The Last Federation is an obscure game made by Arcen, the makers of AI War. I haven’t played this game yet, though I intend to try it at some point but I think the premise just absolutely SCREAMS Star Trek to me and I think if the people who own the Star Trek IP were smart they would go to Arcen and offer them a reasonable development budget to make a more polished spiritual successor to The Last Federation in the Star Trek universe and have basically a guaranteed cult hit created by a studio with a known record of creating games that are interested in mechanical nuance in an oddly similar way to the way Star Trek is interested in narrative nuance to storytelling and perspectives.

Not that Star Trek doesn’t fumble the ball or tell war stories, I am talking about the trek that isn’t too cheesey… (note: slices of cheese are necessary though to engage the audience, I mean in terms of taste not taste), you know… the good trek

description from GOG

From the creators of AI War: Fleet Command comes an all-new grand strategy title with turn-based tactical combat, set in a deep simulation of an entire solar system and its billions of inhabitants. You are the last of a murdered race, determined to unify or destroy the 8 others.

As the last remaining Hydral, it is up to you to create a lasting federation of planets and usher in an era of peace and prosperity to the solar system. Bring spacefaring technology to underdeveloped societies, manipulate their economies, political systems, and diplomatic relations. Do whatever it takes to end strife in your solar system. Remember, when helping civilizations evolve, sometimes they evolve faster when a large multi-headed monster is glaring menacingly at them.

I think in particular any Star Trek game is probably going to need to lean a bit on the lore and story of Star Trek to be authentic… but that requires potentially a lot of work and custom story writing but the translation is so obvious here that I am sure Arcen studios could look at the Star Trek universe and basically just map most of their pre-existing mechanisms in The Last Federation to their Star Trek closest equivalent and be off to the races with setting up naturally evolving dynamic stories, plausible “what ifs” in the Star Trek universe, without having to do a large amount of storywriting from scratch or feel constrained by needing to get an entire plotline and details approved by an overarching IP holder…

Just an interesting thought!