Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer:  How much of space combat is damage dealing versus positioning, and by that I mean either impacting your enemy's mobility or getting yourself in good position to attack effectively?

Craig: There are a lot of abilities in the game that are like hold abilities, like tractor beam. You've got to have a tractor beam when you're in space, and you can kind of keep your enemy still and really work on one of his shields. But the way that it works is that you are always moving. When you're staying still, it's actually detrimental--you end up taking more damage. The enemies can do more damage to you if you're not moving. They can get your vital systems easier, and so... space combat is always about moving around, so there's always a positional aspect to it.  I wouldn't say it's about keeping your enemy still, but it's really about trying to find your enemy's weakest shields, really kind of work on there, really try to get your team to bring down that shield, and really go to his hull on his vulnerable side. And kind of trying to keep you... position your ship, maneuver your ship, so that you can keep doing that.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Okay. And when it comes to these more random encounters, is hit-and-run tactics a valid way to play? 

Craig: I think hit-and-run is actually kind of difficult if you go up against a kind of encounter that has more guys in it that you should be able to take. You could try, but it's very hard to pull just one guy  out of an encounter right now.  If you go into an encounter with three ships, you're going to be fighting those three ships. And, they're going to maneuver around you so that they can take you down.  It's not as easy as just hit-and-run, pull one-guy, go back, and pull another guy. If you aggro one guy within a squadron, they're all going to know that you're there, and they're all going to pay attention.

Ten Ton Hammer: How do you escape from these encounters? Is it just a matter of getting far enough away that the encounter ends and you're back in the astrometrics overview?

Craig: Yeah.  Basically, the way to escape one of these encounters is to fly far enough away so that you can go back into warp space, so that you can go back into warp speed again.

Speed and maneuverability is as important as firepower in Star Trek Online.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let's talk about the different kinds of speed in the game and how speed affects combat tactics.

Craig:  So there are basically three different speed that you move in Star Trek Online.  You travel at warp speed, and whenever you're at warp, you're in the astrometric view.  That is, you're never in system space travelling at warp speed.  Your fast mode when you're in system space is full impulse.  It's kind of like putting all of your energy into your engines and so that, you know, you can fly around at faster speed.   You can go between points of interest within a system, you can go out and explore that system at a little bit higher rate.

That being said, when you are at full impulse, all your power's to your engine, so you have very little to your shields, and none to your weapons. And transferring power over to them takes time, so you don't full impulse into combat.  You pretty much full impulse kind of right out of range, let your systems charge back up again, and then go into combat. But, during combat, you're going at less than quarter impulse when you're going into combat.  You can change your throttle, you can change your speed, you can still transfer energy to your engines so that you end up going faster. You get to the encounter, and then figure out how fast you're going to go to get into battle. 

Ten Ton Hammer: And, you have to take your power away from your weapons and shields to go back to full impulse again once you're in combat?

Craig:  Yeah, you end up having to be out of combat to go full impulse.  But you can transfer all your energy to your engines, you can actually use officer abilities, like "emergency power to engines," to give you a speed burst to kind of get out of combat again if you need to.

Ten Ton Hammer: I imagine all of your tactics change depending upon what kind of ship you are piloting.

Craig:  Exactly.  All those numbers change based on what configuration of ship you have, and as well as what equipment you end up putting on your ship. So if you end up using a whole bunch of energy credits to get that really good impulse engine, you're going to end up going faster that somebody who doesn't have that equipment.  All of the strategies, all of your speed, is really based upon how you're going to end up equipping your ship. 

So, I kind of described the very basic approach:  you go full impulse to just outside of range, and then you go into combat at a slower rate.  There are people here who end up building their ship in a way that they full impulse way into combat.  They know that their weapons are going to be offline but what they want to do is they want to close that distance because the phasers that they have do more damage the closer you are to your enemy.  Their weapons are going to be down for three to four seconds, but they can absorb that damage (maybe they have some consoles on their ship that increase the rate at which energy transfers between systems), and then they're really focused on beam weapons, so they want to be as close as possible. So really dependent on how you outfit your ship and the abilities of those ships.  I mean there are just a myriad of different strategies that can come up with.