Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[LastShadow]

Anyone got any idea how big the Callisto light escorts are suppose to be (in relation of to canon ships or the actual length)?

Big enough to be another disappointing C-Store ship?

Note: I haven't booted it up in awhile, i am literally assuming they are new C-Store ships as most new ships are.

That was about as useless comment as you could probably make, but the Callisto are a Light Escorts tied to the Jupiter-class carrier well you can technically use them in any Fed carrier but to unlock them you need the Jupiter and cannot be bought independently, though from what I've hear when the work the Callisto are the best hangar pets in game atm.

Well like i said, i have not played in a while, so i am not up on which ships are new, or which carrier pets are new, i started playing sporadically right before the tier 6 ships started dropping.

And to be fair, most of the C-Store ships have been pretty useless over the years. So yeah my comment was pretty useless, but clearly you missed the attempt at humor i was making.

[Elheru Aran]

And to be fair, most of the C-Store ships have been pretty useless over the years. So yeah my comment was pretty useless, but clearly you missed the attempt at humor i was making.

Depends on which ship you get. For a basic player who doesn't really go all out on equipment, a C-store ship will have an edge over the relatively bog-standard stuff you can pick up in the game. For serious players who prefer to min/max, C-store ships will mostly be useful for the special equipment that comes with them which you can't pick up in-game.

Also there are some ships you can't get any other way, such as the Odyssey (IIRC) and various skins, so there's that.

[LastShadow]

And to be fair, most of the C-Store ships have been pretty useless over the years. So yeah my comment was pretty useless, but clearly you missed the attempt at humor i was making.

Depends on which ship you get. For a basic player who doesn't really go all out on equipment, a C-store ship will have an edge over the relatively bog-standard stuff you can pick up in the game. For serious players who prefer to min/max, C-store ships will mostly be useful for the special equipment that comes with them which you can't pick up in-game.

Also there are some ships you can't get any other way, such as the Odyssey (IIRC) and various skins, so there's that.

True but they are usually barely a step up, though i did go balls to the wall as much as i could so, there is that. I kind of miss my old 1-2 punch galaxy dreadnaught though.

[Lord Revan]

Big enough to be another disappointing C-Store ship?

Note: I haven't booted it up in awhile, i am literally assuming they are new C-Store ships as most new ships are.

That was about as useless comment as you could probably make, but the Callisto are a Light Escorts tied to the Jupiter-class carrier well you can technically use them in any Fed carrier but to unlock them you need the Jupiter and cannot be bought independently, though from what I've hear when the work the Callisto are the best hangar pets in game atm.

Well like i said, i have not played in a while, so i am not up on which ships are new, or which carrier pets are new, i started playing sporadically right before the tier 6 ships started dropping.

And to be fair, most of the C-Store ships have been pretty useless over the years. So yeah my comment was pretty useless, but clearly you missed the attempt at humor i was making.

Fine but I wasn't intrested in random "take that"s against cryptic either. The callisto serves as good bench mark for light escort(aka the carrier pet escort) size as it's essentially a box with warp nacelles while other similar light starships are of more complex shape.

also humor is something that's very hard to decode in writing especially when there's people who say so insane things seriously that they'd be unbeliveble as jokes, so it's best to err on the side of caution and assume a person is serious unless they very clearly show that they're joking (like with or something similar).

as for C-ships they're good but thankfully they're not silver bullets, since the game would die a quick death if you could unambigiously "buy power" by getting ships that were so much better that there was no contest from the c-store.

[LastShadow]

That was about as useless comment as you could probably make, but the Callisto are a Light Escorts tied to the Jupiter-class carrier well you can technically use them in any Fed carrier but to unlock them you need the Jupiter and cannot be bought independently, though from what I've hear when the work the Callisto are the best hangar pets in game atm.

Well like i said, i have not played in a while, so i am not up on which ships are new, or which carrier pets are new, i started playing sporadically right before the tier 6 ships started dropping.

And to be fair, most of the C-Store ships have been pretty useless over the years. So yeah my comment was pretty useless, but clearly you missed the attempt at humor i was making.

Fine but I wasn't intrested in random "take that"s against cryptic either. The callisto serves as good bench mark for light escort(aka the carrier pet escort) size as it's essentially a box with warp nacelles while other similar light starships are of more complex shape.

also humor is something that's very hard to decode in writing especially when there's people who say so insane things seriously that they'd be unbeliveble as jokes, so it's best to err on the side of caution and assume a person is serious unless they very clearly show that they're joking (like with or something similar).

as for C-ships they're good but thankfully they're not silver bullets, since the game would die a quick death if you could unambigiously "buy power" by getting ships that were so much better that there was no contest from the c-store.

Nah i get that, and just for clarity, im not "against cryptic" either, i rather enjoy the game, even if they didn't do the "best" job balancing ships/captains.

I'll have to spend some time poking about the wiki later and check out some of the newer stuff.

[PREDATOR490]

I came back to STO recently after leaving Pre- Delta Rising expansion. Some things I like, others I seriously do not.

As expected the T6 bullshit continues with Cryptic pushing T6 versions of T5 ships. I have no issue with them introducing T6 ships but the T5U shit is so insanely stupid. As the game stands the ship progression system looks abysmal at endgame. Not to mention that anyone who has an old T5 lockbox ship gets kinda shafted. I have the full Dominion collection and it is going to continue being shit forever now not only because it is an inferior tier but because the old ships are completely ignored for having the new specializations.

I am fairly impressed with the implementation of the Admiralty system. This has driven me to go out and get a bunch of bundles and not feel completely stupid at having nearly 40+ ships that are sitting around doing nothing. I am not so impressed with the horrifically small dry dock facilities or the 'bonuses' ships get for no reason.
I think the system would have been better allowing your admiralty ships to gain experience and earn special bonuses as they progress but oh well...

400 Zen to have 4 Dry Dock slots per character

That is an insanely hefty price tag which is infuriatingly limiting due to the new gimmick of collecting ships for traits.

Bridge Officers - Still no ability to re-trait or change the looks of the special officers. I would have expected Cryptic to clue in on how annoying this is. In a game which is heavily focused towards the cosmetic, it becomes irritating to have officers on my crew that cannot even change their uniform.

Specializations - I actually like this concept and Cryptic are coming with a skill revamp that will follow the same idea to make it 'easier'. Given the history of STO and Cryptic's implementation of such things I fully expect them to make a royal mess.
Major issue I have with this whole new system is that Cryptic are introducing a new skill tree to make things easier to understand but they still refuse to fix the damn ship system. The game has so many ships with so many variations of layouts that it is easily overwhelming to figure out what the hell everything does.

At this rate I would happily see Cryptic introduce a T7 which simply allows players to take a ship hull and choose what bridge officer stations exist. That way I do not have to go through endless wikis etc. to find out what ship actually has the stats, functionality and officer layout.

Story / Plot - Ugh, STO continues to be a load of utter BS when it comes to telling even a remotely consistent theme. The only thing they manage is introducing references to ST stuff.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

That's the thing with BOFFs, most things can be changed except their traits- it took me a long time to build away teams for each character by getting officers with the 'best' ground traits. I still haven't gotten around to tinkering with their default ground skills since there's only a couple of areas I know of that allow you to bring officers for PvE stuff- rest of the time they only get used when new campaign missions arrive.

The admiralty system is great in theory, especially for earning XP to earn points for captain specialisation; I have a couple of captains maxed out, the excess points were supposed to be automatically converted to dilithium but no such luck. If there's a way to do it manually I don't know of it. It might have something to do with the spec system getting a shakeup in the next major update.

The bad side of the system is the prisoners that you accumulate as the feds as you don't have a way to get rid of them like you can as the KDF. With them you can offload 10 at a time for a decent amount of dil, as the feds you can get rid of just 2 at a time for a pittance.

The dil exchange rate is appalling, it's around 310 per Zen. I worked out that in order to afford the T6 Flagship bundle it's going to cost in the region of 3 million dilithium. I don't want the ships that much

One large bundle I did buy was the pilot escort one and it was well worth it- at least half of my characters are flying them as their main ship. I can't imagine the flagships being worth that much though.

[Simon_Jester]

Criminy; the exchange rate was in the 220-240 range when I was last playing a few months ago.

What happened? Did major new sources of dilithium appear, or do people now have less Zen being chased around by more dilithium?

[Lord Revan]

Criminy; the exchange rate was in the 220-240 range when I was last playing a few months ago.

What happened? Did major new sources of dilithium appear, or do people now have less Zen being chased around by more dilithium?

I'm just guessing that people that had Zen kept pushing the price up for more profits and it got out of hand, I suspect we might see a crash in dil to zen prices soon before they go back up. It wouldn't be the first time that has happend and probably wouldn't be the last.

[RogueIce]

Criminy; the exchange rate was in the 220-240 range when I was last playing a few months ago.

What happened? Did major new sources of dilithium appear, or do people now have less Zen being chased around by more dilithium?

Admiralty is an easy source of dilithium if you game the system with enough pass tokens. I'm not sure that matters too much - the refinement cap hasn't changed - but if it's easier for the 'dil farmer alts' to max out every day that could be doing it.

And the dil sinks just aren't keeping up. Any fleet that's at least decent size is probably doing good with their holdings and as time goes on, people will finish their upgrades to whatever level they care about: from what I've seen, they'll take their main up to All Epics but will settle for just getting to Mk XIV on alts. So that's two dil sinks starting to outlive their usefulness. Combined with all the extra dil you can get from Admiralty and, well...

Of course, speculation along the lines of what Lord Revan mentions is probably not helping.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Criminy; the exchange rate was in the 220-240 range when I was last playing a few months ago.

What happened? Did major new sources of dilithium appear, or do people now have less Zen being chased around by more dilithium?

I'm just guessing that people that had Zen kept pushing the price up for more profits and it got out of hand, I suspect we might see a crash in dil to zen prices soon before they go back up. It wouldn't be the first time that has happend and probably wouldn't be the last.

I hope you're right, the last time I bought Zen with Dil was when it was in that range. Lately I've noticed it dip to around 300 before rebounding to 310, it'll need to drop a lot more before I convert any- I almost regret buying the Hestia and the Jupiter but I still use them from time to time. Despite being a lifetime member, it's gonna take me a long time to accrue the Zen from the monthly stipend alone

If it was easy to predict, we'd all be rich

There's a new upgrade weekend just around the corner that doubles boosts from upgrade kits. The part that cannot be predicted is what modifer rolls when upgrading a v.rare to ultra rare weapon. You can but hope that the upgrade happens while at a relatively low level so that if it sucks you haven't sunk too much dil into it

[Lord Revan]

Criminy; the exchange rate was in the 220-240 range when I was last playing a few months ago.

What happened? Did major new sources of dilithium appear, or do people now have less Zen being chased around by more dilithium?

I'm just guessing that people that had Zen kept pushing the price up for more profits and it got out of hand, I suspect we might see a crash in dil to zen prices soon before they go back up. It wouldn't be the first time that has happend and probably wouldn't be the last.

I hope you're right, the last time I bought Zen with Dil was when it was in that range. Lately I've noticed it dip to around 300 before rebounding to 310, it'll need to drop a lot more before I convert any- I almost regret buying the Hestia and the Jupiter but I still use them from time to time. Despite being a lifetime member, it's gonna take me a long time to accrue the Zen from the monthly stipend alone

well you got remember that these are trends I've noticed not accurate predictions, when I say that the crash will happen soon it's soon like Blizzard's release dates, not "this crash will happen on 20th of this month", but generally when prices get really high either some people notice that you can sell more by having low prices after all you get more from selling 1000 zen at 50 dil per zen then selling 0 zen at 300 dil per zen or cryptic forces the prices to go down which I've heard has happened before.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I'm just guessing that people that had Zen kept pushing the price up for more profits and it got out of hand, I suspect we might see a crash in dil to zen prices soon before they go back up. It wouldn't be the first time that has happend and probably wouldn't be the last.

I hope you're right, the last time I bought Zen with Dil was when it was in that range. Lately I've noticed it dip to around 300 before rebounding to 310, it'll need to drop a lot more before I convert any- I almost regret buying the Hestia and the Jupiter but I still use them from time to time. Despite being a lifetime member, it's gonna take me a long time to accrue the Zen from the monthly stipend alone

well you got remember that these are trends I've noticed not accurate predictions, when I say that the crash will happen soon it's soon like Blizzard's release dates, not "this crash will happen on 20th of this month", but generally when prices get really high either some people notice that you can sell more by having low prices after all you get more from selling 1000 zen at 50 dil per zen then selling 0 zen at 300 dil per zen or cryptic forces the prices to go down which I've heard has happened before.

Well it's in Cryptic's interest for the dil to zen to increase- however easy dil is to come by, getting fewer Zen means people will have to make up the shortfall with real money if they really want stuff from the store.

[Lord Revan]

I hope you're right, the last time I bought Zen with Dil was when it was in that range. Lately I've noticed it dip to around 300 before rebounding to 310, it'll need to drop a lot more before I convert any- I almost regret buying the Hestia and the Jupiter but I still use them from time to time. Despite being a lifetime member, it's gonna take me a long time to accrue the Zen from the monthly stipend alone

well you got remember that these are trends I've noticed not accurate predictions, when I say that the crash will happen soon it's soon like Blizzard's release dates, not "this crash will happen on 20th of this month", but generally when prices get really high either some people notice that you can sell more by having low prices after all you get more from selling 1000 zen at 50 dil per zen then selling 0 zen at 300 dil per zen or cryptic forces the prices to go down which I've heard has happened before.

Well it's in Cryptic's interest for the dil to zen to increase- however easy dil is to come by, getting fewer Zen means people will have to make up the shortfall with real money if they really want stuff from the store.

to a degree yes but you have to remember that most players won't use the store that often and it's in Cryptic's favor that as many people as possible use the store. Also if the Zen to Dil conversion ratio keeps too high for too long you'll have people think "f*ck this game" and quick because they don't have the money to buy things and consider the alternative too hard and obviously people who don't play the game won't buy things from the store ever so it's in cryptics best intrest to occationally to force a "sale" on the conversion so that it doesn't seem like the system is intentionally unfair to free to play players.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

well you got remember that these are trends I've noticed not accurate predictions, when I say that the crash will happen soon it's soon like Blizzard's release dates, not "this crash will happen on 20th of this month", but generally when prices get really high either some people notice that you can sell more by having low prices after all you get more from selling 1000 zen at 50 dil per zen then selling 0 zen at 300 dil per zen or cryptic forces the prices to go down which I've heard has happened before.

Well it's in Cryptic's interest for the dil to zen to increase- however easy dil is to come by, getting fewer Zen means people will have to make up the shortfall with real money if they really want stuff from the store.

to a degree yes but you have to remember that most players won't use the store that often and it's in Cryptic's favor that as many people as possible use the store. Also if the Zen to Dil conversion ratio keeps too high for too long you'll have people think "f*ck this game" and quick because they don't have the money to buy things and consider the alternative too hard and obviously people who don't play the game won't buy things from the store ever so it's in cryptics best intrest to occationally to force a "sale" on the conversion so that it doesn't seem like the system is intentionally unfair to free to play players.

This is going to muddy the waters- season 11.5 is coming out Apr 12. Right now it's anybody's guess which way the exchange rate is going to go- if there's a load of new stuff everyone is going to want and whether it's better to convert now or wait until the new season is out and we see a spike in demand. The new T6 flagships are pretty 'meh' for me- whether I get the full pack of 12 or just the Romulan versions depends if I can get excited about the KDF or Fed offerings and whether they offer anything better than the ships I already have.

[FaxModem1]

Well, STO is having a First Contact giveaway. First it was an assimilated crewmember doff, then the Phoenix as a shuttle, and today's giveaway is an assimilated Sovereign class ship. I wonder what's next.

[RogueIce]

Well, STO is having a First Contact giveaway. First it was an assimilated crewmember doff, then the Phoenix as a shuttle, and today's giveaway is an assimilated Sovereign class ship. I wonder what's next.

Nothing, as the Assimilated AC Admiralty card (which was not an actual ship, before anyone gets confused; same thing with the Phoenix shuttle) was the final item.

[Lord Revan]

Well, STO is having a First Contact giveaway. First it was an assimilated crewmember doff, then the Phoenix as a shuttle, and today's giveaway is an assimilated Sovereign class ship. I wonder what's next.

Nothing, as the Assimilated AC Admiralty card (which was not an actual ship, before anyone gets confused; same thing with the Phoenix shuttle) was the final item.

still it's a damn good Admiralty card, I would have hoped it was an actual ship but I'm not that disapointed with it being only a Admiralty card as more gold cards means more good admiralty missions done and more cash and dil for me, so it's not all bad.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well, STO is having a First Contact giveaway. First it was an assimilated crewmember doff, then the Phoenix as a shuttle, and today's giveaway is an assimilated Sovereign class ship. I wonder what's next.

Nothing, as the Assimilated AC Admiralty card (which was not an actual ship, before anyone gets confused; same thing with the Phoenix shuttle) was the final item.

still it's a damn good Admiralty card, I would have hoped it was an actual ship but I'm not that disapointed with it being only a Admiralty card as more gold cards means more good admiralty missions done and more cash and dil for me, so it's not all bad.

A vessel that gives +20 eng per ship is perfect for those assignments that have stupidly high requirements. I see they're offering the keys at a discount and justifying it by the chance of getting a lockbox ship. What they don't tell you is the actual odds of getting one of those ships, which is worse than you think.

[mr friendly guy]

My only toon generally has enough ships to do any admiralty quest I want, which at this stage are usually the Klingon quests which give dilithium or EC. Occasionally after doing lots of quests simultaneously I might struggle to find adequate ships to complete the tasks. This extra ship will certainly help with that.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well the dil exchange rate has gone up again to 320 dil per zen. If only there was a way to know ahead of the next update which way the rate is going to go, given the vast sums of dilithium involved. The buildup from the monthy stipend is going to take off some at least.

[FaxModem1]

I played the latest mission, and boy, they must be running out of villains and bad guys, because our new big bad is the nk'ghul. Aka, the space Nazis from the Enterprise season 4 season premiere.

But it seems to be more of them being time traveling terrorists than an entire race of bad guys.So, that's a different approach, I guess.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Interestingly it seems to be always available, and the ability to choose which marks you want as a reward is a plus too.

[FaxModem1]

Interestingly it seems to be always available, and the ability to choose which marks you want as a reward is a plus too.

That's the Red Alert mission. The Featured Episode actually delves into their motivations and their actions in the 29th century that lead to the World War II two parter and the start of this arc.

Also, in the 25th century, they seem to be hinting that the alliance that formed from the Iconian war is akin to the Coalition of Planets from the Romulan war back in the 22nd century, that it will eventually lead to a great galactic government formed by the major powers. That's a move I rather like, as it shows that now that the war is over, progress is made and the theme of Star Trek with peace, negotiation, understanding and standing together leads to better things than fighting each other. I'm personally glad the MMO is going that route, though I'm curious how they will continue to execute it.

[Lord Revan]

Personally I don't mind the Na'kuhl that much since they're still doing things with them storywise and they're not just "space nazis" like in ENT, hell you even get motivation as to why Vosk feels the way he feels even if you might not agree with his motivations you cannot deny their existance.

Also the building up the Galactic Alliance will easily explain why the sphere builders got their asses handed to them later (the Kremin/sphere builder alliance is still there even if they're not the focus atm) as well as giving the Temporal Cold War the level of detail it needed to work. We can now guess that sides in the Temporal Cold War were the Na'kuhl, the Kremin/Sphere builder alliance and the Galactic Alliance, possibly more as well that we haven't seen yet but those at very least were/are/will be (I hate timetravel) present.