Sto basic information and break down, ground break down up comming

[Acerion]

With sto one of the most important chacter trait skills (imo) to train is to make sure you have warp core theroist. It increases the amount of power with what our engines produce, so therefore you'll run systems at a slightly higher power lvl then what you should be. Your ship only produces a finite amount of power to the systems. In which you have to destribute power into 4 categories. These categories are weapons, shields, engines, and auxillary. These categories will be broken down below in to how it affects your ship. However continuing on with warp core theroist, for instance when most ships run at 70 weapons 40 shields, 30 eng, and 30 aux, I would run at 80, 50, 45, 49.

Weapons: the more power you have into weapons, the greater damage you will do with energy weapons.
This corelation in ratio for tactical ships is at least aprox 1% more in power = 4 more DPS. This is also is futher increased by what you choose to spec as far as skills are concerned. The spec with weapons, start with enegry weapons, projectile weapons and so forth. The more you have the higher it will correlate to dmg. Later on though however skill points become more precise as for the specs are concerned at higher levels. For instance from enegry weapons it will later be turned into beam, or cannons, then later on to disrupter, phaser, plasma. With projectiles it'll turn into torpedo's, mines, then to quantum torpels, plasma, torps, or regular torps. So depending on what weapons you will be wanting to use, it will play a factor into the load out of the ship.

Shields: Shields are pretty much self explanatory, the more you have in shields the less dmg you receive because you regin faster. (clarified this ppl were understanding that you take less dmg and you regin faster, its just regin)

Engines: Engines increase speed and evasion. The more power you have in engines the greater the speed, but it doesn't just depend on your power lvl in engines it also depends on your throttle. So in actuality your evasion and speed depends on your throttle and the bonus you get in speed, and evasion from your throttle depend on your power output of your engines.

Auxillary: This power affects things such as science officer abilites, buffs/debuffs. This also affects your turning rate. The more power you have in aux the sharper the turns you can make.


When you make a character you have to choose 1 of 3 classes the classes include

Tactical: Captain escorts generally which are high dps class ships. Tactical characters are also strong in ground combat
using abilities in suppression fire, grenades, focus fire, and unique hand to hand combat abilites.

Engineering: Captain cruisers generally, for tanking purposes and increase survivability, and also act like healers for other
ships, such as sending repair crews, transferring power, and rotating shield frequences. In ground combat they offer fire support, gun turrent, energy shield walls, Shield and healing generator.

Science: Is a support character and pilots science vessels. They heal as far as ground combat is concerned. Science vessels do not have much as far as armaments are concerned but they are highly invaluable. They offer so many special abilities, such as targeting subsystems, doing sensor scans to detect cloak, or summoning a halographic fleet to fight by your side or your fleet's side. Auxillary power and your deflector dish directly affect the strength of your special abilities.

Any class can pilot any ship however, it is highly recommended that tactical commands escorts, engineers pilot cruisers, and science officers pilot science vessels. Reason being is because of the extra consoles which will boost your abilities for your class, and self buffs from your class are all percentage based. For instance, cruisers have a higher power supply, larger crews and stronger shields.
As a result, an engineer lets say uses rotated shield frequency and increase shield resistances by 50%, it will be 50% of the value of the shield strength of the ship. So say an escort has a shield strength of 50, so an engineer in there will have a total value of 75. Now say that same engineer is in a cruiser, with a shield strength of 100, so with shield frequency adding 50% that would bring his
overall value to 150. This is the same concept that revolves around all classes to their appropriate ship. Such as attack pattern Alpha for tactical players. Attack pattern alpha increases the damage that you do by 40%. If an escort does 200 pts of dmg while a cruiser only does 100, your looking at a difference with attack pattern alpha 280dmg vs 140dmg. These are just two examples of how
the class to the appropiate ship is important.

An additional thing that I highly recommend that you spec into, is on the commander line under the starship engineering section is the starship efficency section. It is broken into 4 sections just like your power distribution, weapons, shields, engines, and aux. I recommend that you max all of these out, however if you do not want to max all of these out I would recommend the following for these classes, aux, and shield for science, Weapon and engine for escort, and sheild and weapons for cruisers. Reason for increasing these stats is that it will increase your overall power output for that section.

A link to see these skills was provided by biodragon, so thx to bio dragon. You can see the skills that i'm speaking off here
http://yfrog.com/0fskillsgbj

Like I stated that I would strongly recommend that you max out all of those skills, at admrial I had an approximate power output of 100 weapons, 70 shields, 45 engines, and 50 auxillary.


Now even with the multiple weapon slots lets say with escorts with 4 forward slots and 3 rear, and with cruiser with 4 forward, and 4 rear, you can only fire up to 2 weapons at the same time without draining weapon power. Your ship will generate 10 weapon power per tick, and each tick occurs aprox every 2 seconds. Each addition ENERGY weapon that you use after 2 drains 10 power each time it is fired. So if you do decide to broadside or attack with multiple energy weapons, be sure that you have weapon batteries ready for use, or have aux power to weapons ability to replenish your weapon power asap to continue your broadside longer, or to just have it for regular single or double attacks.

If you have any futher more specific questions regarding this game, feel free to msg me in game or talk to me in vent. (vent guildies that is)

I will be making an additional section to this post for ground combat in the near future

Hopefully this break down of ship stats and items help a lil bit for those that are confused.
PS i do apologize for all spelling mistakes that i have or may have made.

[Mantu]

Thank you.

[Acerion]

Originally Posted by Mantu

Thank you.

np hopefully that answers some questions if you ahve anymore feel free to pm, in game and i'll answer what i can or post a quest and i'll try to respond to it asap.

[Acerion]

A question that i've been recieving a lot is about the evasion and the accuracy chacter trait that give 0.1 to each. I havn't been able to confirm this but i believe that it actually is suppose to represent 10%

Ps instead pms try posting your questions here, since many ppl may ask the same question.

[Roter_Panda]

Two questions:

Power into shields really also decreases damage taken? I always thought it was the regeneration factor.
And do you also happen to know if the regeneration factors given by the shields are the factors at 25energy or 100 in them?

And for the evasion part: Is full throttle = max evasion?
You also got a clue from which power level on the hyper-impulse engines give you their additional boost? (effective at high power levels - but what's high?)

[Rhaedas]

Concerning matching the captain and ship class, if this is a consistent trend being found by testers, then maybe that's something that should be looked at by Cryptic.

If there's a penalty for having diversity then no one is going to go that road, and at a minimum there should be some added advantage for having say a science captain in an escort class to counter the lesser bonuses he gets for making that choice.

In short, it shouldn't be a given on that first click in the character select what ships you'll be flying. A captain should be able to use his abilities mixed with the ship style.

[RoninTetsuro]

Originally Posted by Rhaedas

Concerning matching the captain and ship class, if this is a consistent trend being found by testers, then maybe that's something that should be looked at by Cryptic.

If there's a penalty for having diversity then no one is going to go that road, and at a minimum there should be some added advantage for having say a science captain in an escort class to counter the lesser bonuses he gets for making that choice.

In short, it shouldn't be a given on that first click in the character select what ships you'll be flying. A captain should be able to use his abilities mixed with the ship style.

I was wondering about that myself. I just preordered and I was thinking I would build an Engineer character with a Escort ship to make a rapid response, agile, 'shield crusher' toon. My thought was that I could make a class that would be good for swooping ahead and kicking the hell out of enemy ship shields quickly, then falling back and supporting while the torp specs nuke the now damaged enemy line.

BUT.

If the class penalties are anywhere near as heavy as described here, will I just be investing in a gimp toon? Anyone that's in open beta, can you confirm that unique builds are possible AND worthwhile?

[MadMaxHellfire]

don't worry, all nine class/ship combination are perfectly viable, they don't gimp you at all, just give a slightly different role.

[Acerion]

Originally Posted by Roter_Panda

Two questions:

Power into shields really also decreases damage taken? I always thought it was the regeneration factor.
And do you also happen to know if the regeneration factors given by the shields are the factors at 25energy or 100 in them?

And for the evasion part: Is full throttle = max evasion?
You also got a clue from which power level on the hyper-impulse engines give you their additional boost? (effective at high power levels - but what's high?)

no its more or less you can take more damage because it regerates faster.
you evasion is based on speed, the more power you have the more speed you have at full throttle, so basically the faster you move the more you evade. Test out evasive manuevers, when you use it boost speed greatly, and you should see a lot more misses when things try to hit your ship.

[Acerion]

Originally Posted by Rhaedas

Concerning matching the captain and ship class, if this is a consistent trend being found by testers, then maybe that's something that should be looked at by Cryptic.

If there's a penalty for having diversity then no one is going to go that road, and at a minimum there should be some added advantage for having say a science captain in an escort class to counter the lesser bonuses he gets for making that choice.

In short, it shouldn't be a given on that first click in the character select what ships you'll be flying. A captain should be able to use his abilities mixed with the ship style.

You can always fly any ship as any type of captain, but say your an eng flying an escort, vs a tactical player vs an escort. the tactical player in an escort is going to do more dmg then you because, they have certain abilites that buff the role more significantly then you would with your engineer abilities. Like how a tactical officer would try and tank in a cruiser vs an eng tanking in a cruiser, the eng would be better suited for that role due to his abilities.