Star Trek Online

[spelk]

I bollock on about Star Trek, now that I'm an "old man".

http://sugarfreegamer.com/star-trek-serendipity-synchronicity/

Lots of Star Trek Online vids too. :)

[Destraex]

Mate I am so new to STO. I literally only have my first ship and have done 3 missions. Still getting my head around the interface.
There is a lot to this game and some fun stories but the ground combat is bollocks.

[spelk]

Mate I am so new to STO. I literally only have my first ship and have done 3 missions. Still getting my head around the interface.
There is a lot to this game and some fun stories but the ground combat is bollocks.

Ground combat gets better later on, more involved, harder.

Most of the missions up to level 50 are too easy on the ground. You can take anything, pew, pew in the general direction and you'd lather them.

Once you get to the Dyson Sphere Battlezone, or onto Kobali Prime in the Delta Quadrant, you need to have your shit together, or you'll get spanked.

Managing your AI Bridge Officers is paramount. Direct them to defend at a location. If you let them do whatever their AI wants, they will just die, all the time.

I play mainly on consoles, so things are a bit behind the PC version, and also there's less fine control. But it's good shit. :)

[Nefaro]

Ground combat gets better later on, more involved, harder.

I always thought it sucked hard.  The enjoyment sucked.  Then the ground missions started taking longer & longer the further you progressed.  *sigh*

Picked up a 'Lifetime Subscription', back when it was released, because I enjoyed the ship combat quite a bit.  But the ground missions... UGH!  They promised to improve them, but they were still pretty much the same thing afterward - sucky.

Pained me to enjoy half the game quite a bit, yet the other half just ended up being an dull & annoying grind.  If I could've skipped all the ground missions, would've been much happier.

I also recall the ship PvP being fun.  The ones you queued for.  Great Klingon vs Fed battles after it came out.  :)

[spelk]

Trying to come up with a visual representation of the systems at play in STO, to help newbies conceptualise where particular mechanics are at play in the game.

It is a crude diagram, that I'm hoping to find a better more informed replacement for.

BOFF = Bridge Officers
DOFF = Duty Officers

[Destraex]

Thanks for the table.
Any tips on tracking targets. I am finding myself zooming right out in combat and still the enemy seems to be out of my visual range. I am also finding myself wishing I could fight from the bridge. On the ground its the same, would have been much better with standard PC fps controls. Autoaim is understandable in space but not on ground missions. Unless star trek tv series are now going to use tracking weapons. Bit any camera management tips would be appreciated.

How do I get an engineering officer. I have no dilithium. I thought I got some but it must not have been refined? My ship is currently without an engineering officer. I only have energy credits. I did get a few officers in the first missions I did but had no idea what I was doing and chose one at random before getting my new ship which needed one. The mission I have been doing seems to be a community one. Which I suspected but think I might need to get back to the main missions to get another officer? Do you generally get them from rank or missions?

I have a trekky friend who will not play STO because the bridge layouts are too large. I don't think he appreciates that you need an area to fit all mission personnel and enemies into.

At the moment whenever I die I simply respawn and if my ship takes damage it just repairs. Does this ever change? Do I get a number of lives that replenish for each mission?

How does multiplayer work. Do I invite a friend and then he becomes one of my bridge officers? Does he bring his ship? If we PVP do we lose the ship?

I have some duty officers but really am wondering why they are necessary. After you send them on missions do they eventually join your crew when you get more positions available on a larger ship?

[Yskonyn]

I am a lifer on STO as well mainly due to potential I thought the game had prior to launch.
Granted I havent played for 2 years or so now, I found the ground combat clunky and unimmersive and tge space combat went to be repetitive after a while.
No idea where the game stands now though. If lots has changed perhaps I should try again?

[spelk]

Thanks for the table.
Any tips on tracking targets. I am finding myself zooming right out in combat and still the enemy seems to be out of my visual range. I am also finding myself wishing I could fight from the bridge. On the ground its the same, would have been much better with standard PC fps controls. Autoaim is understandable in space but not on ground missions. Unless star trek tv series are now going to use tracking weapons. Bit any camera management tips would be appreciated.

Trouble is I'm playing on PS4, although I have played on PC years ago.

Targetting in space involves pointing a reticule at a ship, and clicking the R3 stick on the controller.
I suspect PC targetting involves clicking a ship in your view, to set it as the active target.

There's some real info here, for PC STO, in the playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJwvmqA1qFQmJXfRLvwttX5kv4a8c5hf2

How do I get an engineering officer. I have no dilithium. I thought I got some but it must not have been refined? My ship is currently without an engineering officer. I only have energy credits. I did get a few officers in the first missions I did but had no idea what I was doing and chose one at random before getting my new ship which needed one. The mission I have been doing seems to be a community one. Which I suspected but think I might need to get back to the main missions to get another officer? Do you generally get them from rank or missions?

No experience of community missions, but the main story lines give you Bridge Officers (BOFFs) as rewards and you pick the type (Tactical, Engineering, Science). AFAIK you can purchase BOFFs from the Bridge officer requisitions NPC in the Fed Starbase, I think it costs EC, but might cost Dilithium. You can mine Dil in the Alpha Quandrant. Slow and tedious grind though. Best way to get it, is run Duty Officer Assignments for Contraband (and then hand it in to a Security Officer on Starbase/Deep Space 9 in quantities of 5 = 2000dil), or Prisoner related assignments and then hand the Prisoners in.

You can dismiss BOFFs, but you lose them and their skills forever. So you should be able to get rid of the BOFF you randomly chose, and hopefully have some resources to purchase an Engineer BOFF. Or run the story missions and wait for one to arrive as a reward.

I have a trekky friend who will not play STO because the bridge layouts are too large. I don't think he appreciates that you need an area to fit all mission personnel and enemies into.

Heh. I hardly go onto my bridge, combat takes place mainly from a 3rd person perspective.

At the moment whenever I die I simply respawn and if my ship takes damage it just repairs. Does this ever change? Do I get a number of lives that replenish for each mission?

Deaths usually cause respawns into neutral zones. In the story missions I don't think you lose much, other than progress through the mission. You can fail various story mission objectives though, through a death or even a wrong choice, and have to do the mission again.

How does multiplayer work. Do I invite a friend and then he becomes one of my bridge officers? Does he bring his ship? If we PVP do we lose the ship?

All players are Captains/Commanders of their own vessel. They lead a team of BOFFs and Duty Officers (DOFFs) as their crew and supporting staff. Your friend would join you in a "Team" / party situation, and you'd fly together, and complete missions together. You could create a "Fleet" if you have 5 players online and teamed at the same time. The Fleet officer is usually in the Starbase. Once in a Fleet, you can then start to invest resources into building your own Starbase, research stations and other fleet holdings. But, they cost big style. Then your holdings can be subjected to other players raiding them (non-destructively).. but it takes a lot of doing to build up a Fleet base with any measure of defense to get to this point.

There is a PvP game, if your ship takes damage in this, then you have to spend EC to get repairs - I haven't dabbled in PvP at all, not my bag baby.

I have some duty officers but really am wondering why they are necessary. After you send them on missions do they eventually join your crew when you get more positions available on a larger ship?

DOFFs are a collectible set of officers who you send on assignments periodically, to harvest resources, and gain experience. You collect them like Pokemon, more or less. As rewards. Or as Colonists, or Prisoners picked up from missions out in sector space. They are important in down-time, because each assignment will take 30 mins-48 hours real time, depending upon mission. So you set them up and then harvest their outcomes later. The skills/traits of your DOFFs affect the success/failure/critical ratios of the mission. Plus you level up Commendation tracks to award you better quality DOFFs from the recruitment source. So doing them regularly and well (ie. not failing, or worse yet failing with disaster - killing off some DOFFs) is key to making progress. You also have a quota of 12 DOFFs who can be used for Active duty, 6 for space, 6 for ground missions. These ones add bonuses to your abilities/skills/cooldown times.. Important if you want to tweak performance to min/max a particular build, or support ground attacks/defenses.

Bridge Officers are your Spock/McCoy/Sulu/Checkov/Uhura, you keep them near, skill them up, kit them out with gear and train them with various skills that complement your build in both space and ground missions.

Duty Officers are your stock crew, your red shirts, they help you in downtime away from the game, and in bonuses on active duty. They can be traded/recruited/killed off.

Admiralty missions allow you to use your ships as a resource to send them on "downtime" missions whilst you are away.

Reputation/Faction missions allow you to grind quest/adventure zones, battlezones (capture the zone etc) for various factions (Omega/Delta/Romulan/Dyson Sphere/Iconian etc) to get to their epic gear sets, both space and ground.

Hope that helps... :)

[Nefaro]

I am a lifer on STO as well mainly due to potential I thought the game had prior to launch.
Granted I havent played for 2 years or so now, I found the ground combat clunky and unimmersive and tge space combat went to be repetitive after a while.
No idea where the game stands now though. If lots has changed perhaps I should try again?

I don't think the core gameplay changed much since launch.  But I haven't played in a couple years, either.

These MMOs just tend to keep piling a bunch of nebulous mission & inventory junk on top of you, layer by layer, as they age.  So when you log back in, there is a mind-numbing amount of annoying crap to sort & read through.  There is usually a bunch of new grindy quest/mission systems, added later, which just adds more confusion. 

This is especially true after a game has switched from Sub-only to Free-To-Play; it turns into a supreme mess and requires a lot of time sorting and studying before actually playing.  I often rage-quit when revisiting one and seeing this chaos.

The last couple times I logged into STO, awhile after it went FreeTP, it was this way to a small extent.  Although I didn't have the ridiculous inventory flood as bad as most MMOs do. 

[Yskonyn]

Even though as much as I like the setting, I dont think I am an MMO player. Where a SP game offers you story without interruption, most MMO's make you grind mindlessly to get to this other story bit that should just be connected to the previous one. I hate that.

[Nefaro]

I don't mind the grind as long as it feels like I'm progressing through levels, and through locales, as I do so.  Actually find it a bit relaxing, when solo grinding, if I enjoy the mechanics and theme enough. 

But the sights, terrain, enemies, etc need to be regularly changing; that makes repeatedly hacking creatures apart and taking their stuff is okay.

It's when "the grind" just keeps you in a static situation for far too long, doing the same thing over & over too many times in the same place, that it gets old quick.  Even if you're mostly doing similar things for long periods, it's not so glaring when the scenery changes regularly.  Unfortunately STO tends to seem like a lot of samey grind after awhile; especially the ground combat for me.

[spelk]

Even though as much as I like the setting, I dont think I am an MMO player. Where a SP game offers you story without interruption, most MMO's make you grind mindlessly to get to this other story bit that should just be connected to the previous one. I hate that.

Considering it is a free to play game, they give you a shit tonne of storied content to play through, and they feed you with free ships all the way up to level 50.

Looking at the story arcs and missions, by level 50 I'd gone through

http://sto.gamepedia.com/List_of_missions

Tutorial
Klingon War
Yesterdays War
Wasteland
Romulan Mystery
Cardassian Struggle

None of it felt grindy, because you are following a pure storyline, in fact until you hit Nimbus III (Wasteland), you don't really see any other players out in your storied missions unless you are teaming with others on purpose. Nimbus III is the first "open world" ground section of the game you encounter other players and their Away teams.

Theres some classic Trek visited in those story missions. Klingons and shapeshifters, Time travel back to Kirk and Spock's time. Intrigue with the Romulans. Battles with the Cardassians around Bajor and Deep Space Nine.

If you like Trek and you prefer story arcs leading to epic space battles, you should give it a go at least till level 50.

The game opens up a bit after 50, you start hitting the Dyson Sphere adventure grounds, and battlezones. Then you go into the Delta quadrant, meet Voyager and face the Borg and the Undine.

From level 30 you can jump into impromptu Deep Space Encounters, which are like a free for all, wave based horde mode.. different enemies, waves of incoming ships and usually larger battleships, or even the quite frantic "escalations" where you get overwhelmed. If you do too many DSE's it can feel grindy. But I felt I didn't have a decent grasp on ship systems and setup to take on the DSE's, so I didn't start them till early 40's. And they were a welcome break from the intensity of the story lines.

Obviously the kicker, is that at 50 you don't get another free ship (the last one you got was at 40, a Tier 5 freebie). If you want you can pay some real money for a Tier 5 ship and a ship upgrade to make it a T5U ship. Which will get you through most of the end game content, but not be AS spicy as a proper more expensive Tier 6 ship. The T6 ships are where ARC want you to be, they're flashy, they're the top ships in the game, and they have their own perks and levelling systems. Plus they get their own unique sub-system.

So if you've pumped in 40 odd hours to storyline and fiddling around in the game, it's at that point they coax you to stump up the cash to invest in a swanky ship. One you'll be using and tweaking through the rest of the content.

There are a horde of differing resources and what not to collect, and your inventory does become a premium well after level 50, but thats about the time the end game sub-systems open up, the Admiralty missions, the Duty Officer assignments, the Reputation missions, the Fleet holdings and Fleet missions etc.. Theres still story content to play through, but your time starts to be distracted towards all these other mechanics to play with.

Plus there are different story arcs for The Klingons characters. Romulans have different stories until about level 30, then you have to decide to join the Federation or the Klingon Empire (although I've been told you can remain neutral). Once the choice is made, you sort of slot into the other factions remaining missions.

I dunno, not trying to suck anyone into an MMO, just expressing the excitement I've had whilst becoming re-aquainted with Star Trek and it's MMO.

[Yskonyn]

As I have a lifetime sub it doesn't cost me anything to take a look again. Installing and I'll make up my own mind in a few days.

[spelk]

As I have a lifetime sub it doesn't cost me anything to take a look again. Installing and I'll make up my own mind in a few days.

How far did you get Ysk, what level, what Tier ship did you settle on previously?

Here's some screenshots (from the PS4 version) of my ones

[Nefaro]

PS4 UI looks a lot different.  Looks a lot cleaner than the old PC version's UI, but maybe they updated that since then..?

I had forgot about their adding the Romulans.  Had been mostly doing Klingon stuff the last few times, which was still rather thin on content, but I didn't get up to many Romulan things.  Hrmm...