STO Combat Systems
Star Trek Online has a different take on combat than other more traditional online roleplaying games. There are two separate types of combat in this online game to reflect the different types of fights that are common in both the television series and the movies. They are Space Combat and Away Mission Combat. These two styles of combat tap into different skills and are vastly different from one another, giving the game two separate aspects and expanding the entire experience. Space Combat is all about tactics and slow combat, using brains and plans to defeat enemies, and as one would think from the name, it takes place in space using ships. Away Mission Combat is the fighting that happens face-to-face on planet surfaces, enemy ships, etc., and is fast paced gun-based combat.
Players control their ships during space combat, using the WASD keys to move around and the mouse to control weapons systems like the phasers and photon torpedoes. The type of ship and its different properties will determine how you should approach combat. Faster moving enemy ships need faster phaser fire to be damaged, so players would need to divert power from shields and engines to phaser power, and so on.
Away Mission Combat is a little different, and focused less on tactics and so will move much faster. Away Missions can happen on defeated ships, planets, space stations and other places. Players beam into them with your bridge crew (or other human players), who can be controlled like pets in other MMORPGs. Kits, which add certain special bonuses, can be applied to crew members and used to increase skills. Players control their captain and their crew members, using their different attacks, kits, and abilities together to defeat enemies. Away encounters often involve large numbers of enemies, and this scales depending on your experience and the number of human players in your party. Using the skills of your crew to exploit enemy weaknesses will be the key to being victorious in away team situations.
Star Trek Online has types of combat to please all kinds of gamers, and the variety in combat will keep the game from being too much of a grind. Players will need to learn the details of both types of combat to succeed, but with the scaling mechanism in-game completing quests and battles shouldn’t be too difficult.