Star Trek Online – Starship Guide for Beginners and Stuff

A complete guide on starships and tips on how to improve them in combat n stuff for newbs & returning players.

Basic Starship Stuff: Flying and Organising Your First Starship

All credit goes to Deathstalker!

So, your new in star trek online, and you have your ship, but dont know how to use it nor some controlls for them. Well im going to tell you some secrets and stuff that pro starship players use.

New Starship Guide:

Rule 1:
Always have Auto Fire on during combat. A verry easy way to enable Auto fire is simply by RIGHT clicking on your weapons in the weapon tray. This will easily enable you just to spam spacebar to attack with all abilities.

Rule 2:
Organise your Hud and toolbar.
Organising your hud and toolbar for your starship will GREATLY increase your combat effectiveness because you dont have to look for your abilites, they are just close to your ship. Organising your Hud can be done by press esc, or simply pressing F12 (warning, this will take a screenshot if used in steam) Here is an example of my layout:

As you can see, its far more organised, and I can easily access abilities and etc.

Rule 3:
Dont use different weapons.
Never use mixed weapons, It is a horrible idea, and WILL stop your ship from being at its best ability. This is how your ship should look.

As you can see, my loadout is organised with only one type of weapon, Diffusive Tetryon. (New players you will either have Phaser, Disruptor, or Plasma.)

Rule 4:
Boost your ship’s weapons with amplifiers.
Take a look at the tactical slot on my ship. Those two blue chamber looking things, are resonators to boost my damage output on enemy ships. Use them along with the SAME type of weapon to get the best out of your ship.

Basic Starship Control: Movement and Basic Flanking and Manuevering

Now, I will teach you basic starship movement and how to evade enemy fire and etc.

Basic movement:

Basic movement is acctually different from most games. Insted of W being the forward, it is acctually to look upwards.

Here is a list of movements:

• W = Move starship upward(face up, not move forward).
• S = Move starship downward(face down, not reverse speed).
• A = Move left.
• D = Move right.
• E = E is the basic command to move your starship FORWARD. 
• Q = Q is the basic command to move your starship BACKWARDS.
• R (full stop / full impulse) = This sets your speed level to max, or sets it to 0.

Your Speed Meter is represented by a meter that increases or decreases as you fly forward / backwars.

Useing Evasive manuevers: you can use Evasive manuevers to quickly evade enemies firepower and torpedoes. Once activated, I reccomend flying in a Zig-Zag pattern for the best results.

Once you hit Level 50 you will unlock patturns like Rock and Roll, which allows for temporary immunity to damage. (check advanced starship control for details)

Flanking Flanking is a pretty common tactic for raiders (Klingons) and proves extreamly usefull during combat. Best results happen when using evasive manevers to get behind enemys.

Advanced: Reading Ship Stats

So when you eventually buy a new ship, your faced with this.

Now lets talk about those stats you probebly dont care about, but WILL come in usefull during combat. But before we can do that, lets review what you learned back then about this.

Inertia:

According to Newton’s first law of motion, INERTIA is the tendancy of and object to resist a change in motion.

Basic Stats:

• Hull: The amount of health your ship has
• Shield HP: The amount of shield your ship has to defend it
• Defense Rating: This provides a bonus to your ship’s defense aginst all types of damage
• Hull and Shield repair rate: Rate at which your hull and shields regenerate
• Resists aginst dmg: This tells you how much your ship will deduct of that type of damage

• Accuracy Rating: % in which your ship will acctually hit small and fast moving targets
• Crit chance/severity: chance and bonus damage your ship will inflict upon enemys when crit hits occur.

INERTIA This determains how much your ship will REMAIN moving once stoped. One effective manuever that Pro starship players will use is to SIDESTRAFE enemys, using inertia to their advantage.

Flight speed/turn rate: rate in which starship will turn and fly.

Advanced: Piloting and Starship Roles

So as I said earlier in the guide, the Rock and Roll manuever comes in usefull when taking tons of dmg, such as when an enemy starship explodes.

Other things to do is use builds such as DPS, Tanking, and support such as draining expert and etc.

DPS Roles

These roles are usually good at DPS, but not so good at surviving. DPS Roles usually include rapid damaging and fast attacks such as Dual beam banks, or Dual heavy cannons.

Tank Roles

These roles including alot of damage reduction such as tzenkethi ships (what im using as of now) and as a tank main, your main goal is to drain energy, absorb shields, take all firepower and convert it into health and stuff, and have high threat. Tzenkethi ships are expertly made for tanking (rhas’bej on the most part).

Support Roles

These roles focus on Extreamly high healing outputs, or things even to draining ships completely, to where they cannot fire. This role is the hardest because combat is usually not an option.

Now lets go over some starship types:

• Cruisers: Main backbone ship, good hull, but less shields than usual. Cruisers usually have a moderate weapons count.
• Escorts: Weak hull, and shields, but extreamly fast and manueverable. heavy hitting. I sugest using a main dual heavy cannon build on these ships, because they can easily turn their front to enemys. 
• Science Vessels: Moderate hull, extreamly powerful shields, and a ton of healing and support abilities. 
• Battleships: Heavy hull, moderate shields, slow but powerfull, and used for tanking. 
• Battlecruisers: Moderate hull, moderate-heavy shields, fast, and somewhat manueverable, but pack a punch. 
• Dreadnaught: Extreamly Heavy hull, moderate-heavy shields, verry slow and UNmanueverable, less damage output than a battlecruiser in some situations, and verry tanky. 
• Carriers: Moderate hull, heavy shields, and usually two hanger bays to aid them in combat. not the most heavy hitting ships tho…
• Escort carriers: Escorts, but with a hanger bay 
• Dreadnaught Carriers: Jack of all trades. heavy, durable, slow, and 2 hanger bays to aid in combat. Some are more tanky while others dish out more damage.