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[Mech#4]

I've been playing this a faire bit recently and I must say that I'm rather surprised. I don't think they advertise the space combat enough and how it actually works as it's quite fun. Also the chance to own and fly around in a battleships pretty neat.

Spoiler: Notes on Gameplay (click to show/hide)

The game has two major sections, space combat and ground combat.

Space Combat is where you pilot a ship you've acquired through the main quests or later on bought. Your ship is like a second character as it has slots to swap in and out weapons, shields, engines and so forth. Space combat itself involves flying around, targeting enemy vessels and trying to get them within the firing arcs of your guns.
Ships have 4 shield sections, being forward, aft, port and starboard, that you first have to bring down before launching torpedos to deal direct hull damage. Shields can be boosted by routing power to shields to increase their regeneration rate or by using a number of abilities that come with bridge officers.

Example: I currently have a Dhelan Warbird, a type of light cruiser, which has the following item slots:
Fore Weapons: 1: Torpedos  2: Beam Array  3: Duel Heavy Cannons.
Deflector
Impulse
Singularity
Shields
Aft Weapons
Devices: (These are things like batteries that act like health potions for shields and hull)
Engineering Console
Science Console
Tactical Console

Consoles give bonuses to shield regeneration, weapon damage and damage resistance. Impulse is your ships engines that let you move faster, Singularity (Engine for other races I believe) affects power distribution I think.
With the weapons, I can swap those in and out as I please. So you can add three beam cannons on the front and no torpedos, or as I have, a mix of beam, cannon and torpedos. Beam have a wide fire arc but lower damage while cannons have a low fire arc (45*) but higher damage.

Bridge Officers: They're the other guys on your ship bridge with you. They're NPCs that you have control over levelling. They also have skill trees that help improve their abilities (though I believe you can teach them new ones if you have the skill to). They also form your ground team.

Ground Combat:

I would liken it to Mass Effect 1 and Knights of the Old Republic. It's not strictly turn based like those two, but you can position your bridge officers by a button to set them up before combat. Different weapons have different abilities (I have a pistol and a sniper rifle) and your characters class tends to come into play more during missions. It is a bit weak with difficulty but I have been pleasantly surprised by the AI automatically doing things like reviving team members, throwing grenades and using weapons secondary firing modes.


What else... Missions:

Missions I believe are meant to be like TV episodes. So far they've been quite varied, showing off a large number of different races, different objectives and so forth. I've had a mission where I had to cloak through a turret wall to get close enough to take out a space stations weapons before fighting off other ships. There was a mission where I had to fly to a planet, fight off orbiting raiders before beaming down to the planet surface to take samples and explore. Another saw me attacking a convoy, taking out the escort before disabling and boarding the freighters.


I will say though, a bit of an issue is there is a lot of content and mechanics to understand, not to mention the UI, which the game doesn't do the best job of explaining. I would recommend keeping the http://sto.gamepedia.com/Main_Page open while you're playing to look up things when you need to.

Overall, I would say its a pretty good game, certainly worth it for a free game. The F2P aspect of it doesn't seem to be too unfair, it is owned by Perfect World now (Well, kind of) and I've seen their in game stores before. However, while you can buy ships from the in game store and other such things, there's nothing which you can't get without paying anything, though it may take a long time gathering resources. Zen is the money you buy but you can exchange Refined Dilitium in game for it. Dilitium is a reward you get for completing things like PvP content and the like.

The player base seems to be quite large, I count about 21 in my immediate area. Chat is very quiet, not sure why but maybe people are talking in private channels.

I would like to see the game expand its player base, it's certainly a fair bit different from most other MMOs I've played.


Oh, Romulan Centurion Ayadore possibly willing to join a group if we've got one on the Klingon side. If not I could be convinced to create another character on the other side.

[Sappho]

So... the game focuses on combat? I was hoping for something focused on exploration and diplomacy. You know, like how Star Trek originally was meant to be. If it's about fighting, then count me out.

[ollobrains]

yeah its fighting focused

[Mech#4]

There is a focus towards combat, yes. Though I will say to the developers credit there is more focus away from combat than MMO's usually show.

For a start, space isn't populated by roaming mobs. There are these red orbs that I think are enemies but I haven't gone into them yet (moving into a planet or battle is like entering an instance). There is a large number of planets and sectors to explore, though again I haven't checked it myself and I understand it may be rather empty of actual rewards.

Out of the... mmm 20 or so missions I've done so far about 5 of them have had a focus away from combat with either no or little actual fighting. One was a mission with me talking to various diplomats, gaining their trust and saving them from sabotage, another mission I was captured and had to perform various tasks while under observation. There was another mission where I had to read through various documents I'd recently been given to discover discrepancies by cross referencing with other documents. Another had me transported to an alternate future where I had to gather allies to escape a mining facility, talking to people and navigating tunnels.

So yeah. It certainly has combat, and combat is a large part of the game, but they have tried to make it less combat focused then most other MMOs available. I've fought a lot less than I did while playing World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online.

[Kaje]

I loved playing this, for about a month, until I realised it's simply tailored to the PvP crowd. There's little to no opportunity to RP and the developers are solely focused on adding yet more PvP content (aside from the sporadic 'episodes').

[forsaken1111]

So... the game focuses on combat? I was hoping for something focused on exploration and diplomacy. You know, like how Star Trek originally was meant to be. If it's about fighting, then count me out.

There is a whole line of diplomacy and exploration missions by the way

[Linenoise]

You also assign your crew members (not Bridge officers but the actual crew of your Starship) to various missions. They can vary from anything to combat training missions to sending your scientists off to give a lecture. There are varying degrees of difficulty and danger that influence what sort of rewards you get.

these missions are passive so you just assign the crew missions and then it basically runs a timer (varying anywhere from 2 minutes to several days). Once the time is up you will be notified if the mission was a success or failure (varying degrees of success and failure as well).

[BFEL]

Well this suddenly revived

So anyone actually manage to do anything with Arc? I tried for the free stuffs and now can't get into STO from there or the former option. Very frustrate.

[Mech#4]

I'm not sure exactly what Arc is, though from a brief look it's a social program linking Perfect Worlds MMOs together?

I seem to remember reading that you might need to change your password or use the password for Arc and not the one for your Star Trek Online account.

I don't know more than that, I installed the game from Steam which didn't install Arc.

[Kaje]

So... the game focuses on combat? I was hoping for something focused on exploration and diplomacy. You know, like how Star Trek originally was meant to be. If it's about fighting, then count me out.

There is a whole line of diplomacy and exploration missions by the way

Nothing of any note, however. They mainly involve you sending your 'bridge officers' off on missions that have no impact at all on the universe.

The game is VERY combat oriented, and is nothing like the various series and movies - most of which surrounded pure exploration and diplomacy.

[Sonlirain]

So... the game focuses on combat? I was hoping for something focused on exploration and diplomacy. You know, like how Star Trek originally was meant to be. If it's about fighting, then count me out.

There is a whole line of diplomacy and exploration missions by the way

Nothing of any note, however. They mainly involve you sending your 'bridge officers' off on missions that have no impact at all on the universe.

The game is VERY combat oriented, and is nothing like the various series and movies - most of which surrounded pure exploration and diplomacy.

It has its share of non combat missions in episodes but yeah aside of those and several exploration missions it's mostly combat oriented... just not as much as many other MMOs out there.
Then again a game based purely on exploration and diplomacy/talking would need TONS of writing... and would be likely boring for trigger happy people.

[TwilightWalker]

I loved playing this, for about a month, until I realised it's simply tailored to the PvP crowd. There's little to no opportunity to RP and the developers are solely focused on adding yet more PvP content (aside from the sporadic 'episodes').

Pffffffffffffffft. Hah. This game is barely focused around PvP content. What it's focused on is making money, and how they do that is with constant lockbox rollouts and content updates and events that encourage either grinding or purchasing shortcuts to get through the grind. I've played for years, and PvP content has always been a minor part of the game that even the Dev's admit is broken and not at all a well polished part of the game.

[Sonlirain]

Odd i didn't find many things to grind for. i got my reputations pretty fast up to max and have almost every upgrade i wanted with the exeption for one part of the borg mk XII space set and i don't think i had to grind much at all for everything else.
Heck even the leveling was somewhat enjoyable and in fact i hit max lvl before starting the last episodes.

[TwilightWalker]

Odd i didn't find many things to grind for. i got my reputations pretty fast up to max and have almost every upgrade i wanted with the exeption for one part of the borg mk XII space set and i don't think i had to grind much at all for everything else.
Heck even the leveling was somewhat enjoyable and in fact i hit max lvl before starting the last episodes.

Part of a fleet? That's where most of my grind is going. Fleet marks, dilithium, doffs...