Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Since Champions readily supports 3D movement and as far as I know STO uses the same engine, I think it's safe to say ships can move in 3D.

[Mr Bean]

Bean, a question, when playing in an starship, can you purposely zoom in and look at the action from the bridge? In PotBS I could kind of do that to make it more immersive, it was harder to play, of course, but it'd be nice if the option is there so, is it?

And, of course, is starship navigation 3d? Or are you locked to a single plane?

It's 3D, it's not from the bridge which is a disappointment, but the 3d flying view is very pretty and the firing view is nice very much pew pew with pretty basic strategy. Torpedo's hurt shields, phasers eat through armor. You guns have an arch but the way shields are handled, it make sense to flip to a less adventurous firing position to present your best shields towards the enemy.

Being close to an enemy dieing is dangerous to VERY dangerous with some ships going up like massive fireworks.

[OmegaChief]

Torpedo's hurt shields, phasers eat through armor.

Uh not to sound Pernickety or anything, but are you sure you have that the right way round Bean?

[Mr Bean]

Torpedo's hurt shields, phasers eat through armor.

Uh not to sound Pernickety or anything, but are you sure you have that the right way round Bean?

That's what it says and that's how it acts. Torpedo's do massive damage to shields while once shields are down it only takes a few phaser blasts to rip them apart. Using Phasers only takes a goodly amount of time.

And I've yet to discover an autofire so I can fly my ship while my officers engage the enemy. Combat feels very "Trek" as fast movement is disabled in combat, engagement ranges are a bare 10km's (Graphically they could have gone with 50km's and still have things interesting) but since your starter ship is some Federation junk bucket you don't get a sense of scale.

*Edit
What I mean by combat feels very "Trek" is that space combat feels and looks like the shows, big graceful ships stare each other down then one fires then they move. It does feel kind of PoTBS except it's in 3D and rolling to present your back so your rear shields can eat hits makes sense even if you lose 2/3rds of your firing archs and weaponry. Torpedo's have about a 40*-90* arch while phasers have massive 220 to a "tiny" 100* arch.

[OmegaChief]

This just confuses me, as from every oher source I've heard it's Phasers for shields and Torpedos for hull.

Though the most crucial quesion of all, is Ship combat fun? Or is it a bit of a boring 'Menouver into position'-fest.

Also I've heard pressing Ctrl and the weapon fire button turns on auto-attack, though as I'm not in the Beta I can't confirm this myself, mabye give it a go Bean?

[Oskuro]

Can you ram other ships? Does it have any effect or does it just bump you off?


What about interstellar navigation and the warp drive?

[Mr Bean]

I'll take a look over the next few hours.

OAN:It's pretty,to pretty in fact. Like Champions turn down your graphics setting to only 100%. Kind of like Champions if you set everything at max it starts rendering that potted plant with it's 600 poly model instead of it's 60 that's a mile away or in this case all the soft shadows and light sources for objects 300 meters away across that planet.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

It's definitely sounding very PotBS-in-space. One of the most common tactics in PotBS is to maneuver to face your best armor against the enemy, so it's nice to see something similar in STO.

Are there special attacks? e.g., "REMODULATED MAXIMUM PHASER STRIKE, +20% damage!"?

[Gramzamber]

One thing that worries me in preview vids is fights on a ship's bridge.
Please tell me there won't be boarding actions, few things incense me more about Star Trek than bloody Klingons with knives beaming in to attack. Borg would be fine, it was badass when they did it (well you know back in TNG when they weren't toothless and brainless). But Klingons with knives? Oh please no.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

There are boarding actions. Cruiser-type vessels are explicitly stated as being particularly well-suited to it.

[PREDATOR490]

Boarding other players ships, what for unless your trying to capture them ... in which case losing a ship sounds plausible otherwise how are the boarders going to take it ?

Wonder if I can somehow manage to board and steal one of these bonus Connies....

[OmegaChief]

I don't think STO is that EVE like

Though I'll have to wait until Wednesday to find out for myself of course >.>

[Vanas]

Torpedo's hurt shields, phasers eat through armor.

Uh not to sound Pernickety or anything, but are you sure you have that the right way round Bean?

That's what it says and that's how it acts. Torpedo's do massive damage to shields while once shields are down it only takes a few phaser blasts to rip them apart. Using Phasers only takes a goodly amount of time.

*science glasses* If you've got multiple phaser arrays, it's much faster to burn through sheilds with the phasers and then use torpedoes to hit the hull for massive damage. The fire-rate on the torpedoes really makes them less useful vs. sheilds compared to continuous beam-spam.

And Gaius: Yeah, it reminds me of PotBS too, combat-wise.

[Mr Bean]

*science glasses* If you've got multiple phaser arrays, it's much faster to burn through sheilds with the phasers and then use torpedoes to hit the hull for massive damage. The fire-rate on the torpedoes really makes them less useful vs. sheilds compared to continuous beam-spam.

And Gaius: Yeah, it reminds me of PotBS too, combat-wise.

That logic only tracks if your torpedo's are low yield. In today's world a (Nuclear)torpedo could be delivering a hell of ton more energy in one go than our lasers can. A similar line of logic must go through the dev's heads. Torpedo's big anti-matter explosions hurt shields. Phasers carve through armor. After all a space ship is still combat capable until you kill the crew, destroy it's weapons and engines or... just crack the core which does the job for you as the weapons have no power nor the crew life support... This is Star Trek after all, any old yabo can walk into engineering and take a phaser to the core and kill the ship that way.

[Mr Bean]

Further thoughts
First off I was wrong, yes Torpedo's hull, Phaser's shields. It is a very much PoTBS in that facing is everything. Getting inside the enemies arch and crossing his "T". I'd like to try out a new ship but it looks like new ships are a very hard thing to get. You need to earn it. If the Constitution Class you get is better armed than your starting Miranada (Forward and rear phasers plus a forward single torpedo launcher) it's going to be a huge deal and the best upgrade by far of all the pre-orders.

[charlemagne]

It's entirely possible that there'll be some level requirement on the constitution class to balance things out in early game. I remember the preorder-bonus in Age of Conan - a huge-ass mammoth meant for siege combat - wasn't usable before level 40.

[OmegaChief]

From my investigations, the Pre-order connie has exactly the same stats, only one extra engineering slot or somthing?

However the Connie refit which is the first regular cruiser can be a connie refit, which is a fair bit better!

[Gramzamber]

Looking at the artwork for the connie-refit it doesn't really look like the connie-refit.
Actually it reminds me more of the Phase II refit. Maybe that's the intention, but it's different and things that are different scare and confuse me.

[OmegaChief]

Apparently the way it's set up is there's three varatins on the same/similar class, and when you get your ship you can apparently mix and match tehse aprts to costumise the ship.

For example the starter ship is, I belive, a Miranda/Centaur, however if youw ant to swap out the Necelles/saucer for one of the other o have a more 'unique' looking ship then you can. Ta daa, an explination on why there'll probably some gods awful designs flying around.

[Gramzamber]

Well as long as there aren't jerks flying about in ships named USS Uberprise NX-1337... oh who am I kidding, they'll make up half the populace.

[PREDATOR490]

During the open beta possibly but with it eventually going to be a charged MMO then the populace should drop rather dramatically. Although there will still be idiots doing typical stupid shit but thats a given anyway.
If the ship bonus is the best thing then it seems I'm gonna be fucked a bit although apparantly I get some weapon for whatever ship I start with. If that weapon is able to transferred from ship to ship and cant be lost then it might be of use. Hopefully this Joined Trill comes with awesome skill bonuses for me so while everyone is flying their Connies I am 90% to my Soverign

What intrests me more is how the game is split between ground pounding and spacebattles. If you get a selection to chose what you want to do then I might be better at ground warfare than space until getting the bigger ships equivelent to the bonus Connie is doable. Is this game going to go with the idea of multiple people onboard one ship or is it one ship per player ?

[Gramzamber]

I believe it's one player = one ship.
What I'm curious is if your ship remains in the game so to speak if you're on the gound, e.g. can your ship be attacked while you're on Podunk 3 getting attacked by the local Triffids or what not.

[PREDATOR490]

From the forums it seems some players are getting shafted with their pre-orders from gamestop which is the only supplier for Canada. Additionally, the gamesite seems to be getting errors alot which dosent inspire me with a lot of confidence for how stable this game is going to be.

[Oskuro]

Found this review on the STO site: Ten Ton Hammer's Beta Review

Going where Star Trek fans have begged to go for years.

<snip>

The first thing any player, reviewer, or Star Trek fanatic has to admit is that once again, Cryptic has proven why they are the undisputed character creation masters. <snip> The uniform choices may not be quite as extravagant as in the previous titles I mentioned, but character heads, bodies, and faces get the full Cryptic treatment we've come to love and expect.

<snip>

After deciding which officer track to follow (Tactical, Engineering, Science), choosing a race (such as Vulcan, Andorian, Ferengi, or other), and fiddling with my uniform far longer than any self-respecting male should, I was ready to hop into a nice relaxing tutorial. That lasted for all of about two minutes as I wandered through what looked like Ten Forward on the Enterprise-D before being thrown into the heart of a crisis. You may be nothing but a newb Ensign, the starting rank in the game, but you're going to test your mettle against the Borg, so buck up soldier and get to it.

Throughout the battle with the Borg, you'll fight in the hallways of the ship, transport wounded personnel to a science vessel, take on Borg spheres, infiltrate a Borg ground camp, disable a shield generator, and take on a Borg cube with the help of some other Federation ships. Gone are the days of boring tutorials and I say good riddance. I honestly can't remember the last time I not only paid attention to what was going on in a tutorial, but also actually cared. Fascinating.

During the tutorial and your beginning missions, you'll quickly realize that the space and ground combat scenarios are almost completely different games, even though they both take place in the same universe. <snip>

Fighting against one ship by yourself is pretty fun. Fighting against multiple ships by yourself is even cooler. Taking on a small squadron of enemy ships with another player or two is awesome. None of that compares to the space battle you'll enjoy during an early mission where you need to protect a Starbase though. Imagine fighting along side approximately 15 other players and taking on what seems to be a full Klingon fleet. You're tasked with destroying 50 enemy ships and 20 Battlecruisers. The fight that ensues is nothing short of pure epic awesomeness! And by the way, this happened when I was level 4. That's right, I said 4. Not 40, not 50, not at the end-game. This took place after approximately three hours of game play. These are the things that will set Star Trek Online apart from the slew of MMOGs currently on the market.

The ground game can be just as intense. <snip> The AI of your ground team is pretty damned good. The away team will function in similar ways to the heroes you can opt to adventure with in Guild Wars, only taken to the next level in nearly every regard. They keep themselves (and you) healed up nicely. They take cover. They use their abilities to force the enemies into bad positions so you all can take advantage of the flanking bonus damage. All in all, your bridge officers and security teams are rock solid. Be sure to keep them equipped with anything that you can't use as an upgrade yourself. Not only will it help keep them alive, but that in turn will help keep *you* alive.

While there are random battles you can get yourself into, the majority of the game (and your progress in it) takes place through missions, or episodes. Episodes are just what they sound like - a string of missions put together that could make up a television show. They generally have all the elements we know and love from the shows: space combat, ground combat, diplomacy, and exploration. <snip>

Once you know what you're doing in the game, it doesn't take long to unlock the Klingon side of the game at all. I know some people are upset about the announcement that Klingons will be primarily PvP, but players still owe it to themselves to check them out once unlocked. The Klingons are a brutal and honorable people. Your "tutorial" for them is the same way. I'll save myself further embarrassment and not tell you exactly how many times I died during the tutorial. Yes, Spiffy, I said tutorial. Don't judge me!

The game certainly has its good points along with some others that still need some work. I think the space combat is absolutely spot on and can't wait to see more of it as time goes on, especially once I begin to acquire other ships. The ground game (and my skills with it) needs some improvement though. Ground combat doesn’t feel as responsive as that in space. Reactions feel delayed and I don’t just mean mine. The enemy ground troops are not as viciously efficient as their space counterparts. Rather than seeing this as a sign of mercy from the gaming gods for those of us who suck, I actually think it’s something the team is working on.

One of the most unique things I’ve discovered about the game so far, but is *so* totally Star Trek is the Captain's Log. At any time, you can open your journal and make an entry. It will populate it with both our date and time, and the correct star date as well. You can add, edit, or delete these as you see fit. Sure, some players won't care, but by adding something that's so integral to the Star Trek experience, it shows that Cryptic "gets it" and is trying to make a game that all fans can enjoy. The role-players out there should go nuts over this feature. And given Cryptic’s social networking integration in Champions Online, there are a lot of potential ways that the Captain’s Log could be utilized in a similar manner. Imagine the tales that could be told by players while the details of the adventure was fresh in their mind? The possibilities are not only nearly endless, but also incredibly cool.

There's plenty of work to be done on the game and the development team has certainly been busy. Patches have been frequent during beta and things have been adjusted and altered on a regular basis based on player feedback. Is the game perfect? No. Is the game fun? Absolutely. The best thing I can say about Star Trek Online is that it *feels* like Star Trek. I feel genuine excitement when I'm on a mission and the combat is truly intense. The game may not be perfect (yet?), but it is hands down the best Star Trek title we've seen to date and that's something we can all be thankful for

Snipped for brevity (not that I made a great job at it).
I must confess that, upon reading about the Captain's Log, I roleplayergasmed. Looks promising, but, as usual, we'll see. I hope that, for once, rabid Trekkies are of use and help keep the out of character names and attitudes at bay. I mean, if there is a setting for people to roleplay, it's either this or Star Wars.

[Bounty]

This is actually starting to look interesting. Proper missions, a log and fun gameplay? This may be worth a demo.