In Part 1 I covered leveling, ground weapons, and ambiance of Star Trek Online. Today I continue the overview with space combat.
Space combat is entirely different from fighter-style run-and-gun gameplay that I’m used to in space games. The ships are slow turning, massive things that rely on shields and heavy guns to get the job done. Aptly placed skill points improve meneuverablity considerably, but only to a point. You are always piloting a floating city, not a sports car – and for STO, this is a good thing.
Upgrading a ship comes in four primary forms: 1) Weapons, devices, and tactical consoles, 2) bridge officer skills and abilities, 3) your own skills and abilities, and 4) trading in the ship itself for another class as you increase in rank and gain access to better ships. I’ll discuss each of these below.
Space weapons consist of phasers, disruptors, and photon torpedoes, and can be placed in one of the front or rear weapon slots. The starting ship (everyone gets the same ship until reaching Lt. Commander) has 2 weapon slots in the front and one in the rear; more advanced ships get more weapon slots. Each weapon you equip has a firing arc. Right now my ship is equipped with a phaser bank with an arc of 250 degrees on the back, a disruptor with 250 degrees on the front, and a torpedo launcher with a narrower 90 degree arc. This means that when I angle myself broadside to the enemy, I can fire with both phasers and disruptors. I turn to face the enemy head on to fire off a torpedo. Devices are usually the equivalent of potions in WoW or inspirations in City of Heroes – one-off boosts to shields, weapon power, speed, etc. Consoles, one each for the positions of science, tactical, and engineering, usually provide boosts to a particular ship stat.
Bridge officers are acquired through mission rewards or by requisitioning them for credits at a starbase. You can get one of each class to man the stations on your bridge, each one bringing a single ability (in early levels, anyway) to space combat. You can have more than one of each class assigned to your ship, but you can only assign one of each to the bridge at any given time, one for each station, and will only have access to the chosen officers’ abilities during battle. Like ground abilities, space abilities for both yourself and your officers can be improved through skill point assignments. Note that ground and space abilities draw from the same skill point pool, so you must be careful to allocate skills to both types when you skill up. Space skills can improve virtually any of your ships’ stats, from overall power levels to maneuverability.
When you increase in rank from one grade to the next, such as moving from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander, you gain access to new, better ships. You can choose to pilot a cruiser, an escort, or a science vessel and can then begin investing points in a skill tree of the same name. According to Cryptic, cruisers are the slow, beefy, “tank” ships, escorts are the zippy damage dealers with lots of guns but few shields, and science vessels are somewhere in between with a focus on auxiliary systems such as deflectors, tractor beams, and sensors to find and incapacitate the enemy.
It took some time to get used to the control scheme of space flight, but with some practice I was finally able to get the hang of it. Controlling the ship and the camera independently is a must, since the weapons are able to fire from all angles of the ship, and the ship itself doesn’t turn fast enough to keep up with the action if you are relying on “straight ahead” viewpoint. Early space combat usually deals with two or three enemy ships against one, lending itself to some truly epic space battles. Despite these odds, I’m not often killed in space. However, I should mention that defeat is almost as much fun as survival, as your ship explodes in a dramatic, screen-shaking two-part explosion. There is a short respawn timer but otherwise no penalty that I have noticed.
During battles, ships are surrounded by shield indicators which give an instant visual cue as to where their shields are weakest. It looks distracting in the screenshots, but during battle the prominent visual display is really very helpful. Phasers and disruptors are best for taking out an enemy’s shields, while torpedoes are best against the hull, so it is important to see when an opening is present before the enemy can repair or redistribute shields.
After defeating an enemy, they sometimes drop loot in the form of glowing icons. Flying near one enables you to collect what is usually a common ship device but is occasionally a new bridge console or weapons array. Out of combat space loot appears in the form of “anomalous readings” which you can scan and collect certain combinations of to exchange for items in STO’s equivalent of crafting. When teamed, although combat loot is assigned to specific team members, out of combat loot is not (on the ground or in space), so it’s collected on a first-come-first-served basis.
That concludes the STO space overview. Next time I’ll give an overview of the character and ship editors.
