Star Trek Online

[one_klump]

Here is a picture of my captain on the bridge of my Defiant class. Yes, I know its unreasonably large for a ship with a crew of 50, but I decided that giving up the first 3 decks of the ship were worth it.

[Ghost Train]

Now that is what I call a bridge...

[Greyryder]

That's a huge b....ridge!

[David Hingtgen]

I remember at the end of the Beta, there was a call for all Fed players to get Runabouts, and meet the Klingons that way. Never saw what came of it, as ME 2 showed up an hour later.

But still, the idea of a MASSIVE number of Runabouts taking on a Negh'var is very appealing to me.

[eugimon]

I actually thought the runabout would be like a little fighter type ship you could launch and not just a really expensive little sunday drive thing to take around on trips to the grocery store.

[Ghost Train]

The bridge sizes I think are purposely skewed to allow for better camera rotation and thus improved screen-shotting. Not an issue with a bigger ship, the Enterprise-D/E would certainly deserve a larger sized bridge, but the Defiant has a really dinky bridge from the source material. The tactical bridge from my Saber Escort looks more or less size-wise to what the Defiant's should be.

[eugimon]

so all my gear had the stats halved. all seems to work the same in actual combat though

[kaiotheforsaken]

Hit admiral yesterday and picked up a Sovereign and the fleet escort. The escorts dps is nice, but ultimately I didn't like it. The Sovereign is pretty agile especially with points in cruisers and assault cruisers. Unfortunately my spec needs a little tweaking now, hopefully they are able to push respecs in the next big content patch like they've been talking about.

[Uxi]

pics please. Sovereign is probably my favorite design behind the Constitution Refit.

[Grand Admiral]

"I'll just take a photo of my Emissary Class Star Cruiser and FRICKIN JEM HADAR GTFO"

[eugimon]

dude...

[Grand Admiral]

Yeah they started zapping my shields literally at the same instant I took the screenshot.

[kung flu]

I can't seem to takes screen shots, all the shots end up blank and all black.

[Grand Admiral]

Use the "/screenshot" command in the chat box. STO will save screenshots in a subdirectory of the game folder. It even removes the UI for you

[kaiotheforsaken]

pics please. Sovereign is probably my favorite design behind the Constitution Refit.

Ask and ye shall receive. Those are my two favorite designs as well.

The images are large, so I just made a photobucket album: http://s23.photobucket.com/albums/b355/kai...0Trek%20Online/

[Grand Admiral]

I bought a Sovereign to also use occasionally.

[kung flu]

Use the "/screenshot" command in the chat box. STO will save screenshots in a subdirectory of the game folder. It even removes the UI for you

I've been using the print screen key, I had no problems taking pictures with it during open beta, but now when i take a picture, it still saves an image in the screenshot folder but it is a blank black images.

Anyway i'm almost captain now and one step closer to getting my defiant , hopefully the screen capture bug would be fixed so i can take pictures of it.

[kaiotheforsaken]

So apparently the level cap is 45 (though I could swear they have said 50). I still have stuff to do but I'm hesitant to see if they are going to open the last 5 levels. As it stands you can't even spec fully into two talents from the admiral tree, which doesn't make much sense. So I'm just sticking to exploration for a bit to get some nice gear for my ship.

[Ghost Train]

Complaints Time:

Leveling seems to be a bit too easy in this game. Everyone I bump into is either a Captain or Admiral. (Hope they don't run out of content too fast)

Also, there doesn't seem to be a point in using a lower tiered vessel once you get a promo which is a shame for those that play because they want to be fly their "favorite ship." Granted I've seen a few Admirals here and there with Captain-tiered ships. I hope they introduce some sort of ship upgrade that can at least squeeze some life into a lower tiered hull, but make the costs staggered so that upgrading a higher tier ship is more expensive than a lower one. Say you really love your Constitution-Class (and who doesn't ), with a few upgrades it have the effectiveness of a Tier 3... but to upgrade the Tier 3, you would need to invest a lot more money.

Edited February 18, 2010 by Ghost Train

[eugimon]

the loot versus rewards really needs to be looked into. I've rarely gotten loot that was anywhere near as good as the rewards you get for missions.

[kaiotheforsaken]

I think things are just very rough right now, at Admiral there isn't a ton to do ye. Much of the Borg based "raidisodes" aren't in. Ultimately quest rewards+exploration marks for gear has been the most efficient way to gear out your ship.

There is currently one daily quest that rewards 5 exploration marks that are special and can be used to claim epic (very rare/purple) Admiral X items, unfortunately for ship weapons the selection is almost entirely based on the admiral ranked weaponry.

So they definitely need to make things more robust and add lots of things to do. However they have a ton of stuff in the pipe so I think patience will pay off big time. No MMO is perfect at launch.

I do wish leveling were harder even though I'm glad to have my favorite ship already.

[Grand Admiral]

I think leveling is ok, given their assertion that they're designing for the casual gamer.

However,

I think that re-playing missions, where one might repeat something in order to help a lower level buddy, needs to give either zero or very low experience points.

I also think Exploration missions should only reward the badges for equipment, and no skill points after you've done the first exploration mission for a given region.

That would cut down on a huge amount of the skill points I got along the way.

Here's my screenshots of the evening:

Bridge babes with TOS outfits (and myself in WOK style uniform):

Vanguard saucer and hull with Emissary nacelles and pylons:

Edited February 18, 2010 by Grand Admiral

[kaiotheforsaken]

Every space cruiser I've seen looks like a shovel with some Nacels tacked on, but I like the lines on what you put together.

And I agree about the exploration missions, I gathered huge amounts of exp/levels from getting decent phasers and quantums for my various ships.

Edited February 18, 2010 by kaiotheforsaken

[eugimon]

lol, I love all the na'vi running around

[Chewie]

So exploration is the best way to level atm? I'm not in a super rush but I'd at least like commander before I start pumping time into gearing. Any pointers from you super nerd() Captains/Admirals?

[kaiotheforsaken]

It's not the best way, but it's a good way to pad things. I didn't run out of content once. I basically just outfitted my ship with some shiney torps and phasers from exploration marks and then went on my way doing episodes.

And I would just do that for each ship tier when the appropriate exploration missions became available. You can get into some really pricey shields, deflectors and engines too if you want, but most of the time I just did the weapons and left the rest to story missions and so forth.

My biggest recommendation though would be to read the quest text and in-mission dialogue. There is a ton of great stuff, some good story and lots of references to places, characters and events from everything from TOS to Nemesis and the destruction of Romulus in the new movie. Doing this vastly improved my enjoyment of the experience.

Edited February 18, 2010 by kaiotheforsaken

[Chewie]

Yeah. Been reading everything. Enjoying a lot of it. I actually just finished the quest to use the Gateway portal. Was totally awesome.

[one_klump]

Just wait until you get to some of the Romulan / Reman quests!

[Grand Admiral]

Yeah, exploration badges are a great way to get some good solid Uncommon equipment. You can also get badges from PvP and spend them at Deepspace K7.

Like Kai, I only got a set of weapons for each ship, at least until Admiral, where I've been grinding for things like consoles.

I'm not going to bother with antiproton weapons, so I went with polarons.

For some reason, it's really difficult to find tetryon beam arrays. I only got two ever, and they don't seem to sell them from any vendors at all.

[Ghost Train]

Can someone post a pic of the Zephyr class Heavy Escort? (the one that looks like Steamrunner )

[Grand Admiral]

Today's glamor shots of the USS Clynelish

[Ghost Train]

It does look like a giant shovel >_> .

Those round cylindrical nacelles give it a very Star Wars-ish look

[Vostok 7]

It does look like a giant shovel >_> .

Those round cylindrical nacelles give it a very Star Wars-ish look

The other one with the pointed nacelles that shows up in loading screens looks much better IMO.

[Phyrox]

I'd say all the starfleet designs after TNG and classic-cast movie era have a very "generic sci-fi" feel to me. They maintain the basic saucer/nacelle theme, but just don't feel star-trekkie or something.

No thanks.

[Ghost Train]

They did break the mold with some of the TNG movie era designs though: Defiant, Steamrunner, Saber, are all very heretical designs abandoning the traditional saucer look without sucking.

Edited February 18, 2010 by Ghost Train