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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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The main benefit to you would be access to fleet base vendors. Some of the fleet bases - particularly the Colony, Spire, and Embassy - have quite useful items for sale. For this purpose, it would be best - though not 100% crucial - that any fleet you are joining has upgraded those three bases to Tier 3. Tier 1 is absolutely required. (The base tier has to do with lock/unlock status of vendors, but there is a shopping workaround where you can be invited as a guest to another fleet's bases, and the host's fleet level is used for vendor lock rules... but it also consumes "provisions" created by fleet projects, which would still come from your fleet, and those can't be produced until Tier 1.) Shopping access may be locked / unlocked based on your "rank" within your fleet (it's solely rank based though, not individual), and many fleets may have a contribution quota in order to earn ranks.
As for being F2P - none of the items at the fleet bases cost zen. Purchase costs are usually fleet credits only (those are earned by donating to fleet projects) or a combination of fleet credits and dilithium.
Also, fleets can be in a larger structure called an armada, of up to 13 fleets, and you can also earn credits by donating to other fleets in your armada. So do not worry about having the ability to donate if you should happen to join a ridiculously high-level, or even completed, fleet. (Maximum fleet level - which is calculated from various milestones in fleet base construction - is 85. I personally would advise not joining a fleet that is not at least level 23, and that's a very bare minimum, which if properly distributed would be Tier 1 on every fleet base.)
It takes hundreds of millions of dil to complete a fleet. My fleet is completed and the Armada has been upgrading slowly for the last oh 5 years at this point.
I dont do anything with a small rank on purpose in my fleet. Years ago I ran a fleet for four years contributing to everything. Thats one reason I have close to 40 million contributed in my lifetime in the game. Then through politics of armada lose it. They are more than welcome to it.
Ive been with steam 15 years and with the game since the beginning almost. Its a aging product with a steadily declining player base. So many fleets that are not completed now will never be. Part of that problem is dilithium.
It's difficult to express the scale of just how absurd the grind for fleet upgrades is, or articulate how fundamentally unjust the entire fleet structure is. Just understand that all the fleets that have access to the best stuff are either ancient, had big pay2win sponsors or are highly organized slave labor camps. And their remaining active members are mostly dead-eyed drones who lost their souls to the sunk cost fallacy, plus a few min/maxing tryhards. I was once a member of a top tier fleet where I had tens of millions of credits earned, some bought with donated dilithium, and the fleet owner sold the fleet for real world money to another person who kicked all the rest of us out so he could bring in his friends from another game. Never give a fleet a single solitary dilithium crystal, unless it's owned by you or your friends. They'll ask you to because they have to, because somebody has to pay the crystals and the costs are ridiculously high, but it doesn't have to be you and it's not your fault the system is so poorly structured.
Fortunately there's a back door to getting most of the good fleet gear. You don't have to be invited to a top tier fleet, you just have to be invited to a top tier fleet's starbase, and then you can spend your own fleet's currency at the other fleet's upgraded stores. (The one exception is fleet starships, you have to be an actual fleet member to buy those, but those mostly aren't the best anymore.) It can be a huge hassle and require a lot of patience to arrange a good starbase invite, so I recommend looking up the cost of everything you want to buy, save up all the credits and dilithium you'll need in advance, and then buy everything you'll ever need in a single visit. Then you'll probably never have to worry about fleet grind garbage ever again, because it's been years since they added any new fleet gear to the game. Then go back to hanging out with your newbie fleet that's just happy to complete the TFO at all, instead of the guy from the top tier fleet doing his 5000th Infected The Conduit in a row whining about how he's earning 5% fewer marks per minute because his teammates aren't using optimized meta ship builds. This game is at its best when it's played poorly with a bunch of idiots having fun, that's my advice.
On another note, how do Fleet Banks work? Do people just stash their stuff there, and anyone can take it whenever they want?
Akso what are lifetime fleet credits? I seem to have one character who doesn't receive any more fleet credits when donating stuff...is it because I maxed out or something?
To a point, though fleet leaders can set time-based limits on how much you can withdraw, based on your fleet ranking.
Just a lifetime total of your fleet credits earned. When you spend fleet credits, they are subtracted from your current but not from your lifetime. They are not, themselves, spendable.
This was where I was going, kinda, with my rec of a minimum of a level 23 fleet - or otherwise with at least Tier 1 on all holdings - because that fleet can generate shopping provisions, and then you can shop on map invite. This would allow you easy credits earning, as well as access to anything other than (as mentioned) fleet ships.
I'll be looking into getting my characters on a fleet, as from what I heard, fleet gear is very powerful, and more convenient to upgrade, though I'm not sure if I'm mistaken here.
This started mostly because of me wanting a tier 6 Romulan science ship for my science officer honestly xD
I know, but you still need fleet credits to get them, right?
it kinda adds things to do. and creates coordination probs. when someone fills in the easy stuff like fleet marks but doesnt add anything else the rest of the fleet might start to grumble or let the project simply stay unfulfilled bc they already have milions of creds.
armadas and fleet hopping help sometimes.
dil, creds and doffs seem rarest .
overall klings get more un reffed dill due to the prisner/marauder thing. but refining it is the equalizer.
You can buy consoles, weapons and other things if the level of the fleet is high enough.
Playing in STO goes like this:
1. Level up and do episodes
2. Do Task Force Operation for Marks, Trade them in a fleet and buy stuff. Do R&D, Reputation
3. Spend money and complete builds,
4. Log in, convert dilithium, do personal endeavors, maybe daily quests and Doff/admirals tasks.
...and now... repeat the whole thing.
You don't really need a fleet except for chatting if you feel like it. If you need equipment, you can simply ask a fleet if they will invite you to do some shopping. This is not a problem for the majority of existing fleets.
PvP doesn't take place because it's completely unbalanced. There are a few people who claim otherwise and lure newbies into farming. They like to keep quiet about the fact that they are completely superior to them because of their personal Endouvers which takes a few years to complete and grants a huge boost to survivability and damage output. Spending money and installing the best ships, consoles and weapons does the rest. Chances of survival of a newbie = 0 because one hit.
and otherwise there is no endgame here. If you like, the endgame consists of talking and farming Dilithium. Chewing through events from time to time and collect giveaways.
People like me still play it, because it is Star Trek and even if everything is old and clunky... the space battles with the collected ships are still a lot of fun.
Star Trek is a collecting game, here you collect things. Knowledge about builds, you collect dilithium and equipment, Pets and Consoles, Weapons and things you need and don't need but especially ships. And that until you have no more room on the bank or in the shipyard, now you spend money to expand the whole thing to hoard more pointless stuff.
These are the bare hard facts... Star Trek Online, a Home for Hoarder.
Damned
The game is basically dead, the only ones left are the die hard troglodytes who do nothing but stand there and talk smack on zone chat, only to leave for a few minutes to do something event related.
What does that mean? That means you're playing a game where almost nobody talks, except these hot spots with these dudes that play for 23 hours a day. Essentially, this is not an MMO, this is a single player game with multiplayer features.
Do you need to be in a fleet? No, never. Even the bonuses that are not controlled by you in any capacity are negligible at best.
Do you need a fleet? Yes. Why? Two reasons, here's the first. End game items that can only be bought with fleet credits/marks, and while marks can be acquired outside of fleet, credits cannot. You must donate to fleet projects in order to receive credits.
Unfortunately, therein lies the problem. The people that are recruiting for these fleets are all of these 23 hour a day troglodytes that do nothing else, so the chances of you actually donating to something is slim to none. What choice do you have? You have to create your own fleet solely for the purpose of donating, or find a "dead" fleet that has leadership active, but nobody else.
However, you then encounter another issue. You got all of the credits, marks, and refined dilithium for these items. Now what? Now you need to find a fleet that has the upgraded sections in order for you to access those vendors. You can EASILY find these by just asking in the hot spots, somebody always helps out with that. This is all end game stuff, so if you don't give two ♥♥♥♥♥ about maximizing your potential as a character, it doesn't matter, but you wanted the facts, and now you have them.
I was lucky enough to find some good people that were able to teach me and guide me in the game, to the point that I'm confident enough to now relay those teachings to other newbies, but this is not the norm. This game does not have a lot of people left playing, and it's either troglodytes talking smack, or absolute silence, fleet or otherwise.
Understand this very important fact, though, unrelated to fleets. All of these super powerful builds and whatnot that you can find, even if you have all the items necessary, you still won't do as much damage. Why? Because of the "prestige" system the game has that gives you a colossal amount of power, which takes years to max out, that these so-called content creators conveniently always leave out.