Having read Engineer Reports and hearing interviews of Cryptic staff one thing that seems to come up time and again is that they want to make STO "more Trek-like". I can totally get behind this as a huge fan. Whilst playing through on my Tactical VA I was struck by just how many enemies I'd killed, and how much this seemingly flies in the face of the diplomatic and peaceful way of life the Federation normally enshrines.
Now don't get me wrong, I recognize that UFP is at war, and lethal measures need to be taken, but if you look at Next Gen era and Voyager, the characters always take pains to try to avoid fights, or where impossible they instead choose to disable or stun enemies.
What I thought of was an option for captains to choose to use non-lethal methods. In the Devidian episodes one of your bridge officers mentions setting your weapons on "heavy stun", and frequently you fight important boss ships down to about 20% hull. So what happens if you give the player the option to do actually do that, and doing so has a small reward, perhaps providing a couple of Diplomatic XP at the end of the mission if you didn't kill things. However, you don't get the option to loot them, so you get no standard drops. Perhaps also an accolade set for quantity of ships disabled and enemies knocked out.
I'd be curious to hear other peoples thoughts on such an idea.
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That said, I think the devidian Featured Eps were pretty "trek."
I also attempted to create a more TOS-like mission which offers a mixture of combat and other elements of gameplay. It's called Project Revava and is also available on Tribble.