Star Trek Online Discussion Thread (now free to play!)

[SilentP]

Anyone still having this UI bug when flying your starship? The one where it seems that your skill tray is floating off from where it usually is, and the default skill hotkey setup is ghosted behind it? I know how to get it back to normal, but it resets nearly every time I respawn or go from one map to another.

[Ruaidhri]

Yes! It's been driving me batty. Seems to be happening since the last bout of downtime. Having to take a few seconds to rearrange the HUD is frustrating when you just want to start buffing yourself to start shooting.

[intrinsical]

Just press escape twice. The devs know about this but feel it isn't critical enough to warrant an emergency patch. So I guess we'll just have to live with it until the next cumulative patch day.

[SilentP]

That fixes that too? Awesome, much easier that what I was doing atm. At least it doesn't affect ground combat, and for most part, I can generally remember the keyboard binds for my powers, but still, it's confusing sometimes.

[Ruaidhri]

Yeah, the double escape thing is a life saver! Thanks!

[SilentP]

Yup, can confirm, it's an awesome 'fix' for it, thanks for sharing intrinsical!

[Leroy]

I'm new to the game just started a couple days ago and have a some questions. How long does it take to rank up to the next tier? How far can a free player get without spending any money? How does one go about obtaining enough currency (dilithium I think?) to buy the next tier of starship?

[Squiggy]

You can get the next tier os ship when you get promoted, which doesn't take that long to get to LTCDR from LT. There's a progress bar along the top of the screen that shows how much you have to get before getting to the next grade. There are 10 grades per rank.

[Noname Given]

[QUOTE=Leroy;6307210]I'm new to the game just started a couple days ago and have a some questions. How long does it take to rank up to the next tier? [quote]

Depends on how quicly you play through the missions and gain experience, but once you get the hand of it, you can get about a level an hour at a liesurely pace on average.

How far can a free player get without spending any money?

You can go from Level 1 - 50 without spending a dime. None of the mission/event content is pay gated in any manner; and while the C-Store ships have some perks; the 'free' ships work just fine for leveling froom 1 - 50.

How does one go about obtaining enough currency (dilithium I think?) to buy the next tier of starship?

You get it by playing daily missions like the "To Boldly Go" - where you do 3 random exploration missions; Fleet Actions, certain timed events (like the Fed Mirror Event), etc. Also as you advamce in Level, more Dailiy missions that offer Dilithium Ore as a reward will become available.

Also, what you get from missions in 'Dilithium Ore' that you have to click a button to refine into processed Dilithium (on your inventory 'Resources' tab.) I mention this because theirs a refinement cap of 8,000 Dilithium Ore per day (that resets at 24:00 UTC swerver time.)

I'm also not sure (as I've been an LTS from day one - back when the game was subscription based); but I think your Tier 2 ship is also free (IE you get a token for a free ship once you do Admiral Quinn's 'promotion' mission (basically you go and talk to him in person)); at Level 10, and again at Level 20, etc; and theirs some reports that the F2P matrix is out of date and Silvers get free ships up through Level 40 - but again as an LTS, I'm not sure as all the 'rank up' ships have been free to me.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy your time in game.

[intrinsical]

Leroy wrote:

---

I'm new to the game just started a couple days ago and have a some questions. How long does it take to rank up to the next tier?

Not much. If you play an hour or two every day, you should easily hit level 50 in under a month by playing all the Featured Episode missions.

Leroy wrote:

---

How far can a free player get without spending any money? How does one go about obtaining enough currency (dilithium I think?) to buy the next tier of starship?

Pretty much what the others have said, you get 1 ship token at levels 10, 20, 30 and 40 that you can exchange for a free ship. You also get 1 shuttle token that lets you get a shuttle for free the first time you encounter a shuttle-only mission. These ships and shuttle are more than sufficient for anything the game throws at you (except PvP) if you choose your ship carefully.

[Cyke101]

Hi all, I've a newbie question since I just joined the game. I'm a tactical officer who just bought a Constitution class, and I have two spots for Engineering bridge officers, one for ensign, one for LT. I've filled the LT Engineering bridge officer spot, so I have one spot for an Ensign engineer. I have said-officer ready (rank and career), but I can't seem to assign them the spot. Did I miss something in the tutorial?

[SilentP]

Press 'U' to open up the officer/ship interface thingy (the one where you assign where your skill points are spent, what weapons your ship is mounting etc.) and select your ship on the left hand side, and click the 'Stations' tab at the top, there it should have the options to assign bridge officers to your ship's specific stations.

[Xhiandra]

Leroy wrote:

---

I'm new to the game just started a couple days ago and have a some questions. How long does it take to rank up to the next tier?

Levelling is fast and easy, but don't be in a rush.
Take your time, learn the game, don't rush any decision, especially those concerning valuable assets you might (or might not) obtain.

One of those is Efficient Bridge Officers (some Saurians for the Feds,some Letheans for the Klingons), many new players underestimate how valuable those are.

Leroy wrote:

---

I'm new to the game just started a couple days ago and have a some questions. How long does it take to rank up to the next tier? How far can a free player get without spending any money? How does one go about obtaining enough currency (dilithium I think?) to buy the next tier of starship?

Well, like many f2p games: you can, in theory, do everything and get everything as a free player.

In practice, there are 2 types of ships: free ones and c-store ones.

The free ones you get one at each rankup, at no cost at all. If you want more of those, you'll need 120k dilithium (minimum 15 days of grinding, quite manageable).

The c-store ones, you'll never have. You can convert dilithium into c-points (current rate 305 dil=1 c-point), but there are so many things to buy before thinking of getting new ships:

- A retrain token (400 c-points). By the time you hit max level, chances are you'll want to skill differently.
- Extra BOFF slots (2 for 200 c-points). The standard 6 don't give you any flexibilty and lock you into a single ship. 8 to 10 is more manageable.
- EC cap increase (400 c-points). Might not seem like a big deal when you first start, you can't even imagine getting 10M EC at that point but high-end gear (and DOFFs) sells for more than the cap, so if you want to equip your ship well, you'll have to increase the EC cap.
After that, you can start thinking of amassing 2000-4000 c-points for a c-store ship, but by the time you have the points a new, better batch will be released.


In PvE, it's not too bad, a free ship can handle itself well in Elite STFs; in PvP you have to accept you'll never beat some people.
Someone with an Impulse Capacitance Cell console, for instance: they'll activate it when low on health and bam, you can't catch up and finish them, even with full power to Engines (&Hyper-Impulse Engines), Evasive Manoeuvers, APO and a Deuterium Burst.

[Cyke101]

SilentP wrote:

---

Press 'U' to open up the officer/ship interface thingy (the one where you assign where your skill points are spent, what weapons your ship is mounting etc.) and select your ship on the left hand side, and click the 'Stations' tab at the top, there it should have the options to assign bridge officers to your ship's specific stations.

No, my problem is (and apologies for not clarifying), is that I can assign officers to the other stations except for one. That last station is an Ensign Engineering station. I have a bridge officer candidate that is an Ensign Engineer, but I can't assign her despite the open spot. I have all other spots filled.

To note, it looks like this:

Ensign Tactical - filled
Lt. Engineering - filled
Ensign Science - filled
Ensign Engineering - open

Despite that I have two Ensign engineers ready. They say there are no bridge spots open, but as you can see from the list, I have a spot open.

[Xhiandra]

Sounds like a bug. Can you assign your Lieutenant Engineer there?

By the way: rank doesn't matter. You can assign a commander BOFF in an Ensign slot or vice versa. In the latter case, you'll only have 1 ability instead of 4, but the game will let you do it nonetheless.
In light of that, you should rank your officers up as soon as you spent enoughpoints on them, it'll make Ground easier.