Fantastic Game - Suggestions

posted on October 12th, 2013, 2:06 am

First off, can I say that I actually lead a Star Trek: Online Fleet and I introduced them to this game and they ALL loved it and actually play it more then STO now which is great. There are just a few comments I would like to make, feel free to move this if its in the wrong section.

1.) Is there going to be any further expansion of this mod because I haven't seen any information on its development. I hope so as its a great game but I just want to ask if its been discontinued.

2.) My friend tells me that the Romulans are rather weak but he prefers to play as them. Any plans to release the Scimitar as a Romulan battleship similar to the Tevara but with the special weapon to fire while cloaked for a short period of time? The Romulans do need a powerful vessel.

3.) While I understand that the Borg should be powerful and I love how they are set up (my personal favorite), I do feel that the Borg are somewhat over powerful in their cubes and tactical cubes, almost to the point of absurdity. Could it be possible to limit players to certain numbers of cubes (3 would be my suggestion with only one tactical cube) to bring the Borg back into balance a bit?

4.) Could the Cardassians be added as an Avatar of the Dominion (Avatar: Gul Dukat) because one of my Fleet members is a big fan of the Cardassians and was dissapointed that they were not part of the Dominion faction. I would like to see Galors and Keldons flying about in game.

5.) Is it possible to design Species 8472 for the game as that was an aspect of the Original Armada II that I actually really enjoyed. They had a really unique culture and vessels which I thought was great with the whole biological development thing.

6.) Whereas the Galaxy is a cool vessel in the game, you missed the most obvious feature... SAUCER SEPERATION... why is that part of the game? Also, what about the Prometheus and Multi-Vector Assault Mode?

7.) Would it be possible to bring back the old Armada and Armada II ways of limiting numbers of ships in the game creation screen to help limit the number of ships that people can have, allowing you to have fewer vessels but maximise the potential of what you have. Its too easy to spam Defiants or other ships in this game because there is no real limiting factor other then supplies/collective connections etc that is too easily replenished.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 3:25 am

My answers are unofficial, and I'm sure I will be corrected on some points, but here's my take:

1) 4.0 is in development, and has been for nearly two years. Major releases tend to have long gestation times. You can get information on how development is progressing from the News section; 4.0 related posts start on page 6 or 7.

2) Romulans are competitive with a more aggressive, raiding playstyle. Use the cloaking scouts to locate weak points in the enemy's defences and use the superior Romulan cloak to strike hard and often at them while keeping away from decisive engagements.

The Scimitar might be included as a "map object"*, but considering the Tavara is already one of the strongest vessels in game, and the Romulans get other very powerful battleships (D'deridex and Norexan are both incredible), I think it unlikely that it'll be a mainstream vessel. Also, the Fleet Operations timeline diverges from traditional TNG-era at some point before "Nemesis". I believe in their version of the universe, Voyager never makes it home, so the Scimitar may never have been built for them.

3) If a 1v1 game has gone on long enough for the Borg to get multiple cubes, then they're going to win. No other race can remotely match the density of Borg fleets after they start fielding Diamonds. It's best for other races to win before it gets that far. In larger matches, cubes should hopefully be matched by numbers.

4) In the Fleet Ops timeline, the Cardassians never recovered from the devastation of the Dominion War. I don't think they will ever be added as a major faction; instead certain ships and stations will be included as map objects. Several mod projects over the years have cropped up to add them.

5) Because of the status of Voyager in the Fleet Ops timeline, any Species 8472 appearances in this mod are likely to be as map objects.

6) At least one of the senior developers of the mod loathes separation as a concept, and considers the Prometheus to be a gimmick. It exists in the current version as an incompletely implemented map object, and it's unlikely it'll ever appear as a mainstream unit. The closest Fleet Ops equivalent is the Phalanx.

7) On the one hand, one of the draws of the mod is that it's possible to create huge armadas of ships; on the other, most of the posted 1v1 replays are decided long before tech advances to various races' chassis 3 equivalents. Scouting (started immediately the match is started) and aggressive raiding (starting at 2 - 4 ships built) will keep games short and numbers down.

* A "Map Object" vessel is something that has graphics and data files included with the mod, but isn't part of the normal tech tree and so is unavailable in normal matches. A mapmaker might choose to include "Map Object" ships to add variety, but in practise, no maps in the standard set of the current version does this.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 4:17 am

Thank you for your response. I have to say I disagree with both the Galaxy's Seperation and the Prometheus's Multi-Vector as a "Gimmick". Star Trek: Online suffers from the same type of bias towards the Galaxy in particular which is canon-wise the most powerful Federation vessel ever constructed during the 2360's (still relevant to the timeline in the game) and also one of the most versatile Federation ships ever constructed.

Personally, I do feel the Galaxy is badly represented and its special ability in this game is somewhat boring and uninspired when it technically should have both;

- Saucer Separation (The Galaxy's main feature and was successful in fending off a Borg Cube due to this tactic. The developer in question may not understand or appreciate that the Galaxy Class was the FIRST Federation ship to be able to separate and then reintegrate. To call that a "gimmick" when there are so many strategic and defensive values to that is frankly arrogant. Also, because of Saucer Separation, NOBODY died when the Enterprise-D was destroyed over Viridian III.)

- Type X Phaser Array (The Galaxy was the first to carry a VERY LARGE phaser array which is STILL outmatched, even in this non-canon universe. The Type X phaser array is more powerful in output then a Sovereign's Type XII phasers which were able to recharge and fire faster but lacked the overall force of the Type X. That was one of the reasons the Galaxy was chosen to be a battleship during the main battles of the Dominion War over the Sovereign which was still fraught with development problems.

This brings me to my next point and my main gripe with the Federation in this game. The play very well as a defensive faction but their ships are very tactically focused which some vessels like the "Phalanx" being completely inconceivable. I think the developers have missed out on a chance to make the Federation more interesting, using their skills and aptitude for Science and Engineering to their advantage.

Oh and I can tell there is a lot of bias towards the Defiant as well, in Armada I and II, it was a cheap escort... what it was designed to be. You guys have basically made out like its some special "battleship" type and its represented by its extremely strong version in this game. Defiant Class usually had the name "Expendable" written on them.

One other thing made me chuckle too...

"Photoshopped Jadzia's head"... Sorry but that made me crack up a bit.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 5:57 am

Heh Seperation is a sticky subject around here. It hasn't been touched for a while, but I imagine it could easily be brought back into the light.

Also, concerning 8472, the Devs do plan to, someday, implement a species that much resembles them. I don't know if that will be in the next upcoming version or what.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 10:39 am

welcome to the forum

you probably picked the most sensitive issue on the forum for your first post (go big or go home indeed). plenty of threads have been filled to bursting with heated debate on the subject. so i'll leave out reasoning and justification and just say which side of the fence i'm on: i oppose introduction of saucer sep (and mvam) in fleetops.

i don't oppose the prometheus type itself, as long as it doesn't start cutting into pieces.

also worth remembering is that fleetops is set decades after voyager in its own storyline, not STO's.

Also, concerning 8472, the Devs do plan to, someday, implement a species that much resembles them. I don't know if that will be in the next upcoming version or what.

to elaborate on zax's words, that would be the noxter, also biological aliens that live in space. similar to the race from a1 that the borg had to wipe out (that ones that reproduced like rabbits).

the noxter were in a version of fleetops a really long time ago, FO Beta 2. then were removed. but they are long term planned to return.

on cubes, i think they are balanced by collective connections and costs. large numbers of cubes should be matched by ridiculous spams of your own powerful ships, eg sovvie/e2 spam.

on the defiant, it's a powerful ship in fleetops because that's what it was in the show. most federation ships are designed for defensive combat, not offensive. the feds have more of their hitpoints in their impressive shield systems. the defiant was a ship that forwent science labs and comfy quarters to cram in the most vicious and unpalatable weapons the feds had. a2 made a mockery of the defiant class.

with plot armour, sisko's defiant went up against half a dozen dominion bugs, and crushed them. and that was before starfleet stole a dominion bug to analyse its systems. because sisko got a defiant, not many others appeared on the show, so sadly we don't have a plethora of examples without plot armour. only 2:

- the valiant, crewed by cadets (not even clever by cadet standard, the captain was on drugs). went up against bad writing (dominion super duper ultra deathstar) and didn't immediately get blown to bits. it lasted long enough for the main characters to escape.

- the battle with the prometheus and the romulans. 3 romulan big D warbirds. 2 defiants and 1 akira. the battle was still going when the doctors figured out mvam and ended it. the prommie even shot a photon torpedo at one defiant at the start. the defiants didn't get wiped out in this battle.

defiants were never expendable in canon, only 2 of them were ever destroyed on screen. the miranda/excelsior class were the expendable ships.

on your point 7, i don't have any objection to this. unit limits would really mess up balance. but so does 10 minute cease fire yet we still have that option. i don't mind unbalancing things being options, they don't have to be turned on. like mutators.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 12:17 pm

i really like the model for the Prometheus,
but i can understand why they find it hard to make it a useful addition in the game. (if its split then the armor of each part is weaker and destroyed easier )

it could easily be altered from MVAM to have a MTAM
(multi targeting assault mode) so its a heavy hitter but on several ships, or just a short time it could pound a single target.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 12:24 pm

Thank you for your posts Diamond! Haven't laughed this much for a while! It's really honest legit trolling! Keep it up!

PS.: I hope you are not just Ray320 in incognito.......

PS2.: You should come online on tunngle sometimes with your buddies and have some fun games with the rest of the active community!

posted on October 12th, 2013, 4:15 pm

I am sorry if you viewed my comments as trolling. That was not my intention but I just wanted to point out there is a lot of bias in this game towards the Defiant which is present in Star Trek: Online as well. I prefer the original Armada I and II concept about the Defiant because its small and cheap to produce.

My intention was not to "troll", I am actually pretty new here and we've only been playing this game a short time. I enjoy playing Borg but I always have to limit myself because I personally believe that cubes are usually too cheap to produce and its really tempting to just build 4-5 of them. ((I guess I'm just good with economy.))

I just wanted to ask with some options that would allow us to slow down the game in favor of a slower and more strategic game play. I must say though, this mod is one of the best I've ever seen and I do love it. Just the usual "fanboism" towards the Defiant because of pew pew gets on my nerves a little bit.

I do hate to remind people but WITHOUT the Galaxy's Saucer Separation "gimmick", the Borg would have assimilated the Federation as the Enterprise-D would have never rescued Picard and I hate to remind you that it was the ONLY Federation ship that held off a Borg cube in two separate encounters in that episode alone.

Personally, I just think its a little dismissive to call it a gimmick and comes off as a little arrogant. This reminds me of Al Rivera making the Excelsior more powerful then the Galaxy because he likes the Excelsior more. That urks me a little, its not the places of Devs to make judgement about ships because all the canon specifications of vessels are easily available.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 6:15 pm

Haha... Escorts in STO. I love'em but they are soooo broken.

And about the Separation, just remember it is the Devs game. The original makers clearly made some judgment calls when making Stock, and the devs have to as well. Remember also that the galaxy we saw in TNG was only amazing because it was the Enterprise. If it wasn't, the writers would have been much quicker to let it be blown up in many different ways. Again, just remember that it is the devs call to change what they want, even if it makes a lot of people unhappy. Clearly they know what they are doing.

That being said, for those of us who like things to be just the way we want, you can always do what the Devs do and mod FO. Probably a matter for another thread, but adding something like a saucer sep'ing Galaxy to the game is not that difficult.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 6:22 pm

STO is offensive to Star Trek. To be honest, I understand why some of the ships are like what they are but I fail to see why any game cannot just stick to canon with ships being representative of what they were in the shows. Its not rocket science to make ships as balanced as they were in canon and big companies like Activision managed to do it for Armada, Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command III. All three games were accurate to the known capabilities of the ships.

I just get the feeling that these people from smaller projects and companies don't understand the value of research on the capabilities of different ships and that is my greatest bugbear with the game.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 7:02 pm

like Activision managed to do it for Armada, Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command III. All three games were accurate to the known capabilities of the ships.

you're joking. a1/a2 didn't follow canon. they couldn't as they were making a game that had to be balanced. so many liberties were taken.

the defiant was weakened greatly from the show. suddenly a borg cube vs 1 sovvie was a fair fight. and the special weapons tended to be "colourful" to say the least. like the nebula could clone a ship and all its crew, then have them all die moments later.

bridge commander (probably my favourite ST game) was much closer to canon, but suffered from weapons taking all day to recharge and doing almost no damage. playing as galaxy/sovvie classes meant spinning on the spot to let all the arcs fire in sequence. legacy fixed the charge time issues, but still had phasers do tiny damage (legacy had many other issues too).

posted on October 12th, 2013, 8:34 pm

There have been threads and threads with posts upon posts regarding Prometheus and separation. When a dev (usually Dominus) has responded, it's generally been to indicate that it's not happening; either the ship, or the ability. Some players agree with this, some don't, but in the end it's the mod we have. If you disagree then there's always the option of creating a mod to add it.

The Galaxy itself is up there in capability. It's one of the Federation's strongest vessels in this mod (at Veteran rank it's stronger offensively than the Sovereign), and you'll find at least one video commentary with a player whining about their Fed opponent pulling several across consecutive Warp-Ins. I will agree that STO does have a Galaxy problem, with Excelsior and Ambassador classes outperforming it, but that's STO, not Fleet Ops.

As for the Federation themselves -- while we don't have a lot of information on the timeline (in the Devs' "blue sky" wishlist they're going to implement a single-player campaign that'll tell the tale of the Eraudi Incident), we can surmise that they've been slow to step down from the militarisation required by the Dominion War, same as how STO justifies Starfleet's more aggressive stance with the Klingon war.

As Myles has already indicated, the Defiant's stats were set to reflect how it generally performed under Sisko's command. I think A1/A2 disappointed fans with how weak the class was in those games.

But here's the thing. I don't think any game has been particularly accurate at depicting Trek ships, but this is because they're games and have to consider playability as the most important factor.

Finally, I'd be very careful when making assertions like

That was one of the reasons the Galaxy was chosen to be a battleship during the main battles of the Dominion War over the Sovereign which was still fraught with development problems.

without citing source. Screen canon vs expanded canon is, as you might expect on a Trek board, a bit of a touchy subject. The Sovereign class was never even mentioned on DS9 -- even the events of First Contact only got a cursory mention, while Insurrection is entirely ignored other than a couple of mentions of the Son'a. Of course, in the real world we know that this is probably because the movie execs were hoarding the use of the Sovereign model in much the same way they denied the TNG producers use of the Constitution refit. That DS9 got to use the Galaxy as much as they did surprises me to this day.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 8:51 pm

That DS9 got to use the Galaxy as much as they did surprises me to this day.

the same reason avery brooks was allowed to shave his head: tng was finished. so ds9 could have a bald captain and blow up a galaxy class starship to introduce the jemhadar (see the worf effect).

also the switch to cgi for later battles meant that they could build their own galaxy class (with blackjack and hookers).

posted on October 12th, 2013, 9:48 pm

I'm sorry but the Defiant is just not that powerful, its an overgunned, overpowered, ghetto-mobile pimp car for Sisko. It was easily destroyed in Valiant and it just generally does not deserve the pedestal that you put it on. It ultimately failed in its ONE function... To Fight and Defeat the Borg...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPzJSBHG4pI - Yes, such a good ship... failed completely, so hard that Worf was going to ram it into the Borg Cube. Until a real ship like the Enterprise-E came in to save its butt.

posted on October 12th, 2013, 10:04 pm

The USS Valient had been taking beatings over a fairly decent amount of time with a cadet crew that wasn't up to the task of repairing it. Not the best example.

Designed for the Borg or not, it's still limited by the Feds lesser technology and defences. The fact that it survived a beating from a Cube at all is far more than most other ships can claim.