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Everything else is optional / as you want it.
Take note of possible running promotion codes, they often include "starter kits" that increase a character's inventory or bank space.
past the energy cap increase and optionally more character slots (reason: refined dil bots, and this justifies being able to make a high level character to dil bot faster (jem H race starts at 50 I think) ... beyond those 2 big ones, you have inventory slots for your main character if you plan to pack-rat the unique items and such.
those aside, then come the ships. Ships are troublesome:
- it takes a while to learn what is 'good' which in turn is relative to your preferences. For example I think the fleet nova is the best ship in the game (and, its potentially free thx to free ship modules in rep) but the guy next to me would prefer a cruiser, and the one on the other side wants a carrier, and so on.
- ships are the carrot on a string: always more power creeped stuff coming out. I salute their efforts to sell upgrade tokens that sort of fix older ships (t5 and t6) but not all of them can be fixed (eg if you like intel seats, you won't find much help in the T5 XX list).
- ships are often sold in a way that to get the ship trait you want, you have to buy a clunker you would never fly.
So that circles back to my sit on it advice. Until you KNOW what ship you want very very well, which you can get a feel for by trying out similar cheap or free ships, keep the money for later. Its too easy to buy something that didn't really fit your needs and get stuck with it.
The Zen purchases seems to give the "nice to have cool things" kind of stuff without making me feel like I can't play the game without spending any, it's a good combination. I know I don't have to spend any real money to play but the way it's set up I want to spend, at least a little bit here and there.
Now I know what to save up for and I will make sure to choose my first ship that costs Zen extremely carefully. Even the free ships I agonize over which one to get lol
That being said, Energy Cap Increase is the first thing to buy. Thats 5 dollars (500 zen.)
The next thing is more slots. For the inventory. You will overflow it in generic stuff starting out.
Now this will get a bit long bear with me.
I have exactly 7 DOFF's for the ground and space ship stations. Thats it. All new officers asking to join get turned into a manual. Eventually all the Doffs that I am using are all trained with the exception of a few lockbox manuals needed.
I keep a set of weapons beam, a set of torpedo weapons and a couple of plasma, photon or quantum mines in the bank. Theres one primary set I have upgraded to the max. currently XV or Epic on all of them. All of them are tuned to critDx4 and in my specific case with Pen. Because I have ground the traits and other things that provide for penetrating shields and armor. Anything else is just sound, fury and noise which is a liability against truly powerful enemies.
Keep a set of Valkries for shuttles. You will need them to clear tholian Webs in a hurry and chase down really elusive enemy shuttles that are objectives in TFO's etc. This is like having a wolf pack. They can catch a fleeing Shuttle and kill it at 30 km out and then come back to you way faster than you can lumber and waddle your big starship that far.
Be very careful what consoles you pick to use. Those good consoles become Epic and stay with you on all your ships that are ACTIVE. I have a full dockyard of rotting ships and I have like 20 plus ships in space dock that could be activated after I emptied out the one ship and moved everything into the other then made active.
Thats why you need many more inventory slots. Game says I can buy more but I wonder. I have so many now. Sometimes on moving day the 8 weapons, 15 consoles, the core, deflector, engine and shields and shuttles cause me to almost run out of inventory slots.
Keep a couple rows of stuff that is not used in your inventory, sometimes the endeavor will pop up a salvage mission and you will have enough to meet it.
Learn to be heavy on the tactical side of the skills screen for the ship and less so for shields and a little less for the hull. On the ground side of skills be more towards lethality. You kill your enemies faster than they can destroy you. Less so against humans.
Recognize from the very beginning that the generic stuff offered by any vendor in the game is just that generic. Use what you are able to until you get to 65 first. Then discard them.
Accumulate keys. On sale always. I think the last time I checked they were 12.2 million a key on the exchange. They generally fluctuate a range of 12 to 15 or so millions normally. Anything higher risks intervention by Cryptic and banning. So you buy the keys and accumulate them. The prices get to 15 million sell.
THEN SIT on those specific credits in your account bank. Wait until prices fall to 12 million.
Buy keys. When finished you should have MORE keys now. Otherwise it wont work.
Put the credits back into the account bank seperate from the regular churn of EC's
Lobi, Dabo, Gold Pressed lithium etc is decoration, so are the winter event ornaments. A waste. You wonder why hardly anyone is in the winter event now.
Decide how you want to progress in upgrading. That falls to the Phoenix boxes. Refine 40,000 dil then do it again until you have 250,000 Dil. Then you will buy 5 bundles of 10 Phoenix boxes. At that point you will end up with several hundred phoenix upgrade cards. IGNORE the ships offered at epic (They are bound to you anyway and require too much research etc) and ignore most of the stuff in the lower phoenix offerings. Its essentially eye candy and a drain on you.
You occasionally (two to three times a year) will get a epic prize voucher from a phoenix... WAIT until 6 minutes by stopwatch from the last Game WIDE anouncement of the previous epic prize winner before opening phoenix boxes. Click all of them open as fast as you can. It does not matter what they will be because the server will decide what boxes will be before you find out.
When you have at least a hundred phoenix cards. upgrade something to epic. When you get a hundred more upgrade something else to epic. I started with the warp core, then shields then impulse engine then deflector. Then the four beam weapons next. Followed by the torpedoes.
By this point you will have discovered what are good consoles and what are generic and junk.
The biggest and worst grind is the R and D. You will go all the way to level 20 across the board in due time. This gives you the right to craft stuff that usually is not availible by vendors in the game and are sometimes overpriced on the exchange.
Thats the last item. The things that get crafted have a cost in componets needed to craft it. Those costs are already included in the offering price by sellers who know what they are doing and ensure that they can craft another with the sale and small profit.
Finally but not last. Do not sell anything or refine dil or... more importantly do anything in the Dilithium--Zen exchange screens with a altered mind or physical illness. A mistake in fat fingering will cost you so very much.
I really do appreciate it, I feel like I learned a ton about STO now. I copied your post to a text note so I can refer back to it when I need so I can read it a few times more and have it all sink in. Now I feel I am starting to get a basic idea of how to do things now.
I highly suggest you not base your STO strategy on anything that 1xHeavy tells you in pretty much any case. His understanding of the game is certainly not "advanced", and a lot of the advice he gives is really, really stupid.
So, lets get to the original question:
You're certainly going to want to raise the EC cap, but that won't necessarily be important as your first purchase if you're never close to hitting that 15M ec limit in your daily play. It does eventually become a major issue, but when you're working from limited ZEN, you may want to focus on things that have immediate benefit.
Your first major buy should probably be the Arbiter class Battlecruiser (assuming you're federation). It is a solid ship, and if you're at or near level cap it is a ship that unlocks a starship trait that will likely go on every single energy weapon build you make. The utility of the "Emergency Weapon Cycle" trait cannot be overstated. If you have patience you can wait for a ship sale and get it at a discount.
Next, find a new player guide that is genuinely aimed at new players. There are many that claim to be, but will yammer on about special consoles and traits that are almost certainly outside of your immediate reach. You want one that focuses on things you can acquire easily from missions (and tells you which ones!) and on the basics of how to make a solid ship build, as well as the most basic techniques for starship combat.
If you're not at level cap, just play your way till you get there - you don't need to worry about builds and fancy equipment while leveling. You can make it all the way to level cap just using random drops and occasional mission rewards. If you do end up buying a T6 ship, and aren't at level cap, those scale to your level, so you can fly it all the way through.. though the free ships you get every 10 or so levels are just fine for the process, too.
Take part in the neverending stream of events that are happening in-game, and unlock the permanent event rewards. Most are crap, but some are not. More importantly, it'll earn you dilithium.. plenty of it... especially when you finish the event progress and keep running the daily event content. You're going to want to build up your supply of refined dilithium as a new player because there are plenty of great things to spend it on.
Once you're at level cap, make your first fully fleshed-out build, and have it be beam based. Beam arrays are one of the most forgiving weapon types in the game, so they're a great first thing to focus on. Pick whatever energy type you want... base it on colour.. or sound.. or whim. Over time you'll end up with sets of every energy type, but your best bet is to focus on one at the start.
HA. Thats ok. Imagine if I was really stupid at this game, how dumb anyone would be to try and play it for 13 years? hmm? he he he.
The game has no end. Its designed to extract real dollars from impatient people. They gotta make a living somehow.
With that in mind buying a Lifer Subscription once a year on sale is the very best investment. In terms of 500 zen allowing a month from that for oh 9 years or so roughly its paid for itself 3 times over. The game economy is self supporting at that point.
The other poster talked about Lobi. Hes right. There are some goodies in it, and I had in my ancient age quite forgot about the AP stuff. I found a few scraps of those in the far corners of my store room tonight.
The Poster who thinks hes a heavyweight compared to little old me mental midget to him brings up another thought. Fleets in STO. The fleet I am in is a bunch of ancient ones who do not engage in politics, genuflecting and games of rank and clue. (Who done it) etc. we jump in play a while, get out until tomorrow. Usually due to real life stuff. Very rarely do we assemble to do fleet stuff. And when we do I am really small at the feet of Gods in the game.
Something to keep in mind. I no longer worry about little problems if someone does not like me for whatever. I recently got diagnosed with two types of lethal problems that will kill me 6 to 20 months from this one in due time depending on how fast it progresses. When you are facing mortality and death for real (Again...) little things like that doesnt matter anymore really. We are over it.
Finally but not least.
It is my theory that perhaps Star Trek will eventually go off into worlds beyond this one in due time. Theres I think two generations of people now being born who do not know anything about star trek. When they become of age 15 years from now.. and discover the internet and this game they will not understand most of it.
And the memorial on the Mezzie Deck at Earth Stardock second floor is accumulating quite a few names now. Kirk and a couple of others are yet to be added to dearly departed absent friends.
Thank you for all of this advice, I feel like I'm learning so much. So far in the game I've mostly just been wandering around aimlessly, exploring everything and going through the stories/main missions as well as trying to learn all of the items, stats, buffs and debuffs as well as getting used to the massive amount of info on all the different UI elements.
Now after the help of you guys, I think I know where to begin now and focus on. Thank you all so much.
1.) Raise the EC limit
2.) Increase your crew size by 100 DOffs for the purpose of DOff assignments and R&D/crafting.
Eventually you'll need either drydock slots, or ship slots. You'll want to accumulate ship's for use in completing Admiralty assignments. As I understand it, you will retain the 'ship card' for Admiralty use even if you dismiss the ship, so you can minimize the number of slots required.
You'll want more inventory slots, BUT you might find opportunities to get them via giveaways. Hang around here - people often post a head's up when they come across a freebie.
I would say:
- EC cap increase
- Arbiter Battlecruiser (but wait until the next time it is on sale)... literally has one of the top-5 starship traits there are.
In general, sales are plentiful enough that you should NEVER buy anything that is not on sale. The EC cap increase can be so critical to gameplay that I'd make an exception for that ONLY.
I would also suggest to participate in all events. You never know how useful the reward might be, and also, you can make a tidy bundle of extra dilithium for the completion of the reward project *and* earning progress on the remaining days of the event after that.
Also, I have three guides published here on Steam which may be useful to new players.
No offense, but you mean it *sounds* helpful, and it does so because you don't know any better yet. It's not particularly good advice for succeeding in the game but a lot of that is hidden because it's things that are beyond your ability to reach them at this point... which is good, because most of it is not what you'll want to do to succeed at the game.
Let me go over it for you:
This is bad advice. Early in your STO career most of what you get is bag trash and exists to be occasionally sold, and often discarded. It is not until much later that you'll end up with a lot of things you DON'T want to get rid of quickly that you'll consider increasing inventory size... and you're better off getting a "starter pack" that comes with increased inventory size than you are buying inventory slots directly.
This is talk for the sake of talk. You'll end up with 4 ground boffs for ground content, and at least 5 space boffs for your starship, and in the long run they won't likely overlap. Unless you're someone who limits themselves for RP purposes, your space boffs will likely (in time, not immediately) be romulan, watchers, or jemhadar vaguard, for the space bonuses those give. While you could use them for ground content as well, you'll probably want different traits for that.
This assumes you'll be piloting a ship with a hangar bay, which most ships do not have, and even if you've got one you won't want Valkyries as your pets because they're not particularly good, especially as a utility pet. Valkyries use pulse cannons which are only good if you have the Superior Area Denial trait, and their abilities focus on buffing their photon torpedoes, which isn't what you'd want to clear tholian webs or chase down enemies - for webs you want pets with FAW (or to use that yourself) and to make pets do any damage at all without building around being a carrier, you want pets with something like Beam Overload.
So, if you do end up with a hangar on your chosen ship, and you're not building a carrier (which you won't be if you're new - carriers take waaaaaaay too much stuff to be effective.. they're a later thing) you'd probably slap in something like Elite Obelisk Swarmers for general duty, or Elite Scorpions.
In the long run you'll mostly use unique-equip consoles, markless gold consoles, and advanced consoles. Unless you fly the same ship all the time, or carbon copies of that build all the time, you won't use the same consoles on all your ships - they will change based on your intentions for a build.
For your first build you'll certainly come up with a set of consoles that likely all boost your chosen energy type, with a bare minimum of consoles that provide more survivability. Those survival consoles will be phased out over time in favour of even more damage consoles.
This is someone confessing to being a hoarder with poor inventory management skills. You have a bank, a shared account bank, and your items are stored on any ships you have active but aren't actually using - meaning you can store an entire ship worth of equipment on one of your ships that isn't being used... multiplied by the number of ships you have in your active slots.
Additionally, you don't need to move the equipment from your ship into your inventory in order to move it to a new ship - you can equip them directly from the old ship, or tell the game to move everything over when you change ships (to the extent that it can). The latter option you'll eventually disable in favour of just manually moving things over without dropping them in your inventory like a moron first.
Actually, just learn not to keep so much crap in your inventory in the first place, then you don't have to worry about any of that. Most consoles that you get from ships, which will typically be markless gold consoles, can simply be reclaimed at any time so long as you still have the ship. You don't need to keep unused copies of those in your inventory - you can delete them and just reclaim them as needed.
Just read the skills in the skill tree and pick stuff that suits you. You do want the tactical skills that boost damage and critical chances, but the effect of the skill tree is something that decreases over time.
For ground skill you want to focus on Kit Module improvement not weapon improvement. Weapon damage is easy to improve... kit module recharge rates and overall performance is less easy to improve, and kit modules will evaporate groups of enemies long, long before your weapon skills reach the point where they can compete.
Don't do this unless you plan on buying big pricetag items off the exchange. Buying and selling keys to make EC is not an effective means of making significant EC as the per-item cost is quite high, and the differential between lows and highs is not big enough to make it worth your while.
Dabo isn't a currency, it's a casino game. Lobi is very useful for space gear and certain ground gear. GPL, where the L stands for LATinum, not lithium, which is a drug they've no doubt put x1Heavy on, is useful only when winning it is a daily endeavor. Winter ornaments are great for buying winter items - you'll want decent winter weapons for completing winter events, and then move on to certain kit modules and BOFF manuals, and finally any of the myriad of vanity shields for your starship.
The reason long-time players don't spend a ton of time in the winter event is that the currencies carry over from year to year, so once you've collected a big stockpile, you don't have a lot of reason to keep earning it. You can also buy large stacks of them from the exchange for pretty cheap.
If you have lots of dilithium and you have a lot of items to upgrade then that's one way to do it, but early it's a better plan to spend your dilithium on fleet and rep equipment. There's little point in stockpiling upgrade material when you don't have things worth upgrading.
If it takes someone a hundred phoenix upgrades to get one piece of equipment to epic then they are an absolute failure at life. Wait for an upgrade weekend when upgrades are worth double, and do your upgrading then. A hundred phoenix upgrades will take several pieces of equipment to Epic MkXV.
By this point you'll have a better idea as to which advice is good and which is junk.
You don't need to grind R&D catagories up to 20. You unlock the associated trait at 15, and only some of them are worth having (the science trait is worth having... it's a monster). Even 15 is higher than is necessary to have guaranteed success crafting advanced consoles, if you decide to do so.
Refining dilithium is a button press. You can't mess it up, and there's no good reason to sit on unrefined dilithium.
The value of lifetime subscriptions has decreased over time, and while you can try to imagine that the 500 ZEN / month compounted over an unknown length of time is a great deal, the price you pay for the subscription on sale is what it'd cost to get 24,000 ZEN, and that's when there isn't a zen bonus. That means that, on sale, you're paying to wait 4 years before you've received more ZEN than you'd have gotten on day 1 if you'd spent that same money directly on the ZEN.
So, for people who got a lifetime subscription when the game first came out it is certainly something that has paid great dividends, but I don't think I'd suggest to people that it is a great deal NOW.
This is only important if you have lockbox ships that, if deleted, are simply gone forever. Event ships and ZEN store ships can be reclaimed an infinite number of times, which means that you can simply discharge the ships when you're not using them. You'll retain their Starship Trait and any of the unique equipment they came with if you choose to.
Use your active ship slots as bonus inventory for starship equipment. Drydock is mostly a place to stick those lockbox ships when you want to make room in your active ship roster. If you're not a hoarder and get used to deleting things that you can reclaim when not using them, it should be a while before you have inventory issues.
Two examples of weird:
- science (all those aoe magic explosions in every group that make it unpossible to see. sorry about that).
- carriers. Carriers are not as pricey as science, but a couple of the big boy traits will set you back and farming the resources for the unique pets for each ship can get pricey in dil costs.
other weird stuff includes just general for the fun of it dumbassery like a turret boat or themed stuff. Basically if you get to max level and think you would prefer to so something other than beam heavy builds, you are already headed off the beaten path a little, and depending on where that takes you, you can end up in a dark alley with fewer resources and may need help getting it set up... just ask ppl will help.