Star Trek General

>salt vampires
The last one went extinct in that episode; that's why they never used them again.

I like how you pretend you have any control on an anonymous image board. Here's your (You)

It is annoying how Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans are the only TOS aliens who reappear in the 24th century shows. Others get mentioned off handedly in a dialog, but never seen. Featuring Andorians and Tellerites was one thing that Enterprise did right.

modiphius.com/star-trek.html

Bad news for anyone hoping for post-TNG. Seems to be NuTrek.

>1. Which Star Trek shows will the game cover?
Star Trek Adventures will cover Star Trek the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise as well as all of the original and Next Generation films. It does not include the new reimagined films by JJ Abrams.

Reading is fundamental.

Whoops, I am wrong, post-tng confirmed as well as TOS.

So how is STO?

I've got it downloaded but I haven't touched it yet

Better than other popular MMOs?

Kinda typical. I like the space combat though, reminds me of Star Fleet Command. You will get a divided opinion on it, I like it though, but that is because blue antenna-ed space babes.

They do, but again, not in a huge way.
So, take the Gorn Confederation (R6). In the basic rulebook they have 2 pages, on which 5 paragraphs are about the races history, the rest is about the ships. In Advanced Missions there is another page about the ships. Module R4 has more pages on the ships and includes the first picture of a Gorn!
The starship books simply collect all the information.
So in SFB, that's about it. You get more hints and bits through scenarios, but you have to dig (but this will include planets and the odd interesting note). And also with the Captains Log magazines (which I don't have a lot of), they do contain stories and art, but mainly about the ships and the combat. The other modules will contain history how it relates to the race, so Module J (fighters) will give details of their fighters, the Y (early years) gives a few paragraphs of their early ships) etc.

So, turn to Prime Directive, and we'll use GURPS 4e. We have a few paragraphs about their race and their statistics for playing. We reuse the same image, but there are a couple more scattered around the book.

So that's a typical race. Naturally, the Feds, the Roms and the Klingons get a lot more treatment (and have their own Prime Directive sourcebook) but the other races give you that.

But if you can combine it all, you do have a lot. And ADB do have a habit of putting the odd bit here and there, so in the middle of Away Log, you find medals and ranks for some species!

So, to actually answer your question -
It depends on which race you want. If you want the Feds, Roms or Klingons then there is a Prime Directive sourcebook.
The Jindarians have a nice module (F1) which contains a lot of good stuff, from appearance to biology and more. Probably the best for the sort of information you seem to be after.

>Omega and Magellanic cloud
In my opinion, not really. If you're space fairies and space dragons, then perhaps, but nothing that adds to the game.

That help?

OK then, how is the space combat?
That would be my key attraction

Space-combat sims are in my top 5 favorite genres

I fucking miss Freespace 2 though this looks to be the capital-ship side of that

Also important I guess, how's the space combat compare to other space MMOs, like EVE?

Good species selection and space combat, mediocre ground combat, boring endgame content and lots of bugs. Amazing cosmetic system though. You will probably love it as much as you hate it

Is the space combat very solo PvE, or are there decent faction PvP squads going around?

Space combat is fun. It's the main draw for me. I also like that I can play it singleplayer most of the time.

However, ground combat can be kind of a slog (it's better now than it used to be). They used to have all character traits in one pool and you had to pick between being good at space or ground, or crappy at both. They split them, so it's no longer as bad.

They did a skill revamp, which helped. However, I really recommend looking up what everything does either on the wiki or the stobuilds subreddit because STO does not do a good job of teaching you how to properly play the game.

Also, because they give out ships pretty regularly throughout the year (anniversary, summer, and winter events) you can get a top tier starship without paying for it. It'll be an alien ship though, usually, and not a proper one for your faction. However, you can do fine in a tier 5 ship (the last tier you get to pick from for free, which include the Sovereign).

It's probably not what you're expecting. It reminds me of a more action-oriented/MMOified Starfleet Command which is why I like it.

I really like the space combat, probably the best Trek combat presented on videogames. It starts out fairly slow on the first levels, but as you get better skills and ships it makes you feel like a goddamn force of nature. Probably my favorite part of the game

PvP is basically nonexistent. If you primarily enjoy PvP, STO is not the place for you.

For a long time, my proud klingon warrior had to fly on a hot pink time ship because it was the only free tier-6 ship I could get. Eventually I just decided to shell out some money for a Kolasi naussie ship. Glorious

When it comes to GMing a star trek RPG, is it better to try and design 'episodes' to try and get the feel right or to simply give players the objective and cover your arse with a few probable encounters?

Because I've been looking a lot at how Rogue Trader plays and it has got me thinking about how that game seems to work best when you just give the players a restriction they probably want to abide by (keep thing mostly intact for Profit!, Abhor the mutants, traitors and occasionally aliens but sometimes not because money can be made from them) and then just letting them roll with it/suffer the consequences.

But whilst 40k is pretty easy to 'get' and suits a typical player's mindset of get loot, get stronk, fight baddies, well star trek seems like it might be a bit harder to get people to work with the character of the setting without going too crazy from the power available to them from even a small starship's capabilities. Like what about NPC captain vs player Captain? Would you trust your group to have a designated leader player who does actually have all that authority plus responsibility of command, or is that better left in the hands of the GM?

I say just make the captain an informal "party leader" role like players often take anyway, and mechanically make him the Party Face type character.

The captain has general authority, but department heads can tell him to fuck right off in their own specialties.
If the chief of security wants extra guys on the away team, there's going to be extra guys on the away team. If the chief of medicine says there's a quarantine, nobody is going through that door. If the chief of engineering says the ship needs to stop, the ship stops.
The FASA RPG got it right when it made all the PCs heads of departments on board the same ship. Yeah, the captain has ultimate authority, but every other PC has authority as well, and none of them can throw their weight around willy nilly.

I really enjoy it. I've been playing fairly steadily for 4-5 years (not quite since launch); it's one of those games that, while I might go on hiatus for a month or two, I've always come back to.

I'd put it at better than SWToR, better than WoW (I just don't like WoW so take that with a grain of salt).

The writing for the quests is okay, but when you get to the end-tier stories (see: Dyson Sphere stuff, Iconian War) it's fucking fantastic. The Iconian War arc, in particular, feels really Star Trek to me--I think Cryptic's writing team did a DAMN good job with it.

I love the space combat side. It has its limitations--while it's 3D, you're limited to up/down angles of about 75 degrees, for no real reason other than "just because." On the other hand, the MAPS are enormous--since the game treats ranges as kilometers and assigns an arbitrary range of 10km to your weapons, fights are fought at knife-range compared to the hundreds of thousands of km you'd hear reported in the shows. On the other hand, space maps can easily be 120km or so to a side.

Lots of flashy colors, amazing effects (seriously, Gravity Well is one of my favorite bridge officer abilities), your shields glow as a sphere around the ship when you get hit, the camera shakes if you take a torpedo hit...there are a lot of really nice QoL touches.

As anons have said, ground combat can be more annoying; it IS better than it used to be, because it feels like your gear matters more, as opposed to the old days where you either roflstomped a map or got slaughtered without apparent effort.

The mission stuff is generally solo PvE, though you can team up on it; there are PvE queues that you can join to grind for endgame stuff, and that's all 5-man team.

Obviously it wouldn't be a replacement for a more traditional RPG, or for a more "in-between" RPG, but what do you all think of the idea of making a full-on statless storygame with a Star Trek theme?

Dice rolls would just determine the direction the narrative takes, and the player (or GM) who just rolled will be the one who takes the action that makes that happen.

So maybe you roll badly and one of your attributes is "leadership." So you try to make a big speech and just as everyone is getting inspired, something happens, interrupting you. Maybe you've just said the "all seems lost" part of your speech and just before you can add the "but," a torpedo hits the ship, leaving everyone with a pretty negative message. Or maybe you just botched the speech. It's your call. You're the one in charge of the story for the moment.

And then the GM rolls and does really well. So now the enemy is boarding your ship and grabbing people. This is what they wanted. They're taking captives to use for strange experiments.

Now it's the turn of the mechanic. He rolls quite well, too. So he describes how he jams their transporters so that, for now, they can't get the coordinates to beam back to their own ship with the prisoners.

Eventually it gets back to the captain, who also has the "tricky bastard" trait. So he swaps shirts with a redshirt, gets himself captured, and puts a phaser to the back of the person leading the boarding action, thus forcing the rest to throw down their arms, winning the scene (by preventing the capture of your people) and starting a new one.

My examples kind of suck, but you get the idea. There are no character builds, just a list of approaches your character tends to take when trying to solve problems.

Perhaps there could be a secondary mechanic for incurring some temporary or long-term penalty in order to win a scene you should have lost, to represent desperate measures.

Thoughts?

>PvP is nonexistant

Really? That seems like a huge waste

Thank you for that. I've been looking for a collection of LUG PDFs that wasn't a torrent.

I agree with the story and writing part. The guys at cryptic are pretty decent when it comes to hooking you in, and the little details about the game and the setting they add are pretty good. They even expand on some of the details about the show's species that were only implied. Andorians are the muscle of starfleet. Pakleds are smarter than they look. Gorn are as smart as they are strong, with the most advanced tech on the klingon side. Nausicaans find combat hilarious. Orions are clever and ruthless, but also pretty good engineers. Little details, represented on ships or dutty officers, but I really enjoy them

>Andorians are the muscle of starfleet
The sexy sexy muscle.

Yep. Just remember: Bones got to order a lot of shit with the magic words 'Doctor's Orders'. Everyone should be respected within their own area of expertise.

It does man, you are awesome.

PvP was poorly implemented from the start. Klingons were PvP only. They had no story, no end game. Their only original purpose was to fight Federation characters.

PvP doesn't occur on the sector map, there is no way for Klingon fleets to attack Federation worlds or Starbases. No strategic back and forth. No front. It was just a meaningless fight on a generic space map where you were rewarded with feels for how hard your DPS penis was.

If there had been more to it than that, PvP might have flourished - but there wasn't, and it wasn't want Klingon players wanted anyway. They wanted glory and honor and pretending to be a Klingon in the Star Trek universe, not being resigned to the PvP only ghetto.

Thankfully, they fixed that (sort of). Klingons have a story campaign like the Feds. PvP is now just an atrophied, vestigial lump that has a hardcore following, but most players ignore it.

You could make the Captain an NPC, who gives the PC's tasks and lets them go about solving it in their own way. Your mileage may vary.

Otherwise it's the Federation. They're a massive beuracracy. They must have a strict report-filing and mission-review system in place (actually, isn't there an episode where Picard gets called in for his yearly competency review or something?) If your PC's start going a bit mad with power, have the sector admiral bring them in and chastise them. If they continue, play the game as Rogue Trader but in the Star Trek universe, see how they like being Marquis...

You could try something with this system.

>play the game as Rogue Trader but in the Star Trek universe, see how they like being Marquis
Alternatively, play in the Mirror Universe.

>Rogue Trader
>Not playing Ferengi

Think about it:

>D'kora Marauder
>One PC is the Rogue Trader (a Ferengi) representing a consortium
>Other PCs are mercenaries, Klingons, Cardassians, Nausicans, etc.

What could go wrong?

On come on mate. It's already IN the big collection of Star Trek RPGs for these threads.

You don't need to plug it every single thread.

Don't. Feed. The. Troll.

Every (You) you give them just encourages them.

Making the captain an NPC is a total cop-out. The tension and conflict between players that you're so afraid of is the heart of a good Star Trek plot. It's where a lot of the drama comes from. You've got these ethical dilemmas with no clear best option, different crew members will naturally take different stances on them and argue with each other, and the captain has to synthesize those opposing views together and at the same time be the voice of Federation doctrines and principles. See Kirk constantly serving as mediator between Spock & McCoy, or Picard talking his crew out of the course of action that FEELS right in favor of the action that IS right. And if the captain fails and takes too much unilateral or illegal action, the logical consequences of that make for an amazing story, too.

Fuck you man I spent fifteen minutes tapping away at Google trying to remember what that shit was called, "Love and lasers? No. Phasers and pheelings? No." Before I finally got it, all to help some schmuck run his shitty freeform. I don't even like Star Trek, the post just caught my eye on the frontpage.

And if there is an archive 'for these threads' then why isn't it in the OP?

Just 1/10 overall poor form chap you need a stern talking to.

Good TV and good roleplaying aren't the same thing.

You better have had given him a Kumari.

Not only that, but a PC-as-captain has the ability to veto and punish other PCs. They also can be punished by higher authorities, thanks to Captains having more responsibility, but that doesn't change the IMMEDIATE power they have over other PCs.

This. In Rogue Trader it doesn't matter, because a bridge is less a place of discipline and more like an episode of Blackadder Season 2. You would need a really solid, really mature group to pull off a PC as Captain.

Space combat works in following way.
Your ship has four different power gauges that determine how well your ship performs, you can change the power gauges either in a simplified manner where you click one power type and it concentrates most of the power there, or you can access some sliders and set power levels however you like them.
These changes stay put after being set, so you don't have to stop and set them up again each time you get in a battle
>WEAPONS
Self explanatory, the more power you got there the harder your weapons hit. If going with a beams only build, the best idea is to keep this constantly capped at 125 ultimate hardcap.
>SHIELDS
Determines how fast your shields recharge and how much shields you got per shield facing (which there are four, front, sides and rear.)
>ENGINES
Determines your ships impulse speed and adds dodge chance, particularly useful for escorts and such cannon boats
>AUXILIARY
This is your space mana bar. If you want to perform space magic (science abilities) you need this power. As a cruiser or any other ship that doesn't concern itself with space magic, you can just use this gauge to feed the others, especially with auxiliary power to batteries skill.

>HOW SHIELDS WORK
Each shield facing has their own max shield health and you can transfer shield power during combat from other facings to the one under fire (NOTE: you can do this automatically with tactical team bridge officer ability that you can give to your tactical boffs).
Shields heal constantly, unless something knocks their power/system out or they are eaten up completely, in this case you have to wait a moment till they start recharging.

>WEAPONS
Weapons fall to two main categories, energy weapons and kinetic weapons, from there they fall into more categories, such as beam arrays, heavy dual cannons, turrets and so on and so forth (with kinetic weapons this is a bit easier as there are only two types, torpedoes and mines).
To be continued...

Yes I did. I probably shouldn't have cropped that sexy beast out.

Probably why L&F has the Captain incapacitated or otherwise unavailable.

You're very welcome, if you have any other questions like this, or specifics, just ask and I'll see what I can do.

>Shields
>how much you have per facing

It doesn't actually affect that number. Some consoles do however. What power level determines is the shield's hardness, which affects how much damage is done to the shield (essentially, damage resistance for the shield HP).

>Auxiliary

It also does not work that way. Power level determines the base effectiveness of healing, exotic, control, and drain abilities. The higher the power, the more HP you get from heals, the more exotic damage Gravity Well does (or Destabilizing Resonance Beam), and the more shield/power drain abilities like Tachyon Beam, Tyken's Rift, and the like do.

Aux2Bat is fine if you're trying to get max DPS by keeping cooldowns to their global minimum, but it's not good for science heavy builds or even power drain builds because flushing your Auxiliary power means less effective power drain.

It also means you have to time your own heals really well.

DIVERT ENERGY TO FORWARD SHIELDS
MAXIMUM OUTPUT, I NEED WARP 9.99 NOW
>b-but sir
WE ARE RAMMING THIS SHIELD AT WARP SPEED INTO THE ENEMY
>b-but sir
FIFTEEN ORKS ON A DEAD MAN'S HULK
>s-sir
LOOKIN' DOWN DA BARREL OF A GUN
>I'm giving her all she's got sir
GRUNTIN' TO EACHODDA
>It doesn't make sense to-
THROUGH BIG SHARP TEEF
>You can't divert power to shields and war-
SAYIN' "THIS ONE'LL GIVE US FUN

Cont.

From there weapons further diversify into multiple different energy types, there are also some more rare weapons that combine two energy types, this tend to be lock-box or reputation weapons though.
Energy types include your familiar phasers, plasma and disruptors, each having their own little chance on doing something nasty at the enemy ship (In order, shut down one random system for 10secs, set the hull on plasma fire that does direct hull damage and ignores shields, -10% defense stats).
There are also other types and it is encouraged to test out other energy types till you find the one that pleases you.

>CONSOLES AND WHY THEY MATTER
Amount of these per ship varies, both in total and in kind.
Consoles are what you stick to your ships console slots, they give modifiers to your ships stats and some even give activated skills (or they give a activated skill and no modifications, that can occur too).
Console slots are divided into three categories, tactical, science and engineering, which in order mainly handle consoles that increase critical hit chances, increase damage, increase shield heals, increase hull durability against different damage types and so on and so forth.
Do note that there are some consoles which are universal, that means that you can stick them on any slot (engineering, don't waste a good tac or sci slot for a special console).

>ENGINES, SHIELD GENERATORS, DEFLECTOR ARRAYS AND WARP CORES
All of these are also things you can find as loot and replace your ships old ones.
With shields it is recommendable to pick the ones with fastest shield regen.
These often come in sets as either in quest rewards or in reputation grind.

>WEAPON SLOTS
The amount of these varies per ship, most cruisers have a total of 8 with 4 in front and 4 in rear.
Sci ships mostly have only 3 for front and aft while escorts have a whopping 5 or 6 for front and 3 or 2 for rear.
Based on what ship you have, this can limit your weapons choices.

Cont...

Playing Science has opened to me the wonderful world of 'Oh shit, Aux power and exotic damage exist'.

Then I shattered a guys bulkheads with resonance, kicked him in the time balls with temporal anomalies and ate him with a black hole.

I have decided I really like science.

Abolishing MACO always struck me as an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Awesome reply guys, thanks! I'll be checking out STO this weekend I guess.

Is there much in the way of clans or is it more scattered PvE than dungeon raids?

I started with Science. It turns out, being a Space Wizard is really fun.

There are fleets (guilds basically) and now armadas, which are alliances of fleets. There aren't raids per se, but there are group PvE missions that can require both good gear, good teamwork, good communication, and good experience with the game to complete.

Sounds perfect. Slightly disappointed there's no real PvP, but good PvE raids make up for that.

The game seems like it would be more fun than say, WOW, getting to max level where you have to grind just to get to the actual meat of the game.

On that topic: A lot of the PvE missions are not that hard to do with just random pick up groups but some of the rewards comes from optional stuff so you'll want to have coordination if you want the big shinies.

Taking out 3 enemy dreadnaughts within 1 min of each other on Elite for example will require some coordination even if you can just brawl until they retreat to win the mission itself.

Thanks for correcting me, you can see that i main with cruisers and only think about shields as a secondary matter mostly.

cont...

It is advisable to use either dual beam banks or heavy dual cannons on front slots if you have more than 4 of them, which most likely means that you are riding an escort and this further means that you can use HDCs which have the tightest firing arcs and highest damage per weapon cycle.

>Can i ram?
Yes, with a certain captain skill, but trust me, it's not worth it, its best used as auxiliary gtfo from fubar situations button.

>How do ships matter? Can i use X ship if my captain is Y?
It doesn't really matter if your captain is tactical or sci oriented when picking a ship, you can have a engineering captain and fly a sci ship just as well as a sci or tac captain would.
Ships decide what sorta consoles you can have, what sorta bridge officer layout you can use and in some cases what weapons to use.
It is advisable to pick different kinds of ships as you go through levels, your last freebie ship is given to you at level 40 when you become rear admiral (lower half) and this ship decision you better nail, unless you want to burn some dilithium to get another one from these tier 4 ships.

>SHIP TIERS AND WHAT THEY DO
Ships come in tiers ranging from 1 to 6 with lowest being worst.
With each tier ships get more weapon slots and bridge officer seats as well as console slots, with tier 6 ones having most and 4 having sufficient amounts.
You can get a tier 6 ship without paying for one during events which are held thrice a year (DO NOTE THAT THESE SHIPS VARY IN TYPE AND SAME SHIP ISN'T AWARDED TWICE, SO YOU GOTTA GET LUCKY WITH WHATEVER THAT YEARS WINTER OR SUMMER SHIP HAPPENS TO BE).

>OTHER SHIP TYPES
Other than the regular cruisers, science ships and escorts, there are also dreadnoughts (which essentially combine a cruiser with some other ship or just with another cruiser) and carriers.

CONT...

>H TLER
Wow.

>there are also dreadnoughts (which essentially combine a cruiser with an immobile block of metal.

Fixed that for you. Fuck you turning speed 3.

1) How much do ships cost if you decide to buy? I read it has a player market so you can buy ships from other people.

2) Is there ever any reason to run a lower "tier" ship if you can be running a higher tier one? Excepting just for looks of course.

>Shields

I'm going to have to disagree again. Shield regen is not a terrible thing. Having shields means less damage is done directly to the hull, and they apply a massive damage reduction to torpedoes, but...

There are four types of shields in STO:

>Standard Shield

Doesn't do anything particularly noteworthy. Has a 10% damage bleedthrough (which means, 10% of the enemy's damage goes directly to the hull).

>Covariant Shield

Has bonus shield HP. More shields mean its harder to deal damage to your hull, but bleedthrough can still kill you. 10% bleedthrough on these.

>Regenerating Shield

Regenerates faster, but usually has less shield HP to compensate. Also has a 10% bleedthrough.

>Resilient Shields

They have 5% bleethrough rather than 10%. This can mean the difference between scraping through a fight on Go Down Fighting as a tactical captain in an escort, and just plain dying.

There are positives to each (except the standard shield) but none of them is "better" overall than others. I'd recommend checking out the STO Builds subreddit for more info.

Personally, I prefer resilient shields, and I keep them up with my massive Aux power heals.

Note: Heals are super important to Tank builds. That seems bizarre, but enemies can do so much damage and resistances have diminishing returns, which means they can kill you if you're not constantly healing to compensate. It's not impossible to get 100k+ hull HP on certain ships, but even that won't save you if you're being hit by everything around you (which good tanks should be drawing that kind of threat).

Zen is 1000 to $10, T6 ships cost $30, lower tier ships cost less.

You can buy lockbox ships on the exchange, but that usually requires several million (and usually tens or hundreds of millions) of ec to buy them, which is out of reach of f2p players (I do recommend removing the 10 million ec cap that you have as a f2p player - it will make life easier down the road). Another good purchase is the account bank (without which, its hard to impossible to transfer things between characters, depending on what the item is).

Space combat is definitely fun and there are a lot of great options for customizing both your character (or characters, seeing as you can customize your Bridge Officers, which are themselves a very cool feature) and their ship, but that's about it.

If the developers had actually included some actual role-playing elements and diplomacy and exploration systems that aren't garbage it could have been great. Unfortunately, all they seem to have focused on in seven years is adding new, higher-stat enemies and new higher-stat weapons to kill them with just like any generic, hot-key spamming, endless grinding MMO. It all adds up to one massive missed opportunity.

Of course, I did get a couple hundred hours out of it for what it was.

>Featuring Andorians and Tellerites was one thing that Enterprise did right.

'Even a broken clock' and so on.

If you want a chan fleet, search for Vidya fleet in fleet lists and send some messages in /v/ chat channel for invites if you want.

Also...
Cont...

>FACTIONS
The game has three factions (well four kinda sorta) in it, the Federation, Klingon empire, Romulan republic and as a latest addition, the original series era starfleet.
The first two are full factions of their own, with Romulans having to pick a side for which to act as a privateer for (PvP reasons) and the last one is a sub-faction that after having done 6 missions in the 23rd century, gets time warped into start of feddie story arc (2409) and then acts like a regular feddie.
Feddies, roms and klinks have their own ship rosters which only they can use (well roms can use feddie or klink ships till tier 4 thanks to the whole raider business) and 23c feddie gets a different starter ship (Feds are cryptics favored children and thus have highest amount of different ships).

>BUYING A SHIP
Tier 5 and 6 ships can be bought from the zen store, zen you can get either by sacrificing your wallet to the ever hungry cryptic or by gathering dilithium, refining it and exchanging refined dilithium for zen in zen exchange.
There are also fleet ships, which are available only if you are in a fleet and have all the needed stuff, which is fleet credits (you gain these by joining in fleet construction by sacrificing random crap and duty officers to the fleet construction projects) fleet provision packs (which happen to be such building projects that you need to do for your fleet to get some, they get consumed on use and so you gotta get more of those supplies when they are depleted.
And finally, a handful of fleet ship modules, which you can get either from zen store or from in game exchange for energy credits which are the "main monetary unit of the game" according to cryptic (well, you gotta shell out some energy credits while doing rep projects or getting rep items too).

>I want to cuddle with an Uhura cosplayer.
That one's from a porno.

Lower tier ships can complete the story content just fine, and even participate in the PvE queues... however, it requires a level of skill that most players don't have. I have an engineer captain who is taking the Tier 1 Forever challenge in an Oberth class.

There's at least a few who've completed the story arcs in a bog standard Miranda.

...

> (Feds are cryptics favored children and thus have highest amount of different ships).

Well, a lot of that is that...well, Romulans and Klingons don't have many canon science ships.

I'd love to see them introduce a pure science warbird for rommies.

1) Those ships are lock-box reward ships and cost astronomical amounts of dough, counted in over hundred million EC.
Other ships include the ships you can get for free which if not used a free ship token on, cost refined dilithium.
Then there are zen ships which are either special versions of these early ships, or late game ships like the tier 5 or 6 ships.
Finally, fleet ships are gained the way i explained here 2) To make those shiny tier 6 ships in STF's look obsolete when you are the only one running a competent build with decent equipment on your ship.
But generally, the bigger the tier, the better the ship too, since the reasons listed here Again, thanks for adding details i either missed or fucked up in my mega posts.

No problem. I just wanted to be as helpful or informative as I could. When I first got into STO I had no idea how anything worked, and I took something like 6 months off. When I came back, I was in even worse straights. Couldn't remember the barely functional stuff I had figured out before.

So, I researched everything. I went from dying repeatedly to a D'deridex in the Romulan arc (the mission with the shield around the planet and the Romulan woman you're returning home), to being able to survive both D'deridexes (D'deridexi?) in the mission with my science vessel.

Now I have a 100k+ hull dreadnaught, plasmonic leech, and the only way I die is when I draw too much threat and everything on the map targets me (happens a little too often for my taste).

If you ever decide to actually spend real money on a ship, make sure that it's a tier 6, and tier 6 only. You'll be using those most of the time, since they are the end game ships. Anything below that is just a waste of money.

>lock-box reward ships and cost astronomical amounts of dough, counted in over hundred million EC.

Ehhh.... is there no direct $$$ conversion for that or is that the purely-in-game currency and you could give me some kind of playtime estimate to save up for it.

Some of the ship's I'd want are apparently lockbox, namely DS9 Cardassian, Breen, Dominion stuff I'm interested in.

...

It depends. Quickest way to get EC is to buy lockbox keys with zen, sell them on the exchange, and buy the ships that way. Otherwise, it depends on a couple of factors, including whether or not you open lockboxes (to sell stuff in them), whether or not you craft, and how good you are at playing the Exchange.

Also...

>Breen

Those were event ships. There's no way to get them beyond having participated in the limited time event. I only have the Breen dreadnought, for example. I wish I'd been able to get some of the others (like the frigate, so I could use that instead in my dreadnought's hangar).

>When I first got into STO I had no idea how anything worked

Join the club, Cryptic absolutely sucks at explaining their own game to newcomers.

Well, let's see...
One way to get EC would be by buying keys or fleet ship modules and putten them on sale.
You get a 10 pack of keys for 1125 zen (or 1 key per 100 zen) which translates to 11,25 dollars per 10 keys and keys currently sell at a price of something close to 5M (id have to start up the game and go look on the nearest exchange to be certain)so, to get 1 or 200M EC you would need to use... some 45 dollars if you buy keys and only keys (which might be the better choice here).

This is the quickest way, the less quick less deadly to your wallet way is to grind that shit and with one character you can quite easily make 1M per day with one mission where you drive with your ship across the sector spaces.
Otherwise you could do random missions, grab the shit enemy mobs drop and pawn them at nearest item vendor.
This way it would take at least half a year, unless you go full no life or something.
Oh and you can also get EC by doing Doff missions and admiralty missions, which are just shit that you can turn on, go watch a movie and they are ready when they are ready.

Aight, i went to exchange and can confirm now that the keys go for about 5M per piece.
As for galors, the cheapest one goes currently for a bit over 100M, so the price of one of these in dollars would be something like 20 or so bucks.

I used to make 50m EC a day crafting upgrades and selling them on the market in packs of 100.

Thanks, that puts it into a perspective I can wrap my head around. It's not even a Tier 6 ship, so...

Good news for me then

Watched beyond. It's a great movie. Not the best movie.

However, the Beastie Boys Scene and all the plot contrivances that led up to that point are the greatest stroke of genius in the last 10 years of cinema.

Well it's one of the ships that can be upgraded for free into a Tier 5-U ship, which is sorta like a tier 6 ship, but it lacks a ship trait.
Ship traits are things that tier 6 ships have and it becomes available after you have mastered that ship.
Ship mastery becomes a thing with tier 5-U and tier 6 ships, where the higher level your ship is, the better it gets thanks to some shit related perks.
Ultimately you unlock the ship trait which you can then mount on your traits menu onto your captain which causes it to be effective on any and all ships you might fly after that.

Now that you say it, they even managed to work in a Chekhov's Gun using that boombox. I don't know if it's intentional, but it's a pretty great nod to old-Trek.

Is the combat more action based, with aiming, or something like tab targeting?

Crafting upgrade tokens though takes some resources (some which you can find in basically the air you breathe) and others which you get only from elite STF's (salvaged borg technology).
Also you need to level your R&D levels for the specific types of crafting you need.

Ground combat on par with old Star Wars Galaxies or post-"combat update" SWG?

How is that relevant? I'm not opposed to sex with her in addition to the cuddling.5

In space, your weapons automatically lock on to closest target.
You can change the target by either pressing tab or by clicking enemy ships that are within range.
Then you have to make sure your weapons are pointed at the enemy, by turning your ship.
After that, you can activate weapons by either clicking their icons in weapon tray, fire all available energy weapons by pressing space or by assigning each weapon behind some quick key and pressing them (only advisable if you plan on doing some fast torp actions, if even then).

I never played SWG
You can either play ground combat in similar manner to space combat, or by pushing a button you can bring up a reticle which allows you to more precisely aim your weapon.

One final thing i must say about zen store 30$ ships.
The ships you can get from zen store, are always unlocks, this means that once you have unlocked that ship, you can claim it as many times as you want on multiple characters (just as long as they have high enough levels to get those ships and are of appropriate faction to get them).

Best uniforms there. Why anyone would use anything else I don't know.

How is the exploration component of it?

Can I just take off in the direction of a planet and eventually reach the planet?

Probably because the best uniforms are Z-store unlockables.
Something like 250 zen if i recall.