[Marcus]

For those of you that are still wondering whether the New Horizons mod for Stellaris is worth buying Stellaris, I'd like to share my gaming experiences playing Untied Earth. I've been playing the mod the past few weeks quite a bit, and I think the developers have made huge strides forward. I was able to play a full and enjoyable game, without any serious glitches. I'll try and give you an impression of the gameplay by showing screenshots of my game and telling you a bit about them.

Start up
The developers have payed considerable attention to detail and this is visible even if New Horizons is still in the alpha stage. After installing Stellaris you get New Horizons by going to the Steam workshop. Subscribe to the mod and Steam will install and update it automatically. Then you simply start Stellaris, select the MODS tab, select New Horzions, switch all other mods off, and hit 'Play'.
Straight away you'll notice the changes, because the New Horzion developers have made a pretty cool loading screen Trek style (below):





Once loaded the main menu has also been 'Trekkiefied' (above).

Once you start a new game you'll really start seeing some Trek content, clearly it's grafted on to the Stellaris game and the Trek theme gets a Stellaris twist, but most of the main Star Trek races are there and nearly all their portraits have been modified.





I chose United Earth for my first game, on the assumption that this being the main race, as it were, it would be farthest in development. When you start a new game you start off in your home solar system. Because I chose Untied Earth, we start off in the Sol system, with all the known planets.




In the top menu bar (enlarged below) you can see the main menu options, from left to right: Planets and Leaders (galaxy button), Diplomacy, Ship Designs, Assignments and Research.
Next to that you can see your rescources, from left to right: Energy credits, Minerals en Influence.
Then you can see your Research symbols for: Physics, Society and Engineering.





The Sol system is placed in the Alpha Quadrant. A few of the stars should seem familair (below) ...
Your ships can jump from one system to another using warp drive. Other races have other methodes.
The green planet symbols you can see next to certain system names are colonizable planets.
When you colonize a planet in a neighbouring system you expand your borders and can harvest the resources in that system.
You have to find the resources in the system first by using your science ship to scan all the objects in the system.
While scanning for resources your science ship can discover strange phenomena that turn into research projects or run into hostile aliens ( the red ship symbols).
Then your science ships takes off to safety as soon as it can. Generally you then move your fleet in to show the naughty aliens who's boss in this system, after which your science ship can return and continue scanning.
You expand the number of enviroments that you can colonize by researching them. Then yellow or red planets turn green and can be colonized.





Zooming in to our home system, let's have a closer look at some of the graphics (below): Earth with ships and stations in oribit, Spacedock, which is still in Stellaris style - maybe they'll change that later on? - a construction ship, and a science ship. As you can see the graphic detail is quite good.




Races

Even though New Horizons is still in the Alpha stage, the mod already holds an impressive number of Star Trek races. In the games I've played so far, the different races behaved as you would expect them to: the Klingons, Breen and Tholians were warlike (no offense to House of Kular ), the Vulcans offered peace and research, Ferengi started talking about trade straight off and the Bolians and Benzarians friendly and peaceful. I think this is quite impressive, as the mod makers have to graft these characters using the different settings that Stellaris provides.
Most of the graphics are quite well done, too (see below).





Advanced gameplay

After scanning your home system, building your mining and research stations and starting off your first research projects, you'll need to quickly explore neighboring systems, to find more resources and possibly colonizable planets, although these can sometimes can quite scarce. Unless you have a huge amount of time on your hands, I'd strongly advise to play the game in "Fast" setting.
After a bit of gametime the galaxy starts to looks like this (below):





At first I though it was a bit strange that everyone seemed to be squeezed into the same quarter of the universe, till someone suggested that the mod makers might have done this on purpose, in order to simulate the Alpha quadrant in the Star Trek universe ...




Conclusion

This mod has come quite a long way the past few months. After a LOT of hours of gameplay, I think this mod has reached the stage that you can play Stellaris with an enjoyable Star Trek twist. The race United Earth seems to be well worked out, the characters of the other races act as you would expect them to do and the gameplay just rolled onwards without any significant hitches. But it's going to take a bit more work to really turn this into a pure Star Trek game.
For those of you that like strategy games based in a sci-fi setting, especially if it's in a Star Trek theme, even at this stage of development this mod is definately worth investigating!

[Infinity]

Oh wow that's awesome! I haven't seen many pictures of New Horzions modded content, it would definitely be awesome to see more screenshots of this mod, also a good explanation of the mod!

Good job Marcus!

[Ned'ya]

Firstly thanks for your review its a good insight into the early stages of the game, (kudos ) letting players know what to expect but not revealing too much of the game, secondly; Wow! The mod looks amazing its encouraging to see this level of detail with it still in its infancy.

I am seriously considering a purchase of Stellaris, purely to use this mod (kind of reminds me of Birth of the Federation which i loved!).

[Kerry Malone]

I did a brief playthrough of New Horizons myself. Its certainly extremely enjoyable, although for dedicated Stellaris players, being capped at "Corvette" level warships isn't very helpful.

If you do your homework on the issue, you'll discover that as you level up your technology, you'll change to the next generation. So it'll progress from ENT to TOS to TWOK to TNG and then beyond. So you'll slowly unlock new ship types and variants. For the time being, you're capped at the NX and the NX Refit (which is nice to see btw!!) but for true Stellaris players, you'll feel the pinch at the limitation of the inability to field different classes into a fleet for multi-role combat.

That negative being said - and for me personally, its an extremely small one - for an "ALPHA" version of a game, it is extremely playable. It should be said that after nearly seven years of development, and two different software houses working on it - STO Beta had more bugs in it than Bat Poo, and that was a refined Open Beta prior to launch, when we should've been experiencing the real deal.

I am genuinely looking forward to what they have in store for us with further releases, and moving into TOS. The thought of a fleet of Connie's going after those damn D-7's...

[SCOOP]

yea, can't wait for the mod to see its 1.0 version!

Here's the link to the mod to stay up-to-date with its progression:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...68&searchtext=

What I like the most is that they actually bothered to create the canon galaxy. It's like birth of the federation 2 to me which I played for an eternity back in the late 90s!

[Yuki]

Is the multiplayer stable or is that a long way off still?

[Link238]

Mod has been updated (I assume out of alpha since they dont display the message anymore) and it's a fair bit better than before. It's well worth a try I find. The Borg still aren't playable but by gosh are they ever powerful. Always looking for multiplayer action on this

[Adster94]

Just noticed that they have released a 0.9 update for this, and it seems pretty much all there! Looking forward to giving it a play sometime soon!

[Link238]

oh its pretty cool, still cant really change ship configs yet but I think its comming. By that I mean take a miranda class, add turrets to make it a soyuz class, add a roll bar its a miranda class, take the roll bar off its another class (sorry, cant look up allot of info right now). I believe Infinities is working on something like this, which would be cool

[Marcus]

If there's enough members that want to give the new update a whirl, let me know, I'd be more than happy to host an event for New Horizons.
Let me know if you'd prefer the event to be on a weekday evening or somewhere in the weekend.
Bear in mind that a New Horizons game can take some time (hours) to complete.

[Link238]

hey, I'm always up for playing trek mods, whether it be armada 3, new horizons, etc. If you want my steam just pm me

[Link238]

So I discovered why the borg aren't a playable race in new horizons... They are so freakin OP its scary. I discovered a sneaky way to play as them by starting as the voth, finding them and then switching to them with console commands... they are so massive its scary, though individual models have yet to be finished. They have interceptor, dodecahedron and a few seperate sphere models working right now. So far as I can tell, no cubes or assimilators as of yet

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile.../?id=861427051

[Marcus]

Thanks for the interesting update, Link!
I'm going to have a go at this myself.
Vivi and I were planning to try and restart regular New Horizon events soon.
Hope I don't run into you as Borg

[Link238]

haha, would have to cheat and I think console commands are disabled I'll keep on top of these things for ya