[Star Trek Timelines] Long term impressions

[Kasey Chang]

I've been playing this for a month, and I think I'm hitting the wall where I need to buy **** to continue. I never paid a penny, and it's turning into a super slow grind.

The backstory is okay, something completely f***ed up the time line, lots of temporal anomalies all over the place. All the major factions are now in the same universe. Augments from Enterprise? Check. Hirogen from Voyager? Check. Mirror Empire? Check. Bajorans from DS9? Check. Section 31? Check. (HUH?) Two separate factions of Ferengi... Marquis... and more. Q is trying to fix things, but he needs a little help from you the players, as you need to run around this compressed universe, doing "missions" (which can be repeated as many times as needed for less reward and XP) and there are "episodes" which is like a campaign of the missions.

To play these missions, you have to collect a crew, and you get a couple free ones to start, and if you keep playing you can roll for more. The various characters are your "cards" in a CCG. If you get two of the same, you can "fuse" them to increase its level. And each Star Trek character often have multiple versions. Janeway, for example, has three versions: Captain Janeway, Rifle Janeway, and Arachnia Janeway. The characters are also rated in rarity, from common to epic.

Each character is rated in up to 3 separate skills. There are six skills: command, security, diplomacy, science, engineering, and medical. Each character needs four separate "items" to increase its max character level by 10. Initially character start at level 0, and max level is 10. Characters needs XP to advance, and you do that by doing missions. The XP needed rises exponentially. Initially each level is just 20-50 xp. By level 47 you need 1000 xp to advance one level. You can also add XP to character by running "training programs", which is obtained via doing "faction missions".

The missions comes in two types: ship combat, or skill check.

In Ship combat, your ship, and two of your officers (one w/ command skill, other w/ diplomacy skill) are given command slots on the ship. Each character has a special skill with X second delay to use, and X second to recharge. As you can only bring two, the trick is bring the right ones, and there are three ship skills: attack power, attack accuracy, and evasion. Each character has ONE of these three skills. Combat itself is boring... Visually you and enemy ship fly past each other, firing all the way. Random dice rolls (and when you activate your skills) affect those rolls doing damage. The objective is to blast the other ship as quickly as possible without dying, with bonus objective of doing it in less than 20 seconds.

In skill check, the game shows a "tree" that starts at one node, then goes through a series of nodes with multiple paths, each checking a different skill, with multiple endings. Each node will check a different skills (or same skill) and may have additional restrictions such as requiring an empath, a tactician, a duelist, a Bajoran, and so on. You can bring up to three characters for each skill check mission. Then a dice roll is done for the skill check, plus any bonuses for that character that's applicable to that mission. If you success, you advance. If you fail, you still advance, but a penalty is applied to the final check. You can use the same character twice, but there's a penalty to that character's skills if you do that. Some nodes may yield a bonus rare item (marked with a star) once. If you reach the end you are considered to have "finished" the mission and get 1 star. If you manage to get one of the rare items you get 2 stars, and if you get all the rare items you get 3 stars and unlock the next difficulty level.

Completing the missions yields random items (each mission yields random stuff from a list), some XP for each of the characters that attended, and some credits, and some "Captain's XP", which raises captain's level (that's you, the player).

If you manage to assemble all four items for the character and equip the character with them as the level is reached (you need to reach level 5 to equip the third item, for example), then when the character reach level 10 you can hit "advance" and the character's max level will be increased to 20, then the process repeats. Some items don't exist and must be assembled at small cost (of credits) from other parts. Others must be obtained via missions.

There are three sorts of currencies in this game: credits, merits, and dilithium. Credits are given out for completing missions, and certain daily missions (completion achievements, like finishing 10 ship missions, upgrade 3 characters by a level, and so on). Merits are handed out by other daily missions. Dilithium is the premium currency and only avaialble via ingame purchases and is useful for all sorts of things.

Your amount of play time is limited via "chronitons", which recharges slowly, and you can only keep X amount at a time (increased as your captain's level up) and each mission you undertake eats up chronitons. When you run out, no more missions. Simple missions cost 4, really hard missions takes up 12 or more.

Faction missions and factions market is also important. Each faction has a market for parts you can't find via random chance or missions. There only are 10 items on display, and depending on your reputation with that faction, your access can be limited to fewer than that. The ten items refresh every 12 hours, and items can cost merit, credits or dilithium. You can also buy comm access to each faction, which will let you undertake faction missions. Faction missions means you send several of your crew (from 1 to 4 or more?) on a mission lasting up to 3 hours, needing no chronitons. At the end, they either succeed or fail, and if they succeed you get XP, parts, and some captain's XP. If they don't, you get nothing.

Finally, there's the ship. We've discussed ship combat before, but you can also collect ship blueprints. Once you assemble enough of a particular ship, you get that ship, which is probably more powerful than the starter ship you have. There are more than a dozen ships.

By now you're probably totally lost, but here's the basic cycle:

1) Go through your current crew, see who has missing parts that prevents them from advancing, and go get that part if it can be done via missions, keeping an eye on accomplishing the daily missions.

2) Train crew if training available, advance if possible

3) Repeat doing missions (both types) until chronitons exhausted.

4) Send crew on faction missions for yet more parts.

5) Wait three hours, repeat.

The game really wants you to pay in by tying some game features to "VIP levels" and dilithium (the premium currency in the game). The higher the VIP level, the more crew you can keep around, and the more bonus you get when buying stuff, and give you rarer characters.

I got multiple characters into level 40's and I ran into many missions with those requirements that made impossible to get the 3rd star for completion. And I'm at the point in the game "episode 5" where skill checks are in the 180's which precludes most of my characters (most of my characters have skills in the 150's and 160's, which can BARELY reach 180 with bonuses). Leveling up the rest are tedious as there's never enough "training" available and repeating missions yield minimal XP. When each mission yields, like 10-20 XP and you need like 1000 XP to advance a level, this takes forever given the chroniton limit.

So I'm near the end of this game as it's almost not worth spending more time, without spending any more money. Still, it's fun looking at all these characters and how they got integrated into the whole "mess".

Worth trying, but not a must try. 4 out of 8 tentacles if you really want to try it.

[Bakhtosh]

Tried this out over the weekend, just to see what it was all about. Found some of the mechanics a bit confusing at first, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. Got to Captain level 8. I can see the grind coming up...my characters aren't powerful enough to complete the missions I'm at, so I'm going back and repeating some, but I find my crew lacking in some areas (engineering & diplomacy), but overwhelmed with Security characters.

Probably not one that's going to stick around long...but maybe they'll make some improvements and it will eventually suck me in.

[Bakhtosh]

Kasey, so I just unlocked Fleets. What's up with them?

[Bakhtosh]

Aaaand, it looks like I'm done with this game. Only on the second set of missions, and I can't even complete the 5th one because I don't have enough science on any character. My only decent scientist is Recovering Spock, but he's only level 10 because I can't get his 4th equipment slot filled. It's only available from Federation faction missions, and you have no control over what equipment is given as a reward. I'm over the 3 hour mark on federation missions now, and they are so difficult that my characters can't beat them consistently. So I'm effectively stuck & screwed. Unless I want to drop real money on the chances of drawing a better science character, but again, there are no guarantees...you don't get any choice in the selection of crew. If you fail the RNG, you are dead in space...and they can't hear you scream. Looks like a game that had some potential, but you have to have some carrot to keep new players coming back. They don't have that with this game.

[Daehawk]

Sounds like microTrans hell.

[Kasey Chang]

It can be microtransaction hell, but I've managed to get all the way into episode 5 (and character levels into 40's) without paying a penny. I decided to give them $5 and $4 last night, as I've been playing quite a bit, to be honest. AND to get 10 more crew slots. There are a couple missions I can't get 3 out of 3 stars on due to lacking a couple characters, like Empath, Romulan, and so on. (Figure out Bajoran problem... Sisko is considered Bajoran, as is Rom)

The characters often *are* stuck at 10's, 20's, 30's, and 40's due to lack of equipment, and farming the right parts often don't come despite repeated plays. You'll just have to go do something else, use a different crew, and so on.

The trick is have more than one team, at least one "superstar" per discipline (cmd, sec, sci, eng, dip, med) but you'll need a couple supporting stars as well. After you raise each character a couple levels you'll see who rises fast and who doesn't. Single discipline characters (Tasha Yar, for example, sec), increase skills generally faster than multi-disciplined characters (like Worf, who's sec and cmd) but if they are of same rarity (both green) and have not been "fused" with others, then Tasha is about 20=30 points ahead by level 30's. Right now they're both on level 35 on my crew, Yar's 135, Worf's about 115 but a minor in command well under 100.

You need the rare and super-rare characters... Light blue, purple, or even yellow characters. Those can be fused multiple times and they grow skills faster. That usually means buy those dilithium cards for a few bucks so you can use them for the premium purchases.

Fleets currently do NOTHING. I think they plan for fleet adventures later, where you get fleet missions, but right now they don't do ANYTHING.

[Kasey Chang]

Only on the second set of missions, and I can't even complete the 5th one because I don't have enough science on any character. My only decent scientist is Recovering Spock, but he's only level 10 because I can't get his 4th equipment slot filled. It's only available from Federation faction missions, and you have no control over what equipment is given as a reward.

Keep playing the old missions over and over. You can repeat missions as many times as you wish, any mission, subject to chronitons available. I'm at Captain level 24 (episode 5, where skill checks average 185's only 5 missions in) and I often have to go back and do episode 1 missions as I need to farm parts. My Agent Sloan is stuck at level 20 as he needs a LOT of encryption (common), and the only mission that yield them doesn't kick out as many of which as it should (I've played that mission 30-40 times last 48 hours, and I got grand total of TWO, total) and I need like 8 or so.

Stuff that come from faction missions can *sometimes* be bought at the faction center (that faction's "home planet", then tap the planet icon upon arrival). You need good reputation to access the entire inventory, but sometimes, what you want is there. My Alexander is stuck at level 30 for almost a week as he's missing some Klingon "house crests" (4 of them). I think I bought 2 and got one from faction mission. Still need one more.

[Kasey Chang]

I agree that this game isn't "balanced" well, and gets really tedious once past captain level 15 or so. At 20 it turns into a total grind.

The ship combat really is too easy and takes up way too many chronitons on tougher levels. With my Tuvok at 3 stars blue and level 49, coupled with Captain Janeway, 1 star purple at level 49, my cheap Maquis raider can tackle even elite ship combat missions. Base ship damage is 1600 per hit. My ship is doing almost 6000 per hit and 8900 on critical hits. Most combat is done within 20 seconds. And this is with a 1-star ship (albeit, slight upgrade from the starter Constellation-class ship). Checking the inventory shows much more powerful ships.

The individual missions are just tedious as you keep farming parts and once you farmed the parts you don't have the XP to advance them. On most characters tapping the part will tell you which missions will yield them, and not all missions would be accessible yet, others may be at a difficulty you haven't unlocked (you have to beat "normal" with full 3 stars to get access to elite difficulty, and do the same on elite to hit "epic" difficulty. On the away team missions, you need to run through the mission multiple times and collect all the "rare stuff" at certain nodes. Just getting through is 1 star. Getting ANY rare part is 2 stars, getting all rare parts is 3 stars. And those can be impossible if you lack a certain crew, like Empath, or Android, or Constable, or Bajoran, or Cardassian... etc. Depends on the mission design.

The most annoying is you play the mission 5 times, 10 times, 20, 40 times... and you don't get the part you're looking for. At other times you like like 4-6 of the same thing. Seems the only thing to do is keep playing stuff and stockpile the "frequently used parts".

[Bakhtosh]

It's not full of microtransactions. And that's part of the problem, actually. There's no way to say, "I need this one part to improve my game experience, and I'm willing to pay some premium currency for it." If there's a single item you need, there's no way to guarantee you can get it. My only solution was to keep playing until I got a new captain level and got a free Time Portal purchase (also get these from daily login reward). This netted me some new crew that were able to take his place.

I just got the Raider ship. Been using Worf & Sisko. Got my first normal 3* with it last night.

[Kasey Chang]

You really need a balanced crew. The latest revision added a couple features like ship upgrades (your original ship and the maquis raider can now be upgraded given enough blueprints) and mission crew filter (you can now filter and rate by the 6 different skills and actual ratings are also displayed) You'll probably need to restart to get the new version.

The part availability is frustrating, but then I'm a completionist of sorts. I have 28 crew and 90% of them have all the parts lined up for the next 10 levels. I just lack the XP to "grow" them.

Additional frustration comes in the form of "bottleneck parts". Certain parts are kind rare, which is fine, you'll just grind the missions over and over with different crew, not a problem. The problem comes when more than one crew member needs the same part, and not just one or two but 4, 8 or more. And when only ONE mission (either ship combat or away team) produce those parts (and availability is not guaranteed), it gets really frustrating.

[Bakhtosh]

The ability to sort is big. Hated having to scroll to the bottom to find my doctor.
I was wondering what I was supposed to do with these extra Constellation Class specs. Glad to know it can be updated.

[Kasey Chang]

Yeah, the ship upgrade and crew filter feature dropped yesterday for IOS and this morning for Android. My Connie is up to level 3 of 6, and my Maquis at 2/6. However, I was already slaughtering all comers on Epic... I was doing 6000+ damage per hit (almost 9000 on critical hits). But then my Tuvok is +5 firepower and my Janeway is +4 accuracy.

[Kasey Chang]

The revision now revises the ship combat screen to show who ranks the highest in the 3 areas of ship combat: firepower, accuracy, and evasion. As usually you can have only two crew (until you get into a really fancy ship) you have to choose.

For most elite or normal level fights I go for accuracy and firepower. Firepower seriously upgrades your hits. A base 1500 damage becomes like 6000 damage. Accuracy decreases your misses but seem to have somewhat lesser effect. Evasion makes you harder to hit which seem to be important when you know you can't win in 20 seconds (i.e. you are seriously outgunned, like a Maquis Raider vs. a Romulan Warbird in an Epic level fight) as you're drawing out the fight. I tried the firepower / accuracy route (Janeway + Tuvok) and I got killed by the Warbird. I swapped for Tuvok and Sloan, and managed to beat the warbird (by a hair).

The little "traits" requirements however, are still painful, as often you got the guy with the trait, but not the skill.

I got TWO Cardassians... Ensign Seska and Tailor Garak. And I just got a mission that requires a Cardassian with DIPlomacy. So Seska is out, only Garak will do. His skills are barely enough to beat the Normal mission, and seriously lacking for elite. I'll need to upgrade him seriously to get 3 star completion on Elite, if it's even possible. He's already 32. He'll probably need to be in lvl 50 or higher to beat that in elite.

There's another mission that requires a cyberneticist and SCIence. Except there are only 2 of those in the whole game.

I will have to go back to search out all the older missions with trait requirements I couldn't complete before. I need to build up two full crews.

[Kasey Chang]

Longer-term impressions... They just did a server-side update and eliminated some of the most egregious item requirements (reduced it significantly) mainly by substituting some other hard (but not impossible) items so it doesn't feel like a grind. And they're introducing limited run characters (only available limited time) apparently on a bi-weekly basis. Last time it was Time Agent Seven. This week it's Historical Figure Spock and Abe Lincoln. Next time it'd probably be Sherlock and Watson dressed Data and Geordi, from the rumor mill.

Obviously you can't "buy" them, but only roll for them by buying packs.

[Bakhtosh]

Few games are as linked to random chance as this one. Most games have a set of characters that you can unlock or work towards claiming by doing certain tasks. If you need a specific character, you can focus on the tasks needed to unlock him/her. In this game, if you don't have any good diplomats, there's nothing you can do other than buy premium currency (which there is no way to earn in-game) and purchase the premium packs, hoping for a good character drop.

I've never played a game that didn't have some mechanism to earn premium currency in-game. This game does occasionally give away premium packs as daily rewards or rewards for leveling up. At least that's something, but if you want to recharge your "moves" without waiting, that comes at the price of real money.

[Kasey Chang]

Correct, this game is brutal for F2P folks. They can't ever hope to advance beyond a certain level as it's too much of a grind.

I just put in my 2nd batch of $9 (my limit on this game is $4 monthly card and a $5 booster pack a month) and I'm captain level 27, and I'm kinda... muddling along in Ep 5. I've managed to purge almost all of my green crew except maybe 3. You really really need premium crew (blues, purple, yellow, or higher) and fused (get them multiple times) for the tough missions as it takes too much XP to raise the stats otherwise.

A purple character, unfused (1 star out of 4) will reach skill levels of over 200 by character level 50 or so. The same character with 2 or 3 stars out of 4 will be in the 245's and 290's respectively. You can make similar projections for the other characters as well.

[Kasey Chang]

STT adds a new "event" tomorrow... For 1 week, Federation Faction Missions gets bonus points, and those who rank high will get bonus such as Queen Arachnia Janeway (a 5 star character) with chances for Captain Proton Paris (4 star character) based on the Voyager's entertainment Hologram Captain Proton.

I fired my Nurse Paris a long time ago, but decided I'm going to throw them another $5 as I do play this game a lot. (That's $23 so far) and got Rifle Janeway (3 star) and Captain Proton Paris (4 star) as well as a couple other characters. Good thing as versions of Paris and Janeway gets bonus when completing these special Fed Faction missions, and I have 18 faction mission calls to chew through. If I can just level them up a bit... But need Chronitons to get some special parts. Got Rifle Janeway into 30's already, those parts are pretty easy, but Captain Proton is stuck at 10 for now. Should have enough Chronitons to push him to 20 next time around.

Also got on this drop, Romulan Senator Cretak (now 2 out of 3 stars blue), CMO Pulaski (blue), Subcommander T'Pol (now 3 out 3 stars blue), and a couple ship blueprints so now I'm driving around USS Voyager, not just Intrepid Class. Had to dismiss B'etor as I already had her 3 stars max.

[Kasey Chang]

****. This month the special was Cretak... They're giving her away multiple times this month, which means everybody will have a chance to make her a 3 star, my previous attempts were for nothing.

So I got her 3 star already, but I don't have XP or stuff to take her all the way to useful at DIP under 200.

Did get a 2nd yellow (5 star) character... Seven of Nine, but with one star out of 5 she's kinda hard to care for, and supposedly when she's higher up she's hard to get 4 parts for.

Got Arik Soong (4 star) but she's not the cyberneticist I was hoping for.

[Bakhtosh]

New update here, too.
They're suppose to be reworking some of the gear acquisition issues and away team missions. They've added new challenges - this one is using common and uncommon characters only to beat a set of 6 missions.

[Kasey Chang]

I don't have any common and uncommon crew left... All except 2. Not enough to play those darn missions.

[Bakhtosh]

I was lucky enough to still have a full compliment. Kirk provides Comm & Dip. Recovering Spock gives science. Worf is Security. CMO Crusher is medical. I have another solo diplomat, but is only needed if Kirk can't go back-to-back. Kirk is the only one I use on normal missions, and spent a lot of training on Crusher & Spock to get them up to level 40 in order to pass the final mission.

[Kasey Chang]

I've collected a decent cadet crew so I can do first 3 missions quite easily now in cadet game, but not all of them have 2nd star, which means they aren't qualified to do the elite level, much less epic. I'm still trying to 3 star each mission normal.

[Bakhtosh]

Elite missions are hella tough. They're needing over 200 skill, evidently that's around character level 100. Mine are just pushing 50.

[Bakhtosh]

Need training programs!

On the bright side, airlocking spare crew gives you training programs now.

[Kasey Chang]

Elite missions are hella tough. They're needing over 200 skill, evidently that's around character level 100. Mine are just pushing 50.

If you have 2/2 stars, you'll hit skill 200 around level 60. If there's only 1/2 stars, it'd be 70-80.

Need training programs!

Save up 750 dilithium and buy a third shuttle. That increases your faction mission rate by 50%, but it may be a bit early for you. Those faction missions require skills in the 400's now for a reasonable (high than 70% probability) chance of success. Every three hours I get a couple thousand XP, but at level 80 you need 5000 points for 1 level. All of a sudden I'm short on parts, not training.

[Bakhtosh]

Thank God for the Dabo wheel. First, I unlocked the Galaxy class, which was a huge step up, and recently unlocked the 5 star Prakesh. Let me tell you, that ship is an absolute beast. I saw it do 24k damage with just the default damage boost...none of my characters had even finished their initial cooldown.

I have about 10 chars up to level 50. Need to go back and wrap up past missions and get Elite versions played. Oh, the addition of training programs when you dismiss characters has been a huge help. Just wish there was a way to get specific characters, or to pay for extra stars for chars you already have.

[Kasey Chang]

That would cost way too much dilithium.

They did, for limited time, guarantee a purple or better if you pay them 650 dilithium, the cost of a 10-pak. But it's not something you can choose.

[Bakhtosh]

I really want more stars for Coffee Janeway and 1701 Dax.

[Kasey Chang]

My Janeway is full 4/4 but I could use another star for 1701 Dax.

But really, have to do those 10 pack pulls.

[Bakhtosh]

Looking to join a fleet before the arena opens and all the good ones are taken. Anyone playing and in with a good group?

[Daehawk]

People talk about this in STO. I thought Id try it....but NOPE. I own a Kindle Fire HDX and theres so much stuff I cant get. If Amazon doesn't have it then I cant play it. Google Play wont even see my tablet so cant get it there.

[Kasey Chang]

Yeah, this game is NOT available on Amazon, probably due to abundance of Amazon coins. This game has a LOT of in-game-purchases.

You'd have to hack the HDX to get it to run Google Play Services, and no idea if that still works. Lost mine more than a year ago.

[Daehawk]

I really hurt when I couldn't play Fallout Shelter.

Speaking of coins I got 500 in the $4 Humble Bundle. Not sure thats good or what.