Is Admiralty P2W?

mayito2009

Well after reaching level 6 in Admiralty I find myself unable to keep going on. Every single mission now requires between 80-120 pointd for each group. How do you expect me to do these missions when my whole 9 ships together dont reach 70 points?

duncanidaho11

Get better ships. This isn't pay to win, it's just RPG game design. Once you level up you will need to start worrying about spending resources for incremental stat increases (in this case, new ships) in order to have a good chance at successfully completing content.

There's a lot of options available, the cheapest being T1-T5 default ships, 200k retrofits from your fleet, and the upcoming Winter event ship prize.

Also, even while at high levels you'll still see low-requirement assignments. In fact I don't think your level affects what assignments you get apart from the tour of duty chain. Those requirements will increase with level, but for the rest if you're seeing a mass of assignments that you don't have a hope for I think that's just bad luck (I for example had very good luck this morning at level 9). Purposefully fail them to move on (T1 Miranda is great for that, but we're getting Shuttle admiralty cards with the next update which will be even better for it) or spend a skip token.

mayito2009

So to get better ship what do I do? Do I pray to the devs so they donate some ships to me or do I need to spend Real money (P2W) to be able to do admiralty?

seriousdave

You aren't required to get all stats above the shown numbers. I rarely hit the quota for sci on my kdf & rom characters but I still get good results for the most part thanks to the tac & engi overflow. You may not have a 100% success chance this way but somewhere around 70-80% shouldn't be impossible for the most part.
Alternatively you can get some low tier ships for dil from the shipyard or some ships for EC from the exchange.

Also, soon the winter event will start which will give you the chance to grind a breen dreadnought. It gives an engi heavy card with some minor tac & sci stats.

fiberteksyfir

Theres plenty of ships you can get fairly reasonably like mirror ships and the other junior lockbox ships like the kazon raider off the exhange. But i wouldnt qualify it as p2w as it doesnt have any real effect on the game outside itself except some bonus mats and xp. Even the level ten prizes are just more admiralty ships. The two spec points and bit of dil is a nice tour of duty completion reward but far from game breaking.

duncanidaho11

mayito2009 wrote: »

So to get better ship what do I do? Do I pray to the devs so they donate some ships to me or do I need to spend Real money (P2W) to be able to do admiralty?

I gave you three options. Read on, there's more after the initial gut reaction.

The cheapest is spending dilithium (at heavily discounted prices right now, and we just had a bonus Dil weekend with big dil prizes coming soon from the Mirror Invasion event) to get T1-T5 ships from the shipyard. Or you can save your dilithium, convert it to zen, and pick up a c-store ship (which is more generally useful but if you need more ships now its probably not your best options.)

Alternatively, if you're in a fleet then you can trade in 200k fleet credits for a T5 retrofit.

Alternatively, you can just wait a few weeks for the upcoming winter event which will offer a T6 ship of some kind (won't get into what here, there's already plenty of other threads that specify) which will have some serious punch when it comes to the Admiralty system. That ship will also be an account unlock, in case you have multiple characters.

You don't have to spend a dime if you don't want to. i certainly haven't.

nyxadrill

I used the dilithium discount to buy back some of the lower tiered ships on both my Fed and KDF characters from the shipyards. I also tend to skip missions if my roster is running low and I cant make the requirements, although I wish they'd put an "are you sure" prompt on the skip button. I've gone click happy a few times and hit it by mistake! >.<

seaofsorrows

The truth is.. yes.. it's a Pay 2 Win system.

Star Trek Online is not a Pay 2 Win game, I don't care what anyone says.. but Admiralty kind of is.

The good news is it's a completely optional system that doesn't give anything that you really need for any aspect of the game. While the system requires a fairly significant supply of ships, the good news is that if you don't have the ships you can just skip it all together.

If you're having a problem meeting the requirements for missions, simply skip the system. Later when you're done with leveling and upgrading your gear, you can spend some Dilithium on ships at the Ship Requisitions Officer. Just grab some base T4-5 ships and you should be able to slowly climb that ladder.

guljarol

seriousdave wrote: »

You aren't required get all stats above the shown numbers. I rarely hit the quota for sci on my kdf & rom characters but I still get good results for the most part thanks to the tac & engi overflow. You may not have a 100% success chance this way but somewhere around 70-80% shouldn't be impossible for the most part.
Alternatively you can get some low tier ships for dil from the shipyard or some ships for EC from the exchange.

Well, I applied that rule (80% or so min., because I just don't have ships to meet all the req), and I fail a lot of those assignments, if not the majority.

The only good thing of that is that they get off the list.

What I find ridiculous is you first see 30/30/30 req, open the assignement, and see +100 on TAC and SCI, making it 30/130/130. Yeah, because I totally can do that...

Low tier ships won't help with that.​​

kjwashington

You don't even need to do admiralty to "win". With just 30 ships average on my characters, I can do at least 7 missions per character (haven't unlocked the eighth slot on any of them yet) per day. Almost all of those ships are the free ships that you get from leveling that I went back and bought with dilithium. Granted, does having a lot of payed for ships help with admiralty? Certainly. That's the way it was designed. The way you do admiralty is log in on all your characters once a day and fill up your missions, then play the character you want to work on. If you try to just do it on your main, you'll always be running out of ships. Really, admiralty can benefit people with more characters than people with more ships, if you have enough characters.

mayito2009

guljarol wrote: »

seriousdave wrote: »

You aren't required get all stats above the shown numbers. I rarely hit the quota for sci on my kdf & rom characters but I still get good results for the most part thanks to the tac & engi overflow. You may not have a 100% success chance this way but somewhere around 70-80% shouldn't be impossible for the most part.
Alternatively you can get some low tier ships for dil from the shipyard or some ships for EC from the exchange.

Well, I applied that rule (80% or so min., because I just don't have ships to meet all the req), and I fail a lot of those assignments, if not the majority.

The only good thing of that is that they get off the list.

What I find ridiculous is you first see 30/30/30 req, open the assignement, and see +100 on TAC and SCI, making it 30/130/130. Yeah, because I totally can do that...

Low tier ships won't help with that.​​

I forgot to mention that, you are absolutely right, the quest says 30-30-30 but when you open it and has happened in several cases you are looking at 75-45-85 most of the times.

mayito2009

Again you must buy the ship slots to be able to buy the ships with dil, so we go back to having to spend RL money to be able to do a system that in a way should be similar to DOFFS and by the way you dont need to pay anything for it to work.

On the other hand my average % of success in each mission is only around 48% to start so I fail in almost all of them.

duncanidaho11

seaofsorrows wrote: »

The truth is.. yes.. it's a Pay 2 Win system.

Star Trek Online is not a Pay 2 Win game, I don't care what anyone says.. but Admiralty kind of is.
.

It isn't and for one very important reason (and a bunch of smaller ones which you've probably disregarded already.)

You can't pay to win with admiralty. Really, you can't. Take the OP. He has 9 ships. How many more would he need to buy to win at Admiralty consistently? Perhaps 30 more. Care to calculate the cost of that? It's not reasonable, and even less so if you consider that cost is just to deal with one optional system.

The best approach to admiralty (ie. the only one that works, and can be expected of players) is to take it slow and build up a ship roster over time (taking advantage of as many free or low cost opportunities as are made available.) Spending money on it is not a viable approach. At most, cryptic has just created an additional layer of incentives to the c-store (and to every ship acquisition).

nikephorus

I wouldn't say it's pay to win. Like anything else in this game. If you purchase ships it makes things easier, but you can still complete all missions in the admiralty system with whatever free ships you receive in game.

seriousdave

guljarol wrote: »

seriousdave wrote: »

You aren't required get all stats above the shown numbers. I rarely hit the quota for sci on my kdf & rom characters but I still get good results for the most part thanks to the tac & engi overflow. You may not have a 100% success chance this way but somewhere around 70-80% shouldn't be impossible for the most part.
Alternatively you can get some low tier ships for dil from the shipyard or some ships for EC from the exchange.

Well, I applied that rule (80% or so min., because I just don't have ships to meet all the req), and I fail a lot of those assignments, if not the majority.

The only good thing of that is that they get off the list.

What I find ridiculous is you first see 30/30/30 req, open the assignement, and see +100 on TAC and SCI, making it 30/130/130. Yeah, because I totally can do that...

Low tier ships won't help with that.​​

Yeah that is facepalm worthy to say the least. Those event things TRIBBLE up a lot of missions, I often just put 1 T1 ship in them to get them off the list without wasting a pass token or a ship with long maintenance.

On the bright side, shuttles will "soon" also give ship cards and from what I've seen some aren't half bad.
Like the fed Type 8 shuttle (20k EC): +10 on all stats per any other ship except shuttles. That's pretty sweet when you consider that price.
Srsly 20/20/20 is already above the non-zen T3 ships.

mayito2009

OK maybe I need to reword my statement, it is not P2W, but Pay to be able to reach higher levels on Admiralty.

darthraiderxxx

Pay to win what? I didn't realize there was some competition going on within the Admirality sys.

And there are 3 free ships each year from events, plenty of ships from giveaways, ships from leveling up, ships for dil and stuff like mirror ships available at the exchange. That's a lot of ships without spending any real money, especially if you have been playing the game for some time. With that being said, the Admirality sys is definitely more rewarding for longterm players rather than new ones. Not that there is anything wrong with rewarding player loyality.​​

sennahcherib

I have 11 ships per toon, they are mirror ships, summer event (I don't do the winter event for the ship), 2nd price lock box ships (bought a long time ago), some crappy T1, T2 etc, the giveaway ships, + 2 lockbox ships (bought with ec) and some c-store ships bought since 2 years (6 ships), and i can do the mission not easily, but with with perseverance. I do a lot of missions which reward the pass tokens.

it is not p2w, if you have decided to use this system like you want.

nikephorus

It will just take longer the fewer ships you have. That's not p2w that's p2 get all the rewards right now because I want everything as quickly as possible and don't want to wait.

mayito2009

Ok thank you guys for all the suggestions and critiques. I will try to apply the ones I can.

enkemen

There are low level (T3?) ships that ignore certain event stats - really helps on those +100 missions.

nyxadrill

mayito2009 wrote: »

Again you must buy the ship slots to be able to buy the ships with dil, so we go back to having to spend RL money to be able to do a system that in a way should be similar to DOFFS and by the way you dont need to pay anything for it to work.

On the other hand my average % of success in each mission is only around 48% to start so I fail in almost all of them.

You don't have to keep the ships in your ships list. You can decommission them and keep the Admiralty card in your roster. Unless its a ship you don't want to lose that is!

mayito2009

nyxadrill wrote: »

mayito2009 wrote: »

Again you must buy the ship slots to be able to buy the ships with dil, so we go back to having to spend RL money to be able to do a system that in a way should be similar to DOFFS and by the way you dont need to pay anything for it to work.

On the other hand my average % of success in each mission is only around 48% to start so I fail in almost all of them.

You don't have to keep the ships in your ships list. You can decommission them and keep the Admiralty card in your roster. Unless its a ship you don't want to lose that is!

Oh OK great thanks for the suggestion.

mustrumridcully0

mayito2009 wrote: »

Well after reaching level 6 in Admiralty I find myself unable to keep going on. Every single mission now requires between 80-120 pointd for each group. How do you expect me to do these missions when my whole 9 ships together dont reach 70 points?

Risk some failures or spend some pass tokens. The lower difficulty missions still exist, you just had a batch of high difficulty mission in a row.

It seems that completing a Tour of Duty awards an epic ship card that you'll keep. So in the (very) long run you won't really need C-Store ships, you will have lots of Epics. Also, some of the missions grant you one-use ship cards.

And of course... you dno't need C-Store or lockbox ships - tons of Dilithium to buy ships regularly would also work.

guljarol wrote: »

seriousdave wrote: »

You aren't required get all stats above the shown numbers. I rarely hit the quota for sci on my kdf & rom characters but I still get good results for the most part thanks to the tac & engi overflow. You may not have a 100% success chance this way but somewhere around 70-80% shouldn't be impossible for the most part.
Alternatively you can get some low tier ships for dil from the shipyard or some ships for EC from the exchange.

Well, I applied that rule (80% or so min., because I just don't have ships to meet all the req), and I fail a lot of those assignments, if not the majority.

The only good thing of that is that they get off the list.

What I find ridiculous is you first see 30/30/30 req, open the assignement, and see +100 on TAC and SCI, making it 30/130/130. Yeah, because I totally can do that...

Low tier ships won't help with that.​​

Actually, there are lower tier ships that negate the effect of events (for a particular stat). Not sure if there is a good overview of Admirality cards online yet, but it might be interesting to identify ships that can do that and buy them from the shipyard (or grind Dilithium to buy C-Store ships with those qualities. C-Store ships would be account unlocks, so it probably pays off too compare the cost).

In fact, even if you have the best ships- if you get one of those +100 (or +100/+100) modifier events, you might be unable to beat the mission unless you got one of the event negating ships.


Oh, there is a master list on the Wiki already:
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Admiralty_System_Ship_Master_List

Event-Negating ships:
Advanced Science Vessel, heavy Escort Refit, Heavy Cruiser Refit: 1000 Zen
Solane/Dyson Science Destroyer: Account unlock if oyu did the event, 600 Lobi (per char?) otherwise
Fleet Experimental Science Vessel, Fleet Guardian Cruiser: 20,000 Fleet Credits and 5 Modules
Dacoit Flight Deck Cruiser, Phalanx Science Vessel, Vandal Destroyer, Mirror Ha'Apax, Mirror Ha'nom, Mirror Ha'feh: ??
Breen Rezreth Dreadnought Cruiser: This Winter
Expensive Sh*t because Promo ships:
Elachi Sheshar Intel Dreadnaught Cruiser, Krenim Annorax Science Dreadnought, Jem'Hadar Strike Ship

swamarian

I have about 20 ships/character, and I've only bought the Vesta 3 pack and the T'varos. (And I fleeted a couple of ships.) I also bought a mirror ship and a couple of T1-2 dil ships.
Cryptic gives away a couple of T5 ships every year, plus the event ships are really nice. There are also the one time use ship cards, which are all T6, I believe, which can help.
Having more high level ships definitely helps. I'm sure that someone out there's buying ships they'll never fly just for the admiralty system. Personally, I think that it's a stupid use of money, but it helps cryptic, so I'm fine with that.
I'm currently level 6-7 on all my characters. I do the missions I can, and skip/miranda the ones I can't.

warpangel

You don't have to hit 100% success on the assignments. There are assignments you can't 100% at all, no matter what ships you have, because the requirements are just too high. That's on purpose.

If you can't 100% something, just try your best and take a chance. Or use a pass token if you don't like your odds.

bobbydazlers

mayito2009 wrote: »

Well after reaching level 6 in Admiralty I find myself unable to keep going on. Every single mission now requires between 80-120 pointd for each group. How do you expect me to do these missions when my whole 9 ships together dont reach 70 points?

I think you misunderstand the point system here, if you can match the required stats you will be guaranteed to succeed but not filling the stats completely does not mean you are sure to loose.
at the top right of each mission there is a meter titled success chance, even slotting the ship with the lowest stats will effect this meter to some degree even if it only gives you 5% chance of success.
all you need to do for each mission you cannot fill 100% is just fill the meter as much as you can with the ships you have even if that only gives you a 50/50 chance of a win its better then no chance at all.
i dont know how new you are to sto but i will tell you as time goes by you will get the chance to acquire more ships though the winter, anniversary and summer events and I strongly advise you make sure you get them, you may also see some c-store giveaways that often include free ships so get these as well.
if you keep your eyes on the sto news page you will see when these things come around so keep a watch on there every couple of days and especially on a Thursday and you wont miss out.

but also bare in mind that I have been playing for a few years now and I have quite a lot of ships but there are still some of the missions I have to just take a chance and hope for the best, luckily you don't loose anything if you don't succeed but you gain a lot if you do so its worth a try at any rate, hope you find this helpful.

seriousdave

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

It seems that completing a Tour of Duty awards an epic ship card that you'll keep. So in the (very) long run you won't really need C-Store ships, you will have lots of Epics. Also, some of the missions grant you one-use ship cards.

I'm pretty sure that's only when you complete (reach lvl 10) the entire campaign. By doing the all 10 Tour of Duty assignements you just get the spec points(fed)/dil(klingon) and start over again.
I got lucky with the RNG and did that on my main once and now I am currently at the fed Tour of Duty 3/10 again.
Both campaigns still at lvl 7 and no epic ship card.

mustrumridcully0

seriousdave wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

It seems that completing a Tour of Duty awards an epic ship card that you'll keep. So in the (very) long run you won't really need C-Store ships, you will have lots of Epics. Also, some of the missions grant you one-use ship cards.

I'm pretty sure that's only when you complete (reach lvl 10) the entire campaign. By doing the all 10 Tour of Duty assignements you just get the spec points(fed)/dil(klingon) and start over again.
I got lucky with the RNG and did that on my main once and now I am currently at the fed Tour of Duty 3/10 again.
Both campaigns still at lvl 7 and no epic ship card.

I haven't really mastered that part of the terminology yet, so I bow to your experience.

shevet

There is a funny sort of feeling to the balance of the Admiralty system, because its requirements expand faster than your resources do.

It takes relatively little time to go from one mission slot to six or seven - but maintenance times don't change on your ships, and your available roster only grows when you acquire a new ship. So, what starts out as a very simple exercise in matching the best ships to the best available mission, soon becomes a matter of filling as many slots as you can with whatever resources you've got available. (I am quite happy sending a single T'Liss warbird out to fight pirates and a Doomsday Machine... so it only has a 2% chance, that's still better than nothing, and it's not like I lose anything by making the attempt.)

There is a strong incentive to get more ships... I think that's only to be expected. I don't think, though, it's any more "P2W" than the rest of the game - if you don't spend real money, you can still get where you're going, only slower.

ryugasirius

mayito2009 wrote: »

So to get better ship what do I do? Do I pray to the devs so they donate some ships to me or do I need to spend Real money (P2W) to be able to do admiralty?

I'll give you a few advices:

• There are some interesting T5 (upgradable) ships, they are "consolation prizes" of older lockboxes, and they generally sell for 2-5mil EC, it's not an unattainable sum (Malon Battlecruiser, Nihydron Destroyer, APU Cruiser, Kazon Heavy Raider, roughly ordered from cheapest onwards). Most of them are not too bad to fly, especially if you are still stuck with free voucher ships. They should show up as purple in your admiralty roster and have nice stats.
• Also, there are cheap-ish Mirror ships. They generally go for the same prices as above, but they have less admiralty points, they can't be upgraded to T5, and they are of "uncommon" quality in admiralty. Some of them have quite good bonuses though (ignore event +ENG/+SCI/+TAC).
• Probably not worth mentioning, but you can get more ships from the requisition store for dilithium. This is a bad investment though as they are of common quality, I'd hardly recommend wasting 50k dil on one of them (they used to cost even more), when you can turn the same 50k dil in 2 lockbox keys, sell them for 10mil or so, and buy 2-3 better ships).
• In winter, a free T6 ship will be obtainable through a series of activities. Such free ships are quite powerful (I have only the summer event Ferengi Warship, and it has over 130 points alone, something like 20/60/45. It is also quite powerful to fly!). Make sure you don't miss the next one.
• There is a mission, Temporal Ambassador, awarding one free ship. Not an awesome ship (common quality card), but hey, it's free.
• As always, you can convert dilithium and buy C-Store ships. This can be more or less convenient, based on the number of your alts. The more alts you have, the more dil you can muster, and the more C-Store ships will benefit you. With 4 alts doffing and doing stuff once a day you can make over 100Z each day.
• Shuttle cards will be added soon, despite their extremely low stats, they should be interesting bonus-wise.
• If you need space for the aforementioned ships, you can dump the older T1-T4 ships, you probably won't be flying them ever again. Also, wait a bit for Drydock (it might even come out this week, as it is in patch notes from tribble). Free players will have 5 free slots to park unused ships.
• Also, if you find assignments with too harsh requirements, just use a pass token, or if you have none, just send a lowly T1 ship to fail it.