This was only meant to be a short message responding to your comment, tomalak301, but it's ended up being a bit of an essay... don't think I could have described the game and how it works more succinctly though. It's worth pointing out as well that it's a 'Freemium' game, so while the game itself is free, they want you to spend real money on it, and will be very proactive in offering you 'packs' of items etc to buy, which will make the game experience easier/more enjoyable, but may end up costing you a lot of money in the long run. Some freemium games eventually hit a wall where it is virtually impossible to progress without spending money, whereas some are still playable without spending money but just take longer etc. I haven't played enough of this one to see where it falls yet.
It's very much an 'RPG-lite', the aim of the game is basically to complete 'missions' to collect extra crew members and items that you can use to improve your crew, make them stronger and give them new abilities, in order to complete more missions etc etc. It's all done via number crunching and virtual dice rolls, and you have very little influence on the game besides selecting crew members to go on missions.
It's mainly split into two game types: space battles and away missions.
The space battles are fairly simple, your ship flies and shoots by itself and the object is to destroy the opponent ship before they destroy you. You can add two crew members to empty slots, which provide various buffs for your ship - improved accuracy, more firepower, increased evasion and so on. These abilities are on a cooldown timer and your only input into the battle is to activate them when the cooldown timers run out. It's very much a number-crunching game, if your ship stats are higher than the opposing ship's stats, you will win. Ships can be upgraded and new ships built by collecting 'plans', which are items dropped during the game.
Away missions are pretty much a dice rolling exercise. You assign 3 crew members to the away team, each of which have scores in various stats appropriate to the character - Kirk has a high Command stat, Picard high Diplomacy, Spock high Science etc. Characters usually have 2 or 3 stats, but one which is considerably higher than the rest. The crew members also have traits such as 'Resourceful', 'Tactical', 'Inspiring' etc and the game will guide you towards the best crew members to select by giving you a list of beneficial traits for each mission. You are then presented with a succession of tasks that need to be completed in order to successfully 'win' the away mission.
Each task will have a stat attached to it and a number which corresponds to your characters' scores for that stat. You must select a character to complete the task based on their score for that stat - for example, a task may have a Command score of 30 attached to it, look at your characters' stats to see if any of them have a Command score close to/greater than 30. If your character's stat is equal to or greater than the score required for the task, they will automatically be successful (the first dice roll). A character with a stat lower than the one required can still be successful, but it then depends more on additional character traits (they may get a boost for being Resourceful, for example - a second dice roll, not every task will give you this as it depends if the character you select has any traits that would be helpful for this task), and finally they will get a 'proficiency' score at the end (another dice roll), which will give another boost. If all of these dice rolls together are enough to fill a progress bar into the 'target' zone, the task is completed successfully and an item will (sometimes) be awarded to you. Repeat until you get to the final task and complete the mission. You can fail any task in the mission except the last one and still be successful, but each failed task makes the final one harder. At the end you will be awarded with items and/or extra crew members depending on how well you do.
There are also 'faction missions', where you can send members of your crew away in a shuttlecraft to complete missions for various factions (the Klingons, Cardassians, Maquis etc). Again you have no input beyond selecting who to send (and again the game will suggest which stats and traits would be advantageous). It can be only one or several crew members depending on the mission, and those crew members will be unavailable for you to use until a countdown timer signifying when the mission ends reaches zero. If successful, again you will be given items.
As I said I'm still on the fence about it, it's held my interest for today but I'm unsure about it long term. Certain things that have countdowns such as the Faction missions have already gone from seconds to minutes to hours, which is a hallmark of 'Freemium' games. I'm sure there's probably an item I can buy (for real money) to make those countdowns go quicker, and I'm not prepared to sink actual cash into this.
