Choose My Adventure: Tiny ship takes on big battles in Star Trek Online

I didn’t have a whole heap of time to myself in Star Trek Online this week, but considering that I was basically told to just stick with what I had last week, I’d say it pretty much worked out for the most part – though it did start to teach me a little more about what this sort of buildcraft is like.

I hardly am an expert now, obviously, but a few surprises during my playtime, a bit of observation, and some research on top of it kind of illuminated the modern state of play. Also, as it turns out, rolling this character actually had me starting at level 60 – a fact that I wasn’t aware of until I hit a new level while playing.

Let me talk about some of that playtime beforehand, though it will be kind of brief: I did a few more missions centered around the Victory is Life story arc, but that was fine since we’ve been on a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine watching kick recently. My playing this game may or may not have had an affect on that decision.

About the only major issue that I’ve had with the content I’ve experienced so far is the fact that I don’t have an awful lot of context for what’s happening in this story. It always felt like I was expected to just know who most of these people were, what the events beforehand were, and what the Hur’q are. Beyond annoying screechy little things, anyway.

My confusion was only exacerbated by the absolute maddening light show that ground and space battles have been so far. Technically, all I really was doing was pressing a maximum of one or two buttons in the ground fights and about three or four more while in my tiny little spaceship.

It was at that point that I sort of assumed that I was missing something, but I figured I’d finish up the story that I was doing before I really dug in. Once I did, I hit the aforementioned level up. I got to… level 61? Wait, what? Clearly I wasn’t paying attention and this character journey started at level 60. I really should have been reading my UI better, obviously.

Once that realization struck, things started to make a little more sense, certainly in terms of some of the difficulty I was facing. I haven’t been killed in this game yet, but I was definitely getting close, and there was this whole pervasive sense that I was making my way through purely by the fact that I have played a “true” level one character up to cap previously. If I were starting off in this MMO brand-new, I don’t know how well I’d be doing.

But more than that, I started to understand that the ship I would have brought along wasn’t really going to matter much more than the weapons I was fielding. And my character was handed some extremely spicy weapons as I noted before. I just thought purple-letter gear was STO being generous, but as it turned out, it was just handing me sympathy epics I guess.

So where does that leave me as an engineering vessel? I wasn’t sure, and so I elected to do some research to find out if there was something I was missing. Did weapons matter more than consoles or ship? How big a deal is the ship really? Is this “starter vessel” really bringing something to the table, or is it the weapons, shields, and engine bringing the party?

The answers I found were basically this: “Fly what you want and stop freakin’ asking us.” And I do mean that pretty literally. Apparently, regular STO players despise it when people ask for help or ask what the best kinds of ships they should bring are. Maybe it’s because it’s a far too common question, but it was kind of disheartening regardless, you know? Nothing dumps cold water on my enjoyment of an MMO more than knowing that the established playerbase doesn’t want to try to help the newcomers, at least perceptibly. And I’m not really even new.

But even despite the spice levels of this advice, it did appear to sort of make sense. The things I clapped onto this dumpy little boat of mine were the major mitigating factor, since ship had no real character itself, which I suppose shouldn’t be a surprise considering this was the first vessel I was handed. But at level 61, I have been handed a new requisition token, which has in turned opened up the potential for me to pick up an all-new ship!

While most of my choices are either locked to fleet advancement or stuffed into the cash shop, there are a couple of different types of ship that are available to me, and both of these seem to have more unique playstyles above and beyond “use the wizard cannons.” One of these ship types are more support-focused, while the other one apparently lets me spit out a bunch of fighter jets into the field. And both of those sound kind of fun!

So, yeah, this week’s poll is a bit like last week’s: You’re choosing my next ship – only this time there are new ships to pick from. These are the choices I have to make you make.

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The next poll will once again be about gameplay focus. As a themepark game, I’m pretty much riding on the rails, but considering the fact that STO has been kicking around for a while, I do have the choice of changing what rails I ride on. And so our second poll:

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Polling will finish up on Friday the 13th (muahaha) at the usual 1:00 p.m. EST time slot. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can’t do a bit more research on the kinds of ships I’m about to start commanding. I’m sure there are synopses and general guides out there that aren’t mad about people wanting information, right? Surely.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.