out here. Any new ideas or suggestions are welcome. Maybe we could make a map just for this kind of game, where certain resources are more available in different regions of the universe so one faction could trade a common resource for something they don't have much of. ie metal rich faction trades with a crystal rich faction.
I've also changed a few things in the mod myself to make it more suitable for a long form 'semi-persistant' world type of game.
Essentially, I slowed down income rates and increased the time to create structures and ships and changed some of the NPC's so that they will still present a challenge without overwhelming players.--this way pirates and such don't send giant fleets every few minutes when it takes a few minutes just to make an excelsior. I created it with the last version of the mod and have just finished editing this release.
For me, having the ships cost more and take longer to produce makes each ship that much more important. In the TV series, losing a ship always seemed to be a huge deal and with these adjustments it creates the same feeling the games I've played. There are still giant fights between massive fleets, but when a fleet is lost it is a MAJOR set back. It forces players to retreat and try to save your ships to fight another day rather than lose a fleet and rebuild it in five minutes. Of course you could invest in ship manufacturing, but it will take of valuable logistics slots, creating an interesting condition of having lots of ships quickly reproduced, but little research upgrades.
I won't release my modifications without permission from the official team, and if you guys would like to have a look at my 'long-form' mod I can give you a link to download it.
I think it would be an incredible experience to have a massive long form game between all of the mighty factions of the star trek universe.....let me know what you guys think.