Star Trek On Track

After 5 days playing I’ve just reached level 11 (Lt. Commander). At this point I get access to new ships, and my skill choices start to make more of a difference to my gameplay.


Up until this point everyone starts with the same basic ship. You can customize it’s looks by quite a large degree, but the stats remain the same.

On promotion I was provided with a choice of 3 ships. I chose Escort (Tactical / DPS) since that’s the direction my character is focusing on.

But one of the things that’s impressed me about STO is that it’s not as restrictive as games like WoW on what you can do.

Because you’re ship also has a crew, composed of Science, Engineering, and Tactical officers just because you’re DPS doesn’t mean that you can’t self-heal, or heal others, or even act as a tank.

You might never be 100% as effective as someone who’s specialised in that area, but you will still be able to hold your own in most fights.

To give you an example, Engineers are the main sort of ‘Tanking’ role. They have the best regenerative abilities, and the most skills aimed at soaking up the damage thrown at them. Obviously they still have offensive capabilities, they’re just not as directly strong as a Tactical officers.

So, put an Engineer in the engineer class of ship (can’t recall the name right now) and you get a good tank.

But my Tactical Officer can use an Engineering ships too. As a WoW comparison, it’s the equivalent of a Rogue with Uber-DPS putting on some plate armour, and becoming a Ret Pally. You’d probably sacrifice some pure DPS, but you’d gain much more survivability.

And since you can own multiple ships, you’re given the freedom of choice about how to play.

This was a very clever move on behalf of the Devs. Essentially they only had to design 3 classes, But with all 3 classes of player, having the option of using 3 classes of ship, they get 9 combinations for the price of 6.

You also spend your skill-points to specialise in particular areas. So while my Photon Torpedos may be the bees-knees, they’re quite ineffective against a ship with it’s shields up. Once I’ve got those shields down though, whoever I’m aiming at is soon going to find themselves in trouble.

Another DPS player may specialise in Phaser Weapons, which do good damage to the shields directly, and moderate damage to a ship with it’s shields down.

Both of us will be effective, but in different ways. But put us together, and you get a much better tactical force. This is the way things should be.

A lot of the ship combat is simply about tactics. All ships are shielded on 4 sides, and those 4 shields operate semi-independantly. So taking down the rear shield opens the ship up to more devastating attacks. But if that ship simply turns to face you you’ll be confronted by a fully operational shield again, while the rear one begins to regenerate. It’s more than likely that you’ll also be getting shot at while you’re doing the attacking, so you have to keep an eye on your own shield status, and compensate accordingly. A full-Frontal assault may give you the best DPS, but if you’re front shield is penetrated, then you won’t last long. So you’re going to have to reposition yourself and sacrifice some of your advantage.

It’s actually much simpler than it first seems. But it’s effective, and in battles with multiple enemies, or allies, it can bring a lot of strategy to things.

The other piece of the puzzle is the ground-combat. You will also have to beam-down to planets, star-bases, other ships, etc.. and take on enemies in a more familiar perspective.

This section of the game is controlled by the same skill points, but they need to be spent in different areas of the talent tree. And here is where your main class choice is most important.

When you’ve beamed down to somewhere, you’re either on your own, in a team with other players, or with your bridge crew (as AI controlled Bots). You’re going to need the usual range of Tanks, DPS, and Healers to survive for very long.

When it’s just you and your bridge crew, you’ll probably have specialised them in to each of those types of area. Yes, that’s right, you not only have your own skill-points to consider, but your bridge crews too.

The AI functions reasonably well in these situations, your team will basically follow you around attacking when you attack, and performing their respective actions such as healing, and using special abilities. But much like most squad-based games, you can control their aggressiveness, and order them to take up a position while you flank enemies. Anyone who’s familiar with the Ghost Recon, or Rainbow Six games will recognise the type of thing I mean. It’s a simplified version of those games.

In fact, if you imagined a Rainbow Six RPG with special abilities on cooldowns, and lasers instead of machine guns, and aliens instead of terrorists, you’d be quite close.

Overall, I’m still quite impressed with the game. So much so that I splashed out my £30 and bought the full version yesterday.

With the ‘Munquis’ now formed as a fleet (guild) in the game, it’s going to be time to recruit.