I've played it. It's NOTHING like the other Trek games out there, in a bad way.
The system setup follows a sort of 'honeycomb' of connections. The only ships you can build are 'scout', 'cruiser' and 'dreadnought'. Amusingly, for the Federation, this means the initial ships you get are Defiant, Intrepid and Galaxy. In that order!
From there, you can put together up to three task forces, each with their own admiral. The Dominion, for example, gets two "attack" bonus admirals and a "movement" bonus admiral, while the Romulans get two "attack" and one "defense", and Starfleet gets one of each.
The systems themselves are initially held by neutral players like the Xindi, the Ferengi or the Borg. Once you vape those guys, the system is yours. You then have one of three choices-- build a starbase and a mining station, build a starbase and a research station, build only a starbase, or only a mining station, or only a research station. Starbases let you add ships to the fleet. No build time. It's instant. Research involves stuff like "admiral bonus" and "ship turning radius". And the 'additional defenses' of turrets are laughable. There's only one type of turret. And it comes in quad-packs. Taking them out is hard, but they do nothing but provide another target for the enemy AI to shoot at.
And at your homeworld ONLY, you can build a "special weapon", ranging from the Genesis device (target any system held by the enemy with it and all ships and stations there are damaged by 50% automatically) to some sort of system breaker (no warp in, no warp out) or a comically named "healing device", which does what it says on the tin.
The hard part about playing for long is the tedium. Actual space combat is like playing Legacy with monkeys at the helm. You'd have an easier time getting out and hurling the feces yourself. And the simulated "instant" combat mode may leave you wondering why you bothered.
And the sound effects were so very repetitive. I could only put up with hearing the Fed sounds voice saying "this is for EARTH!" so many times before I played on mute for a while. And even then, not for much longer. You can challenge as many adversaries as you want or just one. You still only get three fleets. This is supposed to be 'challenging'. Maybe for a Klingon.
There's no story to it. You can play "campaign" mode but that literally means you play a campaign against one or several races. The end result of your triumph is new and stronger ships to fight with. After a time I was reminded of that DS9 episode where people fought and died on a long-forgotten planet, only to be resurrected and live again.
In other words, La Patience, if you want a quality Trek game for the Wii, keep waitin'. Conquest barely makes the grade as a reasonable space simulation. Never mind the combat. It's barely a first-person shooter with starships as weapons platforms. Rent it first, try it out, yell at it, and then see if you really want it. Believe me, it's not as simple an answer as "yay new Trek game!", but then, the last time I could get away with saying that was ten years ago....
Sorry to ruin the day for y'all.
