Starfleet General Order 15: No flag officer shall beam into a hazardous area without armed escort. - Lieutenant Saavik, 2285
(tl;dr in next post below)Personal Log, First Officer Melanie Harris, U.S.S. Corona
"The Corona has returned to duty following repairs after the recent Undine assault on Earth Space Dock. Our casualties were relatively light, and the damage to the ship far less extensive than that of Space Dock itself. However, even with the wide-scale unrest this incident has caused across the fleet, my own concerns are somewhat closer to home."
"It began some time ago, during the Dominion takeover of Deep Space 9. As per the official reports, Captain Trelfar had led negotiations with Dominion representatives to bring a peaceful end to the occupation, but at the last minute, was forced to make a lone infiltration of the station via spacewalk, guided by Captain Kurland over communicator. What did not make into the official record, however, was the somewhat questionable decision to make this spacewalk in a lightly armoured civilian environment suit, despite the Corona having a full complement of Starfleet-issue suits that could have been beamed over to Captain at a moment's notice, along with a security detail."
"This odd judgement continued with Captain Trelfar's involvement with the Nukara Strikeforce, when he would routinely beam down to the Nukara Prime Base Camp alone, and it was only after numerous close calls there that I was able to convince him to accepting an escort again as a matter of routine. Our subsequent tour of duty assisting the Romulan Republic on New Romulus has progressed without serious incident."
"All of that seems to have changed with the discovery of the Solanae Dyson Sphere. The Iconian Gateway incident caught us all unawares, leaving the Captain trapped without support from the Corona, though he was backed up by a few officers from the Enterprise, along with Klingon and Romulan crew. However, during our mission to the sun station of the Solanae sphere, Captain Trelfar insisted on beaming over to assist Admiral Tuvok alone, despite my advice to the contrary. This decision could have been disastrous had the Voth forces on the station been greater in number."
"However, it is our most recent battle at Earth that has me most concerned. After beating back the Undine invasion fleet, the Captain them beamed over to Earth Space Dock with Admiral Tuvok. The Corona has a crew of 2,500 hands, and Voyager a crew of nearly 200, yet both senior officers deemed that no-one could be spared from either ship to accompany them to the front lines of an active battle. I am convinced it was only my insistence that Captain Trelfar be equipped with a full set of M.A.C.O. gear before beaming to Space Dock that prevented a tragedy."
"When Admiral Quinn relaxed the rules on commanding offers leading away missions at the start of the war, he cannot have had this kind of risk-taking in mind. After everything the Corona has been through since the beginning of the Klingon War, most of the crew would be ready to follow the Captain to ends of the galaxy, but it increasingly seems like he feels he must shoulder the burden alone, and reading reports from other ships seems to show this is a trend across the fleet. I'm deeply worried about the psychological effects the war is having on the captain; this is true of many of the crew, but the effects on command decisions could be catastrophic."
"I fear that without revised regulations from Starfleet Command, we're going to start seeing more captains - our colleagues and friends - dying alone."
Comments
Seriously Cryptic, what's with our Captains going it alone recently? With the exception of the Voth Battlezone, it feels like I never do anything with my away team any more.
I get there are times when the game mechanics would make things difficult (Boldly They Rode and A Step Between Stars are good examples) but when I beamed down to ESD to fight the Undine with only Tuvok to back me up, it just seemed ridiculous. Starfleet's single most important installation, and we can only spare two guys to rescue its CO? I have TWO AND HALF THOUSAND crew on my ship, and we can't even spare a redshirt?
Let's have more appearances for our away teams in future story episodes, please. I miss them!
You have a good point though.
Harden up Princess
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With the new tutorials each faction has gained, we develop along side our boffs, so you start to grow attached to them, you equip them with the best items you can get while you are leveling up and they go on every mission with you... then you hit lvl50 and seem to just ditch them, its like: "I'm lvl50 so I don't need you losers anymore!"
I can understand why they would have to with the ones that feature special ships, but there is no reason the new one couldn't have been multi-player.
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Hold over from ToS. The main character(s) went into the situations and solved all problems alone. The rest of the crew were there for the body count.
On the OP's point. I agree, any mission that can't have more than one player. Really should have at least one of your Boffs with you.
(Though I also argue that in Boldly they Rode you did not have time nor the room for an away team. This was a stealth mission and unless your captain lugged around their own suit. They used whatever the Vorta had handy as they snuck across the hull. A team would have been spotted.)
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Case in point: When encountering a new planet, apparently the "proper" method of exploration is to beam down the ship's entire senior command crew (without escort) to an unidentified and unexplored location with zero knowledge of threats or hostiles.
About the only thing they do right is to make sure the planet isn't in danger of blowing up and that their target location isn't in the middle of a volcano or under the sea. The rest is Redshirt Roulette.
There was an TNG Episode, Picard complaining about not being allowed to leave the ship and being on an away team.
For Surface Tension:
Diplomatic part on spire and on Qonos the player does ground. Starbase is the job of the first officer (boff)
Kirk replied there is no such order ...
I went through the whole thread hoping that someone else would say that...
But, I do agree with the OP, and I would also like to add, nicely written! :cool:
If the devs were to add your away team to, say, "Surface Tension" but not make any other changes to it, that would amount to severely nerfing the ESD portion of the mission, because then you'd have six characters (including yourself and Tuvok) fighting the Undine instead of just two (or seven instead of three, for that sequence with the Caitian NPC) - five of which have any manner of special abilities, all except for Tuvok who just shoots at stuff.
To restore the gameplay balance, they'd need to either drop a lot more Undine from the ceilings for everyone to fight, or make all the existing ones boss-level or close to it, and those "solutions" would come with problems of their own that the devs would also have to mitigate, especially adding more Undine. Too many NPCs in an area at once would severely hurt STO's performance on PCs with less RAM or older video cards.
TL/DR: "Away team is OP, plz nerf"
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That or general order 24 for planets infested by borg and species 8472.
[/SIGPIC]
And suddenly realized that that was Saavik's "vulcan" way of saying "Can I tag?", at which point Kirk, realizing that the only way to let the command track trainee learn about away missions is to send her on them (with appropriate redshirt escort of zero), he accepted her on the team...
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No thanks.
This poster brings up a good point. Add to that the fact that the boffs we take will constantly get hung up in doorways (especially coming and going from the Command Center) or run into walls in the battlezone. And you would think that a Starfleet Officer, KDF Academy Graduate, or a Romulan Academy Graduate would know to walk up or down the ramps in the battlezone.
I have had quite a bit of fun with the Voth battlezone, and I am normally a person who much prefers space combat over ground.
The OP also makes a valid point.... we simply need more redshirts. As important as the FE is, I would really like to have seen the ESD interior portion of the mission as a separate battlezone along the same lines as the Voth battlezone. Who knows? maybe in the future, the devs will make something like that for us. That part of the FE, IMO, was the most fun for me.
The entire FE was great, and I have to give credit where credit is due on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed the FE, but the ESD interior was, IMO, the best part. The environment you beam into was beautifully done. I really would like to see more missions like this in the future, but hopefully with the use of eaither all our BOffs or as part of an open-map battlezone.
Realistically, in a combat situation, the commanding officer of a starship wouldn't go it alone when the stakes are that high, and I think the defense of Spacedock and rescue of Admiral Quinn should have allowed for the use of more resources than a starship skipper and RAdm Tuvok.
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Would be cool if you could turn other characters into boffs/officers on your mains ships and do like that to get things done faster