Star Trek Online is free

[charlemagne]

Hehe, most of the time I'm the saucer part myself, I mostly only seperate for the boss fights and the nacelle parts most of the time even life through Donatra's green laser of doom. Most of the time I'm too busy keeping all my buffs, tac teams, EP2S etc. up to watch too closely what the pets are doing, though. I probably should look into keybindings some time.

Once I get two more blue proj doffs I think I'll try running with two forward torpedoes.

[Alferd Packer]

Is it just me, or did the new patch increase weapons' base damage? My god, my Defiant retrofit is even more dakka now.

[charlemagne]

It's probably just the nerf to the field generator consoles, unless you're talking about NPCs. I think they also played with the hp numbers of those.

[Stofsk]

Man the difficulty curve in this game is fucking bizarre. On normal AKA cakewalk, my newly-acquired Akira rapes everything with torpedo spam. Big battleships are about the only thing that give me pause for concern. BoPs and other light combatants can usually be taken out with one volley of high yield torpedos from my two forward quantums.

So I ramp it up a notch to advanced. HOLY SHIT BALLS WTF

Ground missions suck just on principle but on advanced, they uh... suck even more.

Despite this, the Akira redeems this game for me somewhat. I gave up for a long time because the faux-constitution class ships just didn't have any oomph, which made it a hard slog to go through the teen levels. Mainly though I want to get my Defiant and warp around terrorising everything. After playing with the faux-connie though, I can't see myself enjoying any of the cruisers so my next character will likely be a science character.

[White Haven]

You might want to try comparing apples to apples before you condemn cruisers, you know. Specifically, assuming a default one torp fore and aft, beam arrays in the other slots layout, a heavy cruiser (the same tier as the Akira) has fully double the beam armament of the Constitution-refit you were complaining about. Escorts are always going to have more damage output than cruisers, that's sort of the point, but the difference isn't anywhere close to the yawning chasm you seem to imagine it to be after your flawed comparison.

[Stofsk]

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions - like the reason why I didn't like the cruiser was because it was underarmed or something. I didn't enjoy the entry level cruiser because it was slow and wasn't much of a tank. Higher-tier cruisers would be better, but so what? I'm looking for stuff to enjoy now. The gameplay for cruisers is manoeuvre slowly and circle an opponent by tickling them to death with your beam arrays. The thing I immediately liked about the Akira was it fucking moved. A quick look at the wiki shows that all the cruisers have lower inertia ratings and turn rates than the faux-constitution, so I know I'm not going to enjoy playing them based on the experience I had.

[Edward Yee]

That's part of why I went with the Sao Paolo (Tactical Escort Refit) at level 30 for my Engineer (bad idea*), but also rolled a Tactical and went straight escort with him to level 50, at which point I used the 600-day veteran reward token on the Tactical Escort Retrofit. I'm considering the same for my Engineer's token (it's held in reserve at the moment), but waiting on the rumored Galaxy Pack to hit the C-Store before I make that call.

* For the same number of C-Points I put into the Sao Paolo, I could have had the Venture (Exploration Cruiser Refit), taken the regular Tactical Escort (Defiant) as my Engineer's level 30 ship, and given all of my characters access to the Venture's Antimatter Spread console, whereas all the Sao Paolo gives is a Phaser Quad Cannon that one will eventually outlevel.

[Agent Sorchus]

My first character was science, and the science vessels are still slow and annoying. My third character is a cruiser and I have gotten up to Galaxy which is so very slothful, but even though the science vessels are less so they still get into all to many turning fights that last too long (especially with their small number of weapons slots, usually I find it best to drop into alpha with a tractor beam/evasive manuvers to get off the deflector abilities). Actually the battles aren't turning so much as a series of head to head passes which is different from the sloth of cruisers.

Though this is in the Deep space science vessel, and the Recon is supposed to be a little more quick on it's feet.

EDIT: do consider playing Klingon, I find the content (no matter how limited) is of a better quality than the federation. Just the look and feel of first city is superior to Spacedock in all the ways that count (except that people get lost easier.) And the cruisers are less slothful.

[charlemagne]

Cruisers still do respectable DPS, you just have to keep enemies in your broadside arc (which is pretty big with beam arrays). Lose the torpedos or anything with a smaller arc and you don't have to try to bring your fore or aft to bear on the enemy. Just melt them down with energy damage, you lose the torpedo damage spikes but gain a much bigger firing arc and never have to worry about enemy shield facings again.

Sci vessels work best in a faux-escort setup for me, I discovered. Load up turrets in the back, torpedoes and beam banks front, then just keep your nose pointed at the enemy. Most sci abilities operate in the same narrow arc as bank banks and torpedoes. Keeping your shields up in PVE isn't much of a problem with one or two Emergeny Power to Shields in the eng slots.

Doing passes isn't worth the time in normal PVE. Just slow down to a crawl and blast away.

[tim31]

Rocking a Nova with us many upgrades and crafting and dilithium expenditure will allow me. Seems to hold its own quite well, even in Borg dailies. QuanTorps + Rare level Mark IV phasers = good little gunboat. With SCIENCE!

[Edward Yee]

Well this is very unfortunate... the game started to CTD every time I tried to log in as one of my characters (all were parked in Starfleet Academy), so I uninstalled through Steam, reinstalled a Steam backup that I'd made right beforehand... and now Steam is requiring me to download the whole 3.8 GB...

[RogueIce]

That CTD thing happened to me a little bit ago. I got around it by letting the launcher run its "verify files" thing (which it should offer to do if you CTD) and then I went to Options and clicked Force Verify so it ran again. That seemed to work.

[wautd]

Man, I wish I got CTD's as opposed to my laptop instantaniously shutting down near the end of a mission

[charlemagne]

Funny, I'm still running STO off the installation I did back in open beta before launch and it never game me any problems

Computer shutting down sounds like a serious hardware problem though, you might want to check temperatures.

[Edward Yee]

It ended up taking a full reinstall (complete with downloading the game all over again through Steam) AND downloading the patches through the launcher, although now it's working again.

Too bad the daily fun factor is hurt by the lack of Ker'rat and the need to be constantly running around the sector blocks to be in-sector for the next mission in a chain... the cooldowns on some of the assignments don't help either.

[Alferd Packer]

Yeah, losing Ker'rat is a bummer. I loved the mixed PvE/PvP atmosphere of that place.

[Stofsk]

Yeah, losing Ker'rat is a bummer. I loved the mixed PvE/PvP atmosphere of that place.

I tried that place, and I didn't realise it was a PvE/PvP thing at first (until a pair of klingon BoPs decloaked and hammered me). It was pretty fun though.

[RogueIce]

I miss Ker'rat because it was a good way to make up the XP to the next level when there was a gap between missions. Now it'll be somewhat more annoying. At least for the Fed side; pretty sure any KDF who went into Ker'rat below LG would've just gotten raped by the Feddies.

[Agent Sorchus]

Don't worry about the xp anymore, the DOFF missions more than make up for lack of Ker'rat. And yes as a klink I only visited Ker'rat once, too much work for what you get, and there is the easy Empire defense missions that give equivalent Dil.

[charlemagne]

The official forums are hilarious: while fixing the ridiculous turning animations on Borg cubes they broke animations on player ships, after using RSP or a handful of other skills your ship doesn't turn properly but starts to drive on rails. Looks really dumb. This is what I wrote in the bug report threat:

Excelsior driving around on rails, too. Looks like absolute crap. (Warp-out camera on the Excelsior is also still crap, but you guys don't seem to care.)

Cryptic, you should try a thing called "QA": you hire people to testplay the stuff you want to put on the live servers. Those test players can tell you about bugs like this, then you can fix them before using your player base as test players. I know that this sounds like a really strange and alien thing to do, but why not just try it out? This is a bug you should have seen during tests in like the first 5 minutes, it's not something totally obscure.

Yeah, it's pretty childish but I was in a bad mood after a day of fighting against the same kind of sloppy work by our office developers so I let off some steam. It got me a forum warning for "Flaming/Trolling" though They can't take even some light sarcasm over there. Man.

I'm also really trolling some Fed carrier threats, but it seems that some issues are more ignored than others.

[Stofsk]

I just noticed that this arvo. Which is weird because it was working fine during the morning. I logged out now so I can't check but when I do go back in a couple of hours I will see if the bug repeats itself. But goddamn it looks like shit. The only skill I have that appears to cause this bug is RSP. (there are others but I don't have them) And yeah I did notice my Defiant seemed to turn a lot more sluggish than I had gotten used to.

Quick question: how do you actually form a fleet in this game? Because I've tried, and tim31 has tried, and it's getting annoying. There doesn't appear to be any sort of how-to guide and everything the game presents to us suggests it should be as easy as putting a name in and pressing OK. Except we've tried to do that and it hasn't worked. Do you have to be in a team, does this team need to have a minimal number of people in it, or what?

[charlemagne]

Yeah, to form a fleet you have to be 5 people minimum, so you need a full team. Those 5 people also all need to be on the same map in the same instance.

Also the bug is still there, RSP triggers it, and also if you are the target of a feedback pulse, among other things. It seriously looks so bad that I think this needs to be a hotfix and not go through the normal patching process that takes days or weeks.

[cherryycc]

cool

[Stofsk]

Welp I guess I just won't use RSP then. :V

[Atia]

Unless it's been changed recently I'm pretty sure that all 5 of the players on the team when you form a fleet have to have at least 20 hours of play time before they are able to form the fleet. Me and a friend found that out the hard way when we made our fleet. There was a whoooole lotta idling alts while doing other things for a couple weeks there lol.

I suppose option B would also be just shouting in Earth Spacedock for pubs to form a fleet with you and then boot them out once it's formed.