Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if you've been considering getting this mod but holding off, DON'T WAIT ANY LONGER!
I held off until today and that was already too long! This mod is much more complete than other mods still in beta- unique research trees, models for the individual stations (instead of re-using the TEC ones), and even most of the little ship icons you see when you zoom out have been replaced! For instance, the model for the civillian research center is the same as the one that blows up in the episode of Next Gen where Riker gets accused of murdering a doctor working on some new power-thingy or other, but it turns out the doc tried to murder riker as he beamed out and that reflected off the transporter beam and blew up the station.
Oh it's still under construction, but I can tell you that this mod is worth getting. I was twenty minutes in and giggling like a mad-person as my ambassador class outlived its fleet and avenged their deaths against cardassian scum- and I hadn't even encountered another empire yet!
Each ship has voice acting I recognize from Star Trek: Armada, and while it can be unsettling to hear a ship reply in a male voice one minute and a female one the next, it's much more immiersive than leaving in the vanilla sound clips. (Note: notifications for lack of resourses or completion of structures is still vanilla, but considering everything else in the mod itself it's something you can easily overlook. Perhaps that advent lady is really your adjutant or something.)
Even the Phase-Jump trails have been removed and replaced with the traditional dust-streams of the star trek universe. All this content, and they're still working on it. I cannot imagine what it will look like when it's finished, but I know I'll be right there with them when it happens!
