We played a 4-player game of Star Trek Ascendancy today. It was my first chance to try out the Andorians. Unfortunately I ran into to bad luck in the early going and the systems near my homeworld were crap. The Cardassians had some great luck with their start but then ran into a Borg transwarp conduit and decided to poke it. Cube popped out and that tied them up for several turns as they desperately threw suicide attacks at it in order to slow it down enough for them to build up a fleet big enough to take it on. They managed to destroy it in defence of their homeworld but then went and poked the conduit AGAIN! Out popped a 2nd cube...
The Klingons tried to make a beeline for be but ran into several deadend systems which prevented us from linking up. They instead headed off against the Federation and Cardassians. Those two bought the Klingons off with favourable trade deals and the Klingons contented themselves with hanging back and building up their fleets.
The Federation also had bad luck with their systems early on and ran into a bunch of dangerous phenomena. They were able to exploit this and generate a ton of research studying them which they used to develop a lot of tech.
I was finally able to unlock some good systems and start to build my infrastructure and tech up. Never did get to use any of the Andorian’s spiffy abilities though.
Things finally came to a head and the Klingons attacked the Cardassians with some massive fleets....and got spanked pretty hard for it as killing two Borg cubes gave the Cardassians a bunch of tech which beefed up their weapons and shields.
Seeing as how the Cardies were weakened by the fighting, I launched my own attacks and drove pretty deep into their territory. The Feds then allied with them and started threatening me so I had to pull back. It looked like it’d be a 2vs2 fight with the Klingons and I teaming up but then he backstabbed me for no reason other than to get one research token (he was on his 5th gin and sofa by this point...). He also committed genocide and scorched one of my planets because “[he] just wanted to see how the tech worked”. I was far ahead in weapons tech at this point so I destroyed his fleets as punishment but that left me open to a push by the Federation. They tried a soft approach in hopes of wooing my systems away from me and over to their side but muffed the roll.
I had an open run at Earth next turn and Kronos after that but the Cardassians had amassed enough culture to ascend and become dominant and won the game.
Fun times. Very swingy, lots of hilariously poor decisions (some aided by gin) and a generally good time.