Three Wise Men

Star Trek Online – Characters and Space Combat

Image via Wikipedia

Star Trek Online was one of the more, if not the most, anticipated games¹ here at Three Wise Men. That is right, we are all trekkies, we are sure that miniskirt uniforms were dropped because crawling in Jefferies Tubes could become a bit awkward. We also know that crossing replicator power converter with plasma manifold isn’t something you should do if you want to keep your plasma relays in a working order.

Star Trek Online has a very startreky feeling with an LCARS-like user interface and you will run into all kind of Star Trek lingo during the game. You begin with creating your character that will be a member of Klingon Empire or United Federation of Planets. Picking up a career in Starfleet or Klingon empire gives you three options: Engineering, Science and Tactical represented by yellow, blue and red color of the default uniform. If you are a fan of Star Trek then you already know what we am talking about. Next stop is selecting your species and Federation gives you standard compliment of Humans, Bajorans, Vulcans, Betazoid and few other less known species, Klingon empire on the other side offers Klingons, Orions, Gorns and so on. Yes Gorns, you can in fact be a member of the very same species that James T. Kirk got in trouble with. If you are not happy with the offer you can always let your imagination wild and create your own species.

Leveling, Ranking and other earnings

Building up your character is the basic of every role-playing game. You have to build up your skills, stats and who knows what else, to get better in the game, to make a progress. Right now in Star Trek Online you will be grinding on four different things which can be earned during encounters in space or on the ground and you can also get them as mission rewards for completing the missions.

Skill Points – Used for building up your personal skills.

Officer Points – Used for building up your bridge officer’s skills.

Starfleet Merits – Used mostly for buying bridge officers, teaching them new skills and promoting them.

Energy Credits – Used for buying personal equipment and ship components. Money that can be traded forth and back for various items.

There are five different ranks in the game and each has ten grades which gives us fifty levels that you’ll need to chew through. After earning new grade you can spend your earned skill and officer points on skills for your character or your bridge officers. When you gain new rank you can get access to new skills, ships and you can also promote your bridge officers, unlocking their new skills.

In space no one can hear you scream

However, they can hear your ship explode. Strange, but true. Combat in Star Trek Online is relatively simple. The goal is to orient your ship so that as much of your weapons are facing your enemy. Then you fire them all. You have to keep doing this until your opponent (or yourself) is still alive. Space is somewhat 2.5D, it has some height but it is limited and you can quickly reach the top or the bottom of it. While fighting you will also have to take care of your shields and manage your energy.

Weapons – All of them have their own firing arcs, beam weapons mostly cover larger 250 degree firing arcs and you can maneuver your ship so that fore and aft weapon can both fire at your enemy. Projectile weapons will cover 90 degree arcs and you will have to face your enemy almost head on to be able to fire them. Beam weapons will do more the damage to shields while projectile weapons will do more damage to the hull.

Shields – Every ship has four shields: fore (front), starboard (right), aft (back) and port (left). They will protect your ship’s hull from the weapons fire. However all shields have a bleed-through percentage – the amount of damage ship’s hull will suffer anyway. Once the shields are gone most of the damage is inflicted to ship’s hull.

Hull – Amount of hull left is displayed in percentage and when it reaches 0% your ship explodes. Take care of your shields so that your hull won’t suffer. It is always a good thing to have an engineering bridge officer that can dispatch repair crews that will fix some of your hull.

Energy – Your life. If you ran out of energy your ship will stop, shields will go down and weapons will stop firing. The amount of energy that you have is very limited and you can distribute it in four different areas: weapons, shields, engines and auxiliary. First three are self explanatory. Auxiliary power is used to power up some of the ship systems that you can use during the fight to gain some edge. For example: with tachyon beam skill you use deflector dish to drain enemy shields and the effectiveness of attack will increase if you have more auxiliary power available.

Crew – Depending on your level and rank you can recruit bridge officers. You can assign them to tactical, engineering or science stations on your ship and use their special abilities while flying in space. You can also pick them to go with you on an away mission where you are again able to use their ground abilities.

And the rest?

Character creation and progression so far is good. Space combat is not too difficult and not too simple. We were asking ourselves if Star Trek Online can measure up to EVE Online, well it can’t. They are two completely different games with different target audience. STO is trekky enough for an average Star Trek fan and simple enough for an average Joe Random player. EVE Online is just too hardcore with too much of nano-management for players that don’t spend all their free time in the game.

How about away missions, player interaction, co-op missions, player vs. player encounters and other important aspects of multi-player games? So far we haven’t picked up enough play time and we didn’t go much further than away missions and couple of fleet missions, you can expect a new blog post about these things Soon™! For now you can enjoy few screen-shots and in-game footage.

Live long and prosper. ;)

1. We promise not to mention Star Craft 2 or make jokes about Duke Nukem Forever [↩]

Related posts:

1. Star Trek Online – Away Missions
2. Star Trek Online – Exploration with a touch of epic space battles?!?
3. Startrek Online, a replacement for EVE Online?
4. Star Trek
5. EVE-Online: The story of a pod pilot