Ups & Downs From Star Trek: Infinite
6. UP: Five Years Plus
Finding anomalies, finding ANYTHING takes a long time. Trust us, we’ve done it. The 24th and 25th Centuries seem to fly by and your technology doesn’t seem to grow at the same rate.
Sending off a ship or three to complete survey missions is absolutely a step in the right direction but after a while, you might find that both Picard and Riker have become too old to captain and the flagship is being commanded by one of your non-descript admirals. this can be a problem if one of the missions further down the road is reliant on the use of the formerly mentioned Picard.
Take for example the discovery of a Borg Cube in a surveyed system. Without Jean-Luc this special project sits festering and will for a very, very long time… read always. Familiarity with the Mission Tree and early expectations is vital to getting an empire into the right place at the right time. It may take a few restarts and trial and error to get the right balance but once there, it could all sail to victory.
A little down to slip in here is that you can end up with a ship "stuck" in hyperlane or a hazard so keep a save file before you do anything particularly risky!