Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[Lord Revan]

Flavor seems like the most logical explanation, it wouldn't really be Trek if all you had was essentially humans with different skins stats wise.

there's some traits like the reman "lifedrain" that can be useful to new player but don't matter that much at max level as the DPS (and thus HPS) of the ability is minimal and since you can't do anything else while chanelling it you're better of not using it if you want to get to the top of the DPS chart.

Should be noted that "alien" has only generic traits avaible so there's limits to the flavor you can put to your character's gameplay (and also limit to min-maxing as the racial variants are still somewhat better), but the level of customization for the look is amazing (and alien you can have several "races" on a single character lookwise though the stat will remain identical). Mirwast the alien character I made has blue-green skin, with red patterns around her eyes, the Xindi primate forehead and check ridges, bajoran nose ridges and pink(ish) reflective eyes, oh and she's 190 cm tall too and that's more or less with typical human portions, you don't have to use those, you could for example make a member of that reptilian race from the start of Star Trek:Beyond (including the spoiler detail from that species).

[bilateralrope]

there's some traits like the reman "lifedrain" that can be useful to new player but don't matter that much at max level as the DPS (and thus HPS) of the ability is minimal and since you can't do anything else while chanelling it you're better of not using it if you want to get to the top of the DPS chart.

Sounds like the racial skills for GW2. Intentionally underpowered, making them only useful until you get something else.

Should be noted that "alien" has only generic traits avaible so there's limits to the flavor you can put to your character's gameplay (and also limit to min-maxing as the racial variants are still somewhat better),

Thing is, the alien trait slots will always be useful because there will always be something useful to put in them. Racial traits often only work in specific circumstances. Looking at all the race innate traits, regardless of faction, most inate traits only work on the ground. There are only 6 races with an inate trait that do anything in space:
Human
Liberated Borg
Nausicaan
Romulan
Talaxian
Joined Trill
I can't judge which of those are useful all the time in space and which are situational.

Looking at the race specific selectable traits that aliens don't get, but other races do, and I see that all but three are ground only traits. The three space traits are only available to Romulan and/or Reman characters:
Romulan Operative
Infiltrator
Singularity Specialist
Two to do with cloaking and one to do with singularities. Are cloaking and singularities things that will be useful in all battles, or only in some battles ?

So that brings us to 7 races that might be better than alien characters in space. The 6 listed above and Remans. Since those races also have race-specific traits (innate or otherwise) that work on the ground, they might be better overall.

All the other races only have racial traits that work on the ground. Making aliens better than them in space due to the extra space trait slot.

[RogueIce]

The traits look tempting. But if those traits are any use, they will remain available later. Because if they become desired and unavailable to new accounts, that will stop people making new accounts.

If you're talking about the racial traits, well, as pointed out they don't mean a whole lot.

As for Temporal Agent and its bonuses, you only have until the 17th to roll a new TOS Captain and finish the TOS arc to unlock it, otherwise you're missing out. Once you have unlocked it you can complete the various subtasks at your leisure, but if you don't activate it you're screwed.

So you can make one, play the TOS arc up until you get to the 25th century Earth Space Dock, and then leave it by the wayside until whenever. I would recommend it first though, because the bonuses not only benefit the TOS character but all characters on that account.

[Lord Revan]

there's some traits like the reman "lifedrain" that can be useful to new player but don't matter that much at max level as the DPS (and thus HPS) of the ability is minimal and since you can't do anything else while chanelling it you're better of not using it if you want to get to the top of the DPS chart.

Sounds like the racial skills for GW2. Intentionally underpowered, making them only useful until you get something else.

more or less so. They have some minor utility (like Vulcans get 2 CCs) but if you're going for DPS-Gold (or the number equilevant) racial skills are too weak to really matter.

Should be noted that "alien" has only generic traits avaible so there's limits to the flavor you can put to your character's gameplay (and also limit to min-maxing as the racial variants are still somewhat better),

Thing is, the alien trait slots will always be useful because there will always be something useful to put in them. Racial traits often only work in specific circumstances. Looking at all the race innate traits, regardless of faction, most inate traits only work on the ground. There are only 6 races with an inate trait that do anything in space:
Human
Liberated Borg
Nausicaan
Romulan
Talaxian
Joined Trill
I can't judge which of those are useful all the time in space and which are situational.

Looking at the race specific selectable traits that aliens don't get, but other races do, and I see that all but three are ground only traits. The three space traits are only available to Romulan and/or Reman characters:
Romulan Operative
Infiltrator
Singularity Specialist
Two to do with cloaking and one to do with singularities. Are cloaking and singularities things that will be useful in all battles, or only in some battles ?

So that brings us to 7 races that might be better than alien characters in space. The 6 listed above and Remans. Since those races also have race-specific traits (innate or otherwise) that work on the ground, they might be better overall.

All the other races only have racial traits that work on the ground. Making aliens better than them in space due to the extra space trait slot.

again the "bonus" is so insignifigant that if you're not going for the part where every procent matters then it's really not that big of a deal, you're not really gimping yourself if you pick Andorian instead of Alien.

Basically what I'm saying is pick the "alien" race for the wealth of (cosmetic) customization options you can have, not for some practically insignifigant DPS boost you probably never notice if you don't look at the DPS charts like they were holy documents. Race doesn't really matter unless you're willing to spend loads of real life money to get gear/special lockbox traits and we're talking hundreds of what ever currency (Australia uses dollars right?) you use, to get to top of top players.

What I am trying to do is make sure that you pick your race so that you're not disapointed with the selection since you were expecting this big boost and got boost so insignigant that you need a calculator to even notice it.

[bilateralrope]

I was never expecting a big boost. I've made an alien character and I'm not changing it. Still, I'll drop that discussion and continue it elsewhere.

Now I just need a build to follow, as I suck at creating in games I understand way more than I understand STO right now. So far all I know is cruisers and beam arrays. No idea about where to stick skill points as I earn them. Traits I could experiment with as they can be freely swapped. No idea about other slots, though some experimentation is possible there.

Should I upgrade equipment as I find better stuff, or sell what I find and only upgrade at certain levels ?

Playing with the graphics options, I somehow managed to get the mouse cursor unable to move to the right hand side of the screen. Meaning I couldn't click options. Fixed that. I'm not touching graphics options again unless I have to.

[Lord Revan]

for the main factions you generally can upgrade when you get better gear while leveling (with perhaps some additional upgrades if your gear starts to be very low marks) you got 14 marks with more or less 2 marks per each rank (10 levels), also as a rule of thumb don't swap for a poorer quality item (exception being if the poorer quality item is much higher mark).

Also as you might noticed respecting you energy type is generally good though while leveling you might temporally have to fly a rainbow boat until you get decent weapons that are all same energy type. As for mods generally it's [Pen]>[CritD]>[Dmg] you're after.

though how want to build your character also depends on your class and playstyle. Sci officers in space generally want things that boost exotic damage, with engineers you must deside do you want to be more tanky or debuffy, while with tacticals it's DPS boosts with some durability boosts. It should be noted that armor consoles aren't that good at end game and it's generally more useful to use that slot for something else.

[Elheru Aran]

There's not much point upgrading anything until you get to higher levels of play, as you'll rank up quickly enough that your upgraded stuff will become obsolete fairly quickly. Say you upgrade a mark II item, that's fine, but odds are you'll be getting drops of mark IV and mark V stuff before very long, and that stuff is pretty much going to be on par with your upgraded mark II, you know? Now if you upgrade a mark XII, that's more like it, as the max is mark XIV now and you can get by with pretty much anything standard between 10-14 at endgame.

[Simon_Jester]

Question, bilateralrope, are you spending zero money on this, or are you open to spending a small amount money (say, five dollars on one character)?

Pending an answer to that...

If you're playing at normal difficulty (which you should be), you won't have serious problems with being outgunned, unless you get stupid and totally neglect the quality of your equipment. Just try to make sure all your equipment is within one or two tiers of the maximum your character level is allowed to use. When random drops produce something that looks better than what you're using in a given role now, equip it.

The kind of equipment you pick up in random drops usually isn't worth very much EC, and in my experience selling it on the Exchange is usually more trouble than it's worth. You're better off just hitting 'discard' on it and tossing it into the replicator for raw materials (nets you 40% of its official EC value).

At low to mid-levels it isn't really practical to make enough dilithium to upgrade your equipment compared to just picking up new equipment and dropping the old stuff. The only time I've ever upgraded low level equipment I didn't specifically craft with that in mind myself... was for my 23rd century Federation character, because I wanted them to keep using 23rd century weapons for the sound and visual and thematic effects, so I had to keep upgrading those weapons to higher marks so they'd stay competitive.

Plus, as a rule, at low levels you don't get very good stuff anyway- few Rare and Very Rare items that would be worth holding on to and upgrading. If you DO get such an item and want to keep it (I call it... Vera...), then by all means do so. Use Improved upgrade kits at mid-level, Superior when you can afford them; Improved kits are far more cost-effective in dilithium AND EC than Basic kits are, while Superior saves you even more on dilithium at the price of being a heck of a lot more expensive in EC unless you make your own from raw materials you already had lying around. And it takes a month or so of R&D missions to level up your crafting to the point where you can do that.

...

I recommend equipping all your ground combat bridge officers and yourself with "Energy Dampening" armor, because you get shot at with beam weapons a lot more than you get attacked in hand to hand combat. "Polyalloy" armor is a second-best against beam weapons, but very good against hand to hand attacks in the unlikely event that this matters. There are other types of armor that confer offensive bonuses, but are so much weaker defensively that I prefer not to use them.

It doesn't really matter what energy damage type you use in ground combat, not in the sense of one being vastly better than another. It also doesn't really matter if you use diverse or uniform damage types. Except against the Borg, where it's better to have diverse damage types because the Borg adapt to being shot at by any given damage type quickly. You only get a few shots with a ranged weapon of a given damage type before you have to stop for a few seconds to remodulate the weapon. However, you don't fight Borg very often unless you go out of your way to look for them.

Make sure your characters carry large stacks of "hypos" (HP heal) and "shield charges" (shield heals). This keeps them on their feet in battle. Large hypos and shield charges can be obtained for 320 EC per from numerous vendors, which is cheap by the standards of high level play. Small versions of same can be obtained for 20 EC per from vendors or from your ship's replicator, which is likewise cheap.

...

Your starship will be equipped with engines, deflectors, shields, a warp core, and of course weapons. In low level play, concentrate on just getting better stat lines out of these equipment. The only tricky questions are weapons and deflectors.

For deflectors, there are multiple types that do different things (bonuses to hit points and healing, or bonuses to control abilities, et cetera). Pick one based on what it does. I always choose the 'tanky' positron deflectors, or nearly always.

For weapons... thiiiis is where you get into competitive DPS. Here is, in broad, how to have "enuff dakka" for the early to mid-game (i.e. before you get to the point where you can obtain lots of gear through the reputation system and plunk down millions of EC to buy whatever the hell you want on the Exchange).

1) Your spaceship's main battery energy weapons (preferably a uniform set of beam arrays, or a battery of beam banks on the forward weapon slots) should all be the same damage type. The types are phaser, disruptor, plasma, tetryon, polaron, or antiproton. It doesn't really matter which type. At low levels, it's easiest to standardize on the damage type traditionally associated with your faction (phaser for Federation, disruptor for Klingon, plasma for Romulans), because you get some pretty good weapons of the appropriate types as mission awards in the single player campaign. If you don't have enough weapons of uniform type, buy more on the Exchange- you can find cheap weapons, pricey weapons, or anything in between.

1a) Also make sure your main battery is of uniform weapon type. If some of your main battery weapons are beams and some are cannons, the same ability will not benefit all the weapons, and you won't be able to use all your firepower all the time. It's pointless to have one weapon firing forward with a 250 degree arc of fire if you still have to keep the nose pointed within 22.5 degrees of the target to make sure the OTHER weapons can hit, in other words.

2) Fill every single "tactical console" slot your ship has with the console choice that increases the damage of that particular energy weapon damage type. For instance, if your ship is armed with phasers, use phaser relays. If you're a tactical character on a tac ship (raptors, escorts, etc.), this may well double your damage output all by itself.

3) Make sure your ship's power to weapons stays high during battle. Allocate enough power to weapons that it doesn't drop low even when you're firing all your guns; this makes sure you continue dishing out the damage.

4) Liberally spam whatever bridge officer abilities you have that are based on "cannons" or "beam array," choosing whichever option the situation warrants. For example, Fire At Will is best for engaging two or three targets you want to fry quickly, or in a "point defense free" situation where you're trying to shoot down a bunch of fighters and torpedoes that are inconvenient to target individually. Scatter Volley is good for using cannons to blow the crud out of anything in the general vicinity of your ship's line of motion, all at once, regardless of the number of targets. Overload and Rapid Fire increase firepower against a single target but do not engage multiple targets.

4a) If you should choose to use torpedoes (quite useful at low levels, I've had less luck with them at high level), Torpedo Spread is THE killer app, because it hits everything in your forward arc with heavy kinetic damage. Kinetic damage is a special type inflicted by torpedoes in space and explosives in general. It is highly effective at wrecking anything that lacks shields, or whose shields have been stripped away by enemy fire. Watch out for torpedoes fired at you, and try to time your own torpedo shots to slip through after you've depleted the enemy's shields in space.

5) Again, try to have equipment within a mark or two of the highest level available, at reasonable price. It is worth spending a few thousands of EC to buy a good console, but only if you plan to use it for a while. At high level it's worth going shopping to make sure you have, oh, Uncommon Mark XI or better weapons in all slots. Make sure to compare actual stats- for instance, a Very Rare Mk X console will have the same performance as an Uncommon Mk XII console, but will be far more expensive on the Exchange... it's really not worth buying the Very Rare Mk X because it doesn't give much of a performance increase, and waiting for the Mk XII console which is easier to obtain costs little.

6) I tend to fill SOME of my engineering slots with "armor" console choices that confer damage reduction, but that's me. Others might do differently. Note that damage reduction doesn't stack linearly while damage multipliers do, so it's pointless to stack multiple sets of the same armor but highly effective to stack multiple sets of the same damage-boosting console.
___________________

Anyway, none of this is strictly optimal in that it makes you a DPS god, but it will give you enough firepower that, in your journeys through the galaxy, you will seldom if ever lack the means to kill anything that urgently needs killing. Unless you start playing special team missions, in which case you may encounter things with ridiculous hit point bars... but the very reason they HAVE such hit point bars is that there are so very, very many players out there who happen to be DPS gods. Several of them are likely to be your teammates, so don't panic.

[Elheru Aran]

Beam Fire at Will is particularly useful when you're facing Romulan D'deridex Warbirds and their tractor-beam-plasma-torpedo-spam ability. God I hate those sons of bitches, and I also hate equally that they don't give you the same ability when playing Romulan yourself...

[Lord Revan]

the double ds aren't so bad they're just regular tractors, the Mogai do that with the bloody mines meaning you have 3-4 tractors to worry about and the mogai have decent agility too.

[Elheru Aran]

the double ds aren't so bad they're just regular tractors, the Mogai do that with the bloody mines meaning you have 3-4 tractors to worry about and the mogai have decent agility too.

Romulans in general are a pain in the ass to fight until you line up your capabilities appropriately-- Polarize Hull against the Mogai, plus BFAW and Evasive against the DD. BFAW is a pretty useful ability against mines too.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

A couple of things I should point out:

Simply discarding stuff in the replicator isn't the most efficient way- offloading on actual vendors nets you 50% of the face value of an item instead of 40%. doesn't sound like much but it becomes significant when concerning space loot as it's worth ten times what ground gear costs. Generally for low levels the rewards you get for story missions are by far the way to go. Only when you reach endgame should you look at buying high-end gear.

As for traits, you'll find that your bridge officer space traits come into play far more than your character- simply because you have five of them for max-level ships. The most sought-after BOFF traits is Superior Romulan Operative, not because of cloaking but because it confers a boost of both critical chance and severity. Non-Romulan races are restricted in that the only way they can get Rom BOFFS is through the embassy, and only tactical ones come with SRO. Generally though, if your created toon has any form of Operative as a selectable trait, take it. Because crit chance is conferred in 1-3% increments, every little helps.

[bilateralrope]

I made myself a rather short character. Then I got myself a rifle, which looks far too big as STO doesn't scale item sizes with the character.

I'm also seeing a lot of standing on chairs. Both by my character and NPCs.

Question, bilateralrope, are you spending zero money on this, or are you open to spending a small amount money (say, five dollars on one character)?

If I find myself liking STO, I'm willing to spend some money. I'll probably grab a subscription. At the moment I'm not enjoying it:
- Ground combat consists of starting autofire, waiting for enemies to die. The only ability I've got so far is mines, the only enemies I've faced so far were ranged.
- Starship combat consists of circling round the enemy ship to keep it in my broadside arc, waiting for it to die, with my power systems set to fully defensive as going faster doesn't help and it produces enough power to the weapons (when weapons fire, the power level drops. But it recharges again before they fire again).
A typical MMO starting experience that should improve once new abilities open up. So nothing to worry about as I'm only level 3.

If you're playing at normal difficulty (which you should be), you won't have serious problems with being outgunned, unless you get stupid and totally neglect the quality of your equipment. Just try to make sure all your equipment is within one or two tiers of the maximum your character level is allowed to use. When random drops produce something that looks better than what you're using in a given role now, equip it.

The kind of equipment you pick up in random drops usually isn't worth very much EC, and in my experience selling it on the Exchange is usually more trouble than it's worth. You're better off just hitting 'discard' on it and tossing it into the replicator for raw materials (nets you 40% of its official EC value).

Thank you for that information. Looks like I'll be making do with drops and just chucking anything I don't want into the replicator for a while, at least until I'm on my last free ship.

I recommend equipping all your ground combat bridge officers and yourself with "Energy Dampening" armor, because you get shot at with beam weapons a lot more than you get attacked in hand to hand combat. "Polyalloy" armor is a second-best against beam weapons, but very good against hand to hand attacks in the unlikely event that this matters. There are other types of armor that confer offensive bonuses, but are so much weaker defensively that I prefer not to use them.

Good to know.

It doesn't really matter what energy damage type you use in ground combat, not in the sense of one being vastly better than another. It also doesn't really matter if you use diverse or uniform damage types. Except against the Borg, where it's better to have diverse damage types because the Borg adapt to being shot at by any given damage type quickly. You only get a few shots with a ranged weapon of a given damage type before you have to stop for a few seconds to remodulate the weapon. However, you don't fight Borg very often unless you go out of your way to look for them.

Make sure your characters carry large stacks of "hypos" (HP heal) and "shield charges" (shield heals). This keeps them on their feet in battle. Large hypos and shield charges can be obtained for 320 EC per from numerous vendors, which is cheap by the standards of high level play. Small versions of same can be obtained for 20 EC per from vendors or from your ship's replicator, which is likewise cheap.

Useful.

1) Your spaceship's main battery energy weapons (preferably a uniform set of beam arrays, or a battery of beam banks on the forward weapon slots) should all be the same damage type. The types are phaser, disruptor, plasma, tetryon, polaron, or antiproton. It doesn't really matter which type. At low levels, it's easiest to standardize on the damage type traditionally associated with your faction (phaser for Federation, disruptor for Klingon, plasma for Romulans), because you get some pretty good weapons of the appropriate types as mission awards in the single player campaign. If you don't have enough weapons of uniform type, buy more on the Exchange- you can find cheap weapons, pricey weapons, or anything in between.

I'll start standardising once console start dropping for me.

3) Make sure your ship's power to weapons stays high during battle. Allocate enough power to weapons that it doesn't drop low even when you're firing all your guns; this makes sure you continue dishing out the damage.

What happens when each system doesn't get enough power ?
I'm guessing that weapons won't fire. Less power to engines makes me move slower. What about shields/auxiliary ?

4) Liberally spam whatever bridge officer abilities you have that are based on "cannons" or "beam array," choosing whichever option the situation warrants.

Once I get said abilities.

[Simon_Jester]

If we're going to help out a new player, I would like to suggest that we NOT use acronyms like BFAW unnecessarily. I personally remember finding those very confusing and it took me a long time to find a useful glossary to figure them out.

I made myself a rather short character. Then I got myself a rifle, which looks far too big as STO doesn't scale item sizes with the character.

I'm also seeing a lot of standing on chairs. Both by my character and NPCs.

NPCs standing on chairs is weird. Are you sure those are NPCs? Maybe there's a glitch in the animations.

Question, bilateralrope, are you spending zero money on this, or are you open to spending a small amount money (say, five dollars on one character)?

If I find myself liking STO, I'm willing to spend some money. I'll probably grab a subscription. At the moment I'm not enjoying it:
- Ground combat consists of starting autofire, waiting for enemies to die. The only ability I've got so far is mines, the only enemies I've faced so far were ranged.

Okay, that's a problem you can do something about.

Step one is, as your character starts gaining levels (which will not take long), think about kit abilities. If you're summoning minefields you're an engineering character. Consider what the Soviet military used to call "brash mining:" darting forward toward the enemy, laying your mines, and sprinting out of range. Alternatively, try arming your away team with "expose" weapons and yourself with an "exploit" weapon. This makes things more interesting because it gives you an incentive to look out for targets that have been exposed, and hit them with the secondary-fire mode of your weapon for massive damage.

That said, ground combat is not the strongest part of the game, so that's an issue.

What level is your character at, anyway?

- Starship combat consists of circling round the enemy ship to keep it in my broadside arc, waiting for it to die, with my power systems set to fully defensive as going faster doesn't help and it produces enough power to the weapons (when weapons fire, the power level drops. But it recharges again before they fire again).

That's not how power level works.

Basically, the higher your power level, the greater the damage output of your weapon per shot. Firing several weapons at once significantly reduces your weapon power, which means each individual weapon does less damage. Incidentally this is the major limiting factor on broadside-firing beam weapon ships; if you're firing eight beam arrays at once, they're all hitting for a lot less damage than you'd expect, and you may even be doing less damage than you would if you removed one of the eight beam arrays.

Boosting power to your weapons will always result in doing more damage more quickly. This is particularly important because most STO space combat amounts to an arms race between your ability to dish out damage via DPS, and the enemy's ability to regenerate damage by recharging their shields and repairing their hull. In most cases, offense wins out over defense, unless you have a relatively weak and puny ship firing at a very large and tanky ship.

However, many enemy ships, especially ships of the 'cruiser' and 'science vessel' types DO have respectable defense and self-repair capability. If your offense is very weak due to poor build or suboptimal settings, it takes you a disproportionate amount of time to defeat each individual opponent, and battles seem more tiresome and time-consuming. And in that case, boosting power to weapons can mean you chew up enemies very, very quickly.

Basically, going from weapons power 50 to weapons power 100 may result in enemy ships dying about four times faster.

If you're still finding space battles dull, do what I suggested- try to knock down the enemy's shields and then hit them with torpedoes while their shields are still down. This may or may not result in higher DPS, but it does require you to maneuver actively and plan ahead a bit, and it can be very satisfying to watch a "3829 damage" float above the ship you just successfully torpedoed.

A typical MMO starting experience that should improve once new abilities open up. So nothing to worry about as I'm only level 3.

That sounds like you've only played one or two missions, then...? Okay, yes, you do need to play a bit more to get some more diversity in your gameplay experience. What faction are you playing, by the way? Federation, Klingon, Romulan? 23rd century Starfleet Kirk-dude? You didn't say.

Thank you for that information. Looks like I'll be making do with drops and just chucking anything I don't want into the replicator for a while, at least until I'm on my last free ship.

Getting non-free ships will require you to either spend real money on Zen, or do a LOT of grinding. It's complicated, I think I'd rather explain it later.

And as another guy said, you're better off selling the gear to vendors (you get 25% more energy credits that way) than just hitting 'discard' like I do. I guess I'm just too impatient most of the time.

1) Your spaceship's main battery energy weapons (preferably a uniform set of beam arrays, or a battery of beam banks on the forward weapon slots) should all be the same damage type. The types are phaser, disruptor, plasma, tetryon, polaron, or antiproton. It doesn't really matter which type. At low levels, it's easiest to standardize on the damage type traditionally associated with your faction (phaser for Federation, disruptor for Klingon, plasma for Romulans), because you get some pretty good weapons of the appropriate types as mission awards in the single player campaign. If you don't have enough weapons of uniform type, buy more on the Exchange- you can find cheap weapons, pricey weapons, or anything in between.

I'll start standardising once console start dropping for me.

You cannot expect the consoles to drop reliably- most of the time you'll get consoles that are useless to you, because there are six beam damage types and six kinds of torpedoes and they all have their own consoles. 80-90% of the time you wouldn't get the one you want, and tactical damage consoles are a pretty unusual drop anyway.

Plan ahead, use the Exchange, and buy your own consoles of the appropriate mark. If you don't know what item you're shopping for, tell me what level you are and what damage type you want to use, and I'll tell you what you're looking for.

If you're still in your starting ship, you're probably only losing about 5% or so of your potential damage output by not standardizing your damage type and using consoles. But by the time you hit level 20 and are flying around in a bigger, meaner ship (plus being able to use better consoles) the reduced damage output is more like 20 or 30%, and it can wind up being really big if you're at level 40 or 50 and still waiting for the right consoles to drop. Trust me, buy your own. The basic models do NOT cost that much and still give you about 90% of the performance you can get from the expensive top-end models.

3) Make sure your ship's power to weapons stays high during battle. Allocate enough power to weapons that it doesn't drop low even when you're firing all your guns; this makes sure you continue dishing out the damage.

What happens when each system doesn't get enough power ?
I'm guessing that weapons won't fire. Less power to engines makes me move slower. What about shields/auxiliary ?

If power drops to literally zero I'm pretty sure your weapons won't fire- but that's not the realistic problem. The realistic problem is that when your weapons power level is 30 (due to low power settings and/or firing multiple energy weapons at the same time), you lose 2% of your damage output for every point below 50. So at weapons power 30, you're doing 40% less damage than you 'should.' Conversely, at weapons power 70, you're doing 40% more damage, and at weapons power 100, you're doing double damage.

High weapon power is one of the ways to ensure you have adequate DPS. Note that if you're an engineering character you have several ways to raise your ship's power levels through various skills and abilities. Keep an eye out for those.

High power to shields means shields recharge quickly which means it's harder for the enemy to knock your shields down. It also gives the shields a noticeable degree of damage reduction. Conversely, at low power your shields recharge slowly (so once they go down they stay down unless you use shield heals), and have less damage reduction (so they are more heavily damaged by any given enemy attack, and fail more quickly).

There are a lot of bridge officer abilities that heal shields (and hull), which you'll want to use as well. Especially if you're an engineering officer, because engineers and the cruiser ships normally associated with them favor sturdy ships that take a lot of damage.

Although strictly, you don't have to fly engineering cruiser ships just because you're an engineer.

4) Liberally spam whatever bridge officer abilities you have that are based on "cannons" or "beam array," choosing whichever option the situation warrants.

Once I get said abilities.

Those are tactical abilities, by the way. If your tactical officer doesn't have them, you may want to consider buying training manuals for the abilities on the Exchange and retraining your officers to use them. They are highly effective, especially "Fire at Will" for beams and "Scatter Volley" for cannons. Because those abilities effectively double your damage output (or better!) if you fight multiple targets, and they allow you to quickly, efficiently destroy swarms of maneuverable lightly armored targets like fighters or heavy torpedoes before they can attack your ship.

[mr friendly guy]

Is there any advantage to buying a subscription, as opposed to simply buying zen when you want to get stuff?

[Lord Revan]

Simon, AoY broke a lot of the NPC animations so you got things like NPCs standing on chairs or sitting on the ground in front of the chair but with "sit of chair" animation.

and a way to use mines against ranged opponents is to kite them into the field, it'll take some work though, another way is that if you know before hand where the enemy is about to spawn you drop the mine field on them, so when they beam in the mines go boom on their feet and you can kill the whole pack if you're lucky without firing a shot.

that said engineers aren't very mobile and against "ensign" or "lt." kit powers aren't needed, Tactical officers are more new player friendly in that you keep more or less full mobility while using kit powers, though engineers are still more newbie friendly then sci.

[Simon_Jester]

Is there any advantage to buying a subscription, as opposed to simply buying zen when you want to get stuff?

You get access to some interesting side-content and minor bonuses I don't know anything about. And if you're in it for the long haul, you may save money eventually, because you get a free allotment of Zen every month. Over time it adds up.

and a way to use mines against ranged opponents is to kite them into the field, it'll take some work though, another way is that if you know before hand where the enemy is about to spawn you drop the mine field on them, so when they beam in the mines go boom on their feet and you can kill the whole pack if you're lucky without firing a shot.

Yeah, I have fond memories of that one mission in the old (now defunct) Romulan arc where you rescue people from the Hirogen. You have to run up to certain devices and disable them. Hirogen beam into the surrounding area and attack you when you do it, and as I recall they gloat about how they've trapped you. After two such attacks I worked out the pattern and put a minefield in juuust the right spot. Then I had to picture my character suppressing maniacal laughter as these big nasty pompous Hirogen 'hunter' types beam into a kill-zone while I push the detonator.

"I heard you like trapping, so I put a trap in your trap so you can get trapped while you trap me."

[Lord Revan]

and a way to use mines against ranged opponents is to kite them into the field, it'll take some work though, another way is that if you know before hand where the enemy is about to spawn you drop the mine field on them, so when they beam in the mines go boom on their feet and you can kill the whole pack if you're lucky without firing a shot.

Yeah, I have fond memories of that one mission in the old (now defunct) Romulan arc where you rescue people from the Hirogen. You have to run up to certain devices and disable them. Hirogen beam into the surrounding area and attack you when you do it, and as I recall they gloat about how they've trapped you. After two such attacks I worked out the pattern and put a minefield in juuust the right spot. Then I had to picture my character suppressing maniacal laughter as these big nasty pompous Hirogen 'hunter' types beam into a kill-zone while I push the detonator.

"I heard you like trapping, so I put a trap in your trap so you can get trapped while you trap me."

I love doing that to Heralds in "Brotherhood of the sword", there's something pleasing when the big arrogant "we're so much better then you" baddies beam straight into a literal minefield and blow themselves up.

[Elheru Aran]

I'll have to look at that... right now I have one of those strategic kits on my tactical character. It stole my grenades, damnit. Which is another nice kit module to have.

Random question re space weapons: Which is better, Torpedo High Yield or Torpedo Spread? And by 'better' I mean 'more DPS'...

[bilateralrope]

Is there any advantage to buying a subscription, as opposed to simply buying zen when you want to get stuff?

Yes

If you're summoning minefields you're an engineering character.

Just so we are all clear about what my character is:
Faction: Federation
Race: Aliengen
Class: Engineer

What I want to fly is a slow, durable ship with lots of broadsides firing. Mainly for reasons of eye candy, but also because they will suffer less from latency issues.
On the ground, I want to use turrets.

Currently level 3 because I haven't had much time to play yet. That should change today.

Once I hit level 10 and get my free ship I'll start buying equipment. Until then I'll make do with what drops. Any suggestions about what to buy ?

I'm also going to need suggestions about where to put my skill points

That's not how power level works.

I see.

This strikes me as a system designed to get players to shove everything they can into one system, the leftover into a second, then leave it there as long as possible.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I'll have to look at that... right now I have one of those strategic kits on my tactical character. It stole my grenades, damnit. Which is another nice kit module to have.

Random question re space weapons: Which is better, Torpedo High Yield or Torpedo Spread? And by 'better' I mean 'more DPS'...

It all depends if you're facing one target or several- HY is the torp equivalent of Beam Overload and Cannon Rapid Fire, while spread is that of Fire at Will and Scatter Volley.

Spread for the Romulan Hyper-plasma weapon is pretty awesome though, because all the torpedoes are seeking. This means that if the original target is destroyed in transit, the torps aren't wasted. Instead they seek out the next available target- factor in that each one has an area-of-effect explosion, you'll find that for targets that are tightly bunched together (perhaps as a result of grav well...) it's pretty insane how much devastation this results in

HY for the Rom turns each torp into a heavy one; for the Omega weapon it creates a smaller, weaker version of the plasma energy bolt that the Borg Command ships fire. And has the same disintegration effect if it hits a weakened enemy

[Feil]

Basic Leveling Build (Engineer):
Space - Cruiser
Assign beams to all of your weapon slots, until you have seven or more slots. The seventh slot is the last one that adds to your DPS because of power drain, so the eighth slot and possibly the seventh should be a torpedo or mine launcher. Unfortunately, the Star Trek classic beams and torpedos combination is not a very effective way to maximize dps, because you want all your tactical consoles to boost one weapon type.

Consoles:
Eng - Neutronium Alloy.
Sci - Field Generator.
Tac - Boosters for your energy damage type.
As soon as you can afford it, buy a Plasmonic Leech console on the Exchange. It'll do amazing things for your power levels.

Shields: capacity is king.

Devices: Shield battery, weapon battery, aux battery.

BOffs:
Tactical: Tactical Team and Beam Fire At Will. Pop a weapon battery when you BFAW, run Tactical Team on cooldown. Spare slots can be used for Attack Patterns. Attack Pattern Delta is great for a tank.
Sci: Hazard Emitters, Science Team. Higher slots can be used for fun control abilities.
Engineer: Emergency Power to Shields 1. Have two of these. Run them on cooldown so that the power is always active. Every functional space build in STO barring specialty munchkin builds have this. Higher slots can be used for whatever you want, but don't have too many Emergency Power to ___ because they share a cooldown.

Set your power levels to high weapons, moderate shields, low engines, low-to-moderate auxiliary. Ride this most of the time. Engineers in cruisers are more tanky than most STO missions require, so focusing on your DPS will be okay. Make sure to equalize your shields frequently and you should be fine.

Have a second power level with low weapons, high shields, high aux, and low engines. Ride this when you need to tank hard.

Have a third power level with high engines, high shields, low aux, and low weapons. Flip to this one before using Evasive Maneuvers to escape from a bad situation.

Note: power levels can't get higher than 125, and Engineers have a lot of ways to boost power levels. At higher levels, you may find that you don't need to set a power level to 100 to reach the 125 cap, thus freeing up more power for other systems.



Ground:
Weapons - Pulsewave Assault, Split Beam Rifle.
Kit: you want turrets, so get a kit with turrets. Mines are really good, so get some of those too when you get the chance.
Consumables: Large Hypo, Large Shield Charge.
BOffs: Full auto rifles to generate maximum Exposes.
Tactics: Aim and crouch to shoot. Sprint to move. Avoid shooter mode, never fire on the move, stay close to cover and block line of sight when you're running low on health, and use your kit abilities on cooldown. Assign a key for "closest enemy" for blasting with your Pulsewave and a key for "next exposed enemy" for zapping with your splitbeam. Flip to your Splitbeam and secondary anybody with the orange expose circle on them.

[bilateralrope]

Where should I put my skill points ?

[Lord Revan]

Where should I put my skill points ?

that depends on your playstyle really as you can't reset skill points for free.

if you want to go for a highly tanky build doesn't have that much burst but can take a real beating, focus on the endurance boosting skills, on the other hand if you want to do for a more aggressive build you should take skills that boost energy weapons (torps don't matter as much). I'm sure others can go into more detail about this and these are the extremes you generally don't have enough sci slots to go for a exotic damage build on cruisers.

[RogueIce]

Once I hit level 10 and get my free ship I'll start buying equipment. Until then I'll make do with what drops. Any suggestions about what to buy ?

Don't bother until you hit Level 50.

Everything you buy below that will be obsolete before long and you're just going to lose money on the deal. The mission rewards and random drops will do a good enough job of keeping you reasonably geared as you level up.