I don't have any issue with the cooldowns on the ship cards. I'd rather exercise patience rather them speed things up, and nerfing the somewhat generous rewards to "balance" things out.
re: maintenance. Amusing little combo I noticed, for anyone who has the three T6 event ships from the past year. Nandi, Samsar, and Sarr Thein each give -10% maint for each of the other two ship roles. The three of them together give a total of 128/128/122, with -60% maintenance time. Cuts the 18 hours down quite nicely.
there are low level ships that negate those +events, like the Phalanx on KDF side which negates the additional sci
Yeah, that is handy. At least on medium-size missions. On larger ones, it's lack of stats make it hard for two other ships to make up the difference. (That's what the rare T5/6 ships with "ignore event" are for, right? )
I am tending to find 80% of events are bad ones, and 15% are no events and the last 5% are good ones. Still, needing 100+ sci for most tasks is pretty annoying. As most tasks seem to just spit out rather high sci. I even had one mission that was 150 tac/sci/eng with a borg gate, which added 75 to all. It's near impossible to fill some of these tasks with a small roster.
My Feds have a reasonable roster of around 31 ships. So nothing huge, but it's enough to get most tasks going. My Romulans however, suffer immensely with this silly high science and engineering requirements. As, we all know Romulans get very few sci ships and do not have access to fed tier five or six ships.
I tend to think they just assumed everyone has a billion science ships, where we don't. Romulans really don't have that many, and I've not even looked at the Klingons.
The ship not really well suited for exploration tasks with science requirements is the ... Exploration Cruiser.
Because it is tactical and engineering focused, not science focused.
That's what you get if you listen to the DPS maniacs that wanted a tactical lt.cmdr instead of a science lt.cmdr on an EXPLORATION CRUISER.
Mustrum "Still bitter" Ridcully
PS: Also weird: Command Cruisers - the ships of mutal understanding, teamwork and cooperation - get bonuses when they are alone. It seems Cryptic has basically a strict script on how to convert ships from playable to the card, and it mostly ignores the specific story role of the ships.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
PS: Also weird: Command Cruisers - the ships of mutal understanding, teamwork and cooperation - get bonuses when they are alone. It seems Cryptic has basically a strict script on how to convert ships from playable to the card, and it mostly ignores the specific story role of the ships.
All 3-pack ships seem to have those traits.... every single one....
PS: Also weird: Command Cruisers - the ships of mutal understanding, teamwork and cooperation - get bonuses when they are alone. It seems Cryptic has basically a strict script on how to convert ships from playable to the card, and it mostly ignores the specific story role of the ships.
All 3-pack ships seem to have those traits.... every single one....
Exactly. If it's a 3-pack, it gets this ability, but it makes no sense at all for the Command ships.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I tend to think they just assumed everyone has a billion science ships, where we don't. Romulans really don't have that many, and I've not even looked at the Klingons.
I also noticed that a lot of events are "+stats +uninteresting amount of crit". While not bad as such, for psychological reasons it would probably be more palatable if the base stats were higher and you got more discounts to make up for it. On the other hand with higher base stats, probably even more player would notice that they can't fill them all up to 100% success.
And I think that is what Cryptic assumed: that we realize that we won't get every mission to 100% and try to optimize or chances. But a lot of people apparently do not like to gamble, and I do include myself in that faction of people praying to the patron saint of risk aversity.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
what does need modifying if it hasn't been already is for cooldowns to start after the time of the mission not after the rewards have been claimed, so if a mission runs for say 2 hours and has an 8 hr cooldown but the rewards are claimed say 20hrs later the ships involved should be instantly released and not put on cooldown for a further 8hrs.[/quote]
what does need modifying if it hasn't been already is for cooldowns to start after the time of the mission not after the rewards have been claimed, so if a mission runs for say 2 hours and has an 8 hr cooldown but the rewards are claimed say 20hrs later the ships involved should be instantly released and not put on cooldown for a further 8hrs.
Has long been done
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Those +events need to have their stats put into the baseline stats.
When looking at missions, i see a nice one, 50, 50, 50. I go into it, +75 all stats. Come on guys...
Even looking at the mission from main screen, then looking at events, its still annoying to find good ones, then all events are +too much everything.
between 3 toons I have using the admiralty system i have 2 ships available for missions. all the rest are on cooldown. and to make it worse the missions are not accurate. i see the list and is says 60 eng 45 Tac 30 Sci when I accept the numbers double. WTF is up with that?
This may sound harsh, but if you haven't learned that there is a soft cap on number of missions in this system and you can not go on and on and on (and really why should you be able to?) and especially did not figure out why and how the numbers change (which has been explained quite a few times on this forum in addition to the fact that it is not really that hard to figure out yourself) - please understand what's going on before complaining. TYVM
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
between 3 toons I have using the admiralty system i have 2 ships available for missions. all the rest are on cooldown. and to make it worse the missions are not accurate. i see the list and is says 60 eng 45 Tac 30 Sci when I accept the numbers double. WTF is up with that?
When next you look at the Admiralty window, mouse over the little "Event" box at the right side of each mission. Many of them have stat modifiers for the mission they're attached to.
I don't know if its already been clarified but it appears that maintenance time does not start when the rewards are collected but from the time the duration of the mission ends.
many posters on this forum have suggested that if the maintenance time does not start until the reward is collected then runs for say another 8 hrs more even if the duration of the mission time ran out many hours before this would be unfair and perhaps including the maintenance time with the mission time would make it more sensible.
collecting rewards tonight from missions I ran early yesterday even with ships that had fairly long maintenance cycles i can confirm that not one of the ships was added to the maintenance tab, so the way I see it is we have the best of both worlds here.
if for some reason we happen to be logged into a character when a mission timer runs out we can claim the reward, the ship will go into maintenance and we can run missions in the freed up slot with alternative ships but if we are not logged in when the mission ends and we collect the reward much later when the mission time + the maintenance time has already passed we can collect the reward not only freeing up the slot but also putting the ship back into service at the same time.
alternatively it could be that when we collect the rewards say 4 hours of an 8hr maintenance cycle has passed and the ship will go into maintenance but just for a further 4hrs.
this is what I would say the evidence of my recent activity with the system suggests.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Not if they also wanted it to be a meaningful decision which ships to send.
One could probably come up with different mechanical trappings to achieve something similar, but it might be just as arbitrary.
Not sure I follow. What "meaningful decision" is there as to what ships to send? Don't get me wrong, the system is OK and I guess it's what Cryptic could afford to do in terms of giving us something to do with old ships. It's just how the maintenance thing was implemented that doesn't make sense to me at all. I can see ships requiring maintenance after repeated use, but after every single mission? No.
The meaningful decisions is about what ships to take for what missions. Which missions to pass, which missions to risk failure on, which missions to go all in.
As long as a mission is running, it's blocking a mission slot. You can't slot any other mission. So it doesn't really matter that some ships are still busy with a mission, you can't run any new missions anyway.
But the maintenance means that you have mission slots available, but your ships are not yet ready.
On top of that, you have a small selection of missions you can take any time, but you also see two missions that will become available as you start missions. If you see a good mission (like a Tour of Duty Stage mission, or another mission with good rewards), you can consider spending pass tokens. Or send a small/weak ship on a mission it might fail. Or maybe you decide the current missions are also worth doing and risk not having your best ships ready when the cool missions come around.
Basically a central game element here is that you have two types of resources / opportunity cost. Mission Slots and Ships. The maintenance system decouples slots from ships, as slots are available sooner than ships.
An alternate way instead of maintenance might have been that you have some kind of command tokens that (in fiction) represent the time you need to organize a mission, and then the command token would become availalbe sooner than the mission complete.
But that would cause one valuable element to miss - that high tier ships are occupied longer. (A system where more advanced ships with better qualifications for the mission take longer for it would make no sense, right?)
But hey, maybe we can still use the fiction I describe above for the current system:
The Mission Duration is actually the briefing time, e.g. time you and your flag staff requires to brief the captains of the ships under your command to perform the mission.
The maintenance time then is actually something else entirely - it's the time it takes for a ship like the one you just ordered away to become available again. Low tier ships are of course more common, so are more readily available to be send on missions.
But this fiction also has its problems - why would you get the rewards when the briefing is over?
In the end, it's an abstract system. DOFFing has its weird aspects, too. Like why can my 50 person-crew on the Defiant consist of 400 duty officers? And what are 800 crew members on my Galaxy doing while the other 212 are working? Why do so many people die during turbo lift maintenance? How often am I debriefing these prisoners? Would a Klingon really sell Klingon colonists into slavery?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I might be more interested in it if the maintenance thing made some kind of sense. I can see ships requiring maintenance after repeated use, but after every single mission? No.
(I have combined two actual quotes here, not intending to mislead)
As has been pointed out multiple times in these threads it does make sense. In the real life military ships and especially aircraft DO go into maintenance after every single mission. And especially aircraft DOES spend more time in maintenance than on duty. So this actually makes a lot of sense. You can argue about the precise relations, you can argue that ships (RL) indeed do get less time while in use, but when they do get maintenance they do get a lot. In our gaming that would mean something like "after 20 missions your ship is in maintenance now for 2 complete weeks", which players wouldn't like either, so I think "splitting" that up and thus increasing the post mission cooldown for single assignments is a good decision for gameplay reasons.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Having a system filled with long-duration assignments would mean you only participate in the system in spurts on a daily basis. This system was designed with the potential to instead engage with it on a regular basis, as much or as little as you prefer.
(Other than the Tour of Duty which is intentionally time-gated.)
Additionally, the current design allows players that have already obtained a large selection of starships to play the system more than somebody that doesn't have those ships at their disposal. While this is not intended as a monetization strategy (we don't think it will significantly motivate additional ship sales), it is definitely intended to make purchasing a ship that you already intended to buy feel even better, since you'll now get additional use out of it after you no longer fly it.
Maintenance also offered us the means to make lower-tier starships, which were guaranteed to have lower stats than higher-tier ships, still have a purpose within the system. Though they aren't as good at completing or critting on assignments on their own, they become available again on a more regular basis. This additionally helps offset the fact that there aren't as many of these low-tier ships as their higher-tier counterparts.
The question of why it takes ~18 hours of Maintenance after a 15min Assignment is honestly pretty irrelevant, since all of the timers are complete abstractions of actual activities. Does anyone really think it only takes a starship 15 minutes to ... do anything? Even 4 hours is no where near what reality would require. With such drastic abstractions already in place, it doesn't seem very sensible to argue that several hours of maintenance is "unrealistic."
I'm sad to say, that as a player with only 2 ships at the T5+ mark, and the rest are well, pathetic, I can only do 1 Admiralty Mission a Day, 2 If I really play it right. But right now, the requirements I have are way too high for any of my ships to accomplish. I needed my only science vessel, and both my cruisers just to get a decent success rate on a mission that requires 150+ Eng, 80 Tac, and 190 Sci, and I have NO pass tokens so I can't skip them to get to the low eng/tac/sci that I can do. Either the Maintance times needs an overhaul, or the requirements needs an overhaul.
I am seeing this Admiralty Ship System as being nothing more than a grab to get me to spend money. You claim that it is not intentional, but it LOOKS like it was DESIGNED that way. And lower-tier ships being useful. Sorry, I can't do any more missions until tomorrow. I am not getting any use of this system.
And based on the Class of my Captain, why would I need a Science vessel when I am built to Kill not to Study? Having a cruiser makes sense since they are also include the battleships and additional warships, and I generally fly Escorts. So I had to spend money for a single Science Vessel just to help me get past these ridiculously high Science requirements. Here's the thing, I don't want a Science Ship. I don't want to fly it, but I was forced to get it so I can get through some Admiral missions. Thanks for trying to say that it was not intentional for it to be seen and used as a grab for cash.
Once the mission I have going in the Admiralty Ship System, it will be the last mission I do until you guys overhaul the system to make it more friendly with those with very few ships.
Except starships aren't RL modern day warships or aircraft. They're fictional technology several hundred years ahead of what we have now. We've seen on screen that many of them are designed for long term exploration without needing to stop for maintenance every few hours. So no, it doesn't make sense thematically IMO.
True. But, additionally, those fictional ships are part of a game. And the "maintenance" is a game mechanic, not an expression of canon/lore.
I suppose they could have just not tried to theme it at all, and just called it "cooldown". Would that have been better for you?
follow up to my last post I can now state that across 6 characters running 5 missions each hardly any ships went into maintenance and of the very few that did the maintenance cycle was significantly reduced even most notably one ship that had a maintenance cycle of 18hrs that was reduced to 10hrs.
I also noticed that the ships that still required maintenance had been moved to the maintenance tab before I claimed the rewards for the missions they took part in, I can only assume this was done automatically when I signed into the character.
after signing in with each character the first thing I did was collect the rewards from the missions so the ships that were in maintenance would only have been in the maintenance tab for a matter of a few seconds before I collected the reward, nowhere near enough time to account for the reduction in their maintenance times.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Except starships aren't RL modern day warships or aircraft. They're fictional technology several hundred years ahead of what we have now. We've seen on screen that many of them are designed for long term exploration without needing to stop for maintenance every few hours. So no, it doesn't make sense thematically IMO.
Yes, we all remember the "five year mission" setup, and you are right. But real life ships already are designed for multiple months, sometimes years on a mission (especially nuclear submarines). That doesn't mean they do not get maintenance every now and then. After every encounter a ship would make a thorough check whether everything is still working. Yes, even after 15 minutes. You have to take systems offline to switch components and similar, which happened a few times in the series (mostly as a pretense to not getting away or something like that), that is maintenance because during that time you normally cannot do things like transport from A to B or similar.
And in the "5 year mission" and our "Admirality mission", the terms "mission" refer of course to different aspects, let's call them "strategic mission" and "tactical mission", where the first one consists of multiple of the latter. And after every of the latter there should be maintenance as much as possible (think of all the repairs the events of an episode would make necessary in quite a few episodes of the TV series).
But you could argue (we wouldn't know since most of it happens offscreen due to not being really interesting TV material in itself) that these are way shorter than in game when looking at the relations between mission time and maint time. But then we would have the other aspect, the "major maintenance" after the time assigned for missions runs out. Which would mean after a few "tactical" missions we'd get a major maintenance which would indeed need weeks to stay in relation - from a player's perspective I would consider that more inconvenient than the times as they are now.
About "several hundred years ahead": the more complicated technology gets, the more maintenance it tends to need. So there would be an argument for the times being even longer than when compared to today. We can't be sure of course whether that trend would continue, or stop, or maybe even reverse in the next 400 years.
You can of course argue that the whole maintenance system isn't fun and should be abolished for gameplay reasons. But I don't see any problem with realism here (apart from the fact that all times, mission and maint, are way shorter than they would need to be if played to scale)
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
True. But, additionally, those fictional ships are part of a game. And the "maintenance" is a game mechanic, not an expression of canon/lore.
I suppose they could have just not tried to theme it at all, and just called it "cooldown". Would that have been better for you?
I would have preferred something that made sense thematically to the IP the game is founded on, but that's just me. Kudos to those who like it as is.
I think the thing is with maintenance it kind of forces you to use you ships wisely where possible, I guess if there was no maintenance players would just use their best ships wherever possible and hardly ever use low tier ships, having maintenance or cooldown if you prefer makes you consider your choices more wisely.
obviously the best mission with the higher requirements is where you need to use you best ships and smaller missions that where the requirements are very low are ideal for lower tier ships then finally any missions where the requirements fall in the middle ground you can usually fill with middle tier ships.
ok so there is going to be times that you just cant meet the requirements no matter what ships you throw at it and that's just the time you have to just do the best you can with what you have and hope for the best.
on one character I was slotting some missions on yesterday I actually ended up with no more ships I could use at all, I had laterally used every ship in my lineup and they were now either in maintenance or on a mission, I cant believe this would ever happen if there was no maintenance cycle for ships so I guess that's proof positive that this system gets you to use most if not all of the ships you have.
all in all I confess I like this system even more so now that I realise it gives every one of your ships a purpose at some time or another and now with the knowledge that the maintenance cycle doesn't start when you claim the rewards but after the time period for the mission its on its even better.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Personally, I like the Admiralty system. I do tend to agree that the maintenance times are a bit long, but I can live with it.
One thing I would really like to see, being a Romulan dominant player, is the ability to import high-level Fed/Klingon ships I've purchased into the system. I know I can't fly a T5 or T6 Federation Dreadnaught (nor would I want to on my Romulan), but since I've purchased it, I would really like to be able to import it into my Admiralty roster. Same would go for my Klingon-aligned Roms. Considering how few ships the Romulans have compared to the Federation, it would really help to fill my roster. Not to be greedy, but since we are all one big happy Alpha Quadrant, why can't my Fed have purchased Klingon ships in his roster, and vise versa? Kind of like "The Klingons assigned a ship to work with Rakhohl's fleet".
Overall, I'm enjoying the Admiralty system because it isn't just a click-through mini-game. You have to put some thought in to it.
I don't have any issue with the cooldowns on the ship cards. I'd rather exercise patience rather them speed things up, and nerfing the somewhat generous rewards to "balance" things out.
Quiet that.
The new system is the greatest grind relief and the most alt friendliest thing I have witnessed for a long time in this game.
The CD times maybe something to get used to, so is the prioritization and planning for the missions. But for me it’s ok, especially under consideration of the rewards. Without the long CD times one would get so much out of this system that one does not need to play the actual game itself at all in order to progress.
I found to set priorities to grab the “special circumstances” rewards or "event" or how they call it to be the greatest asset for the time being. Hope they are here to stay and not just some promotional idea. That would be annoying, the rest hardly is.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
The CD times maybe something to get used to, so is the prioritization and planning for the missions. But for me it’s ok, especially under consideration of the rewards. Without the long CD times one would get so much out of this system that one does not need to play the actual game itself at all in order to progress.
Agreed. I actually could live with longer mission times on the very short ones (15 mins) so that they won't finish while your only online just doing minor stuff (setting up doffs and now admiralty, selling loot, looking at the exchange, maybe hop into a red alert) without any other changes whatsoever.
I found to set priorities to grab the “special circumstances” rewards or "event" or how they call it to be the greatest asset for the time being. Hope they are here to stay and not just some promotional idea. That would be annoying, the rest hardly is.
Same here. Since most of my toons are maxed out in leveling concerning "what I really want" and now are only getting (very welcome but not really necessary) stat boosts and manual making options (you can always buy them for ec), I am mostly looking at the event. VR mats, dil - go for it. Of course I consider the actual rewards, too, but many only offer common mats and XP and then the only thing that would be interesting is a possible crit - but I consider that mostly not worth investing my precious T6s and give the T1 ships a go. Still often a 5% chance, so every now and again it will even work. Then there's probably going to be a party on the miranda.
I may be doing it all wrong, but as everybody else, I still have to learn how to run the system.
My mother was an epohh and my father smelled of tulaberries
Comments
-100 events.
Yeah, that is handy. At least on medium-size missions. On larger ones, it's lack of stats make it hard for two other ships to make up the difference. (That's what the rare T5/6 ships with "ignore event" are for, right?
My character Tsin'xing
My Feds have a reasonable roster of around 31 ships. So nothing huge, but it's enough to get most tasks going. My Romulans however, suffer immensely with this silly high science and engineering requirements. As, we all know Romulans get very few sci ships and do not have access to fed tier five or six ships.
I tend to think they just assumed everyone has a billion science ships, where we don't. Romulans really don't have that many, and I've not even looked at the Klingons.
The ship not really well suited for exploration tasks with science requirements is the ... Exploration Cruiser.
Because it is tactical and engineering focused, not science focused.
That's what you get if you listen to the DPS maniacs that wanted a tactical lt.cmdr instead of a science lt.cmdr on an EXPLORATION CRUISER.
Mustrum "Still bitter" Ridcully
PS: Also weird: Command Cruisers - the ships of mutal understanding, teamwork and cooperation - get bonuses when they are alone. It seems Cryptic has basically a strict script on how to convert ships from playable to the card, and it mostly ignores the specific story role of the ships.
My character Tsin'xing
Exactly. If it's a 3-pack, it gets this ability, but it makes no sense at all for the Command ships.
The one event-store ship I don't have unlocked. /sigh
I also noticed that a lot of events are "+stats +uninteresting amount of crit". While not bad as such, for psychological reasons it would probably be more palatable if the base stats were higher and you got more discounts to make up for it. On the other hand with higher base stats, probably even more player would notice that they can't fill them all up to 100% success.
And I think that is what Cryptic assumed: that we realize that we won't get every mission to 100% and try to optimize or chances. But a lot of people apparently do not like to gamble, and I do include myself in that faction of people praying to the patron saint of risk aversity.
what does need modifying if it hasn't been already is for cooldowns to start after the time of the mission not after the rewards have been claimed, so if a mission runs for say 2 hours and has an 8 hr cooldown but the rewards are claimed say 20hrs later the ships involved should be instantly released and not put on cooldown for a further 8hrs.[/quote]
100% agree on this
Has long been done
When looking at missions, i see a nice one, 50, 50, 50. I go into it, +75 all stats. Come on guys...
Even looking at the mission from main screen, then looking at events, its still annoying to find good ones, then all events are +too much everything.
When next you look at the Admiralty window, mouse over the little "Event" box at the right side of each mission. Many of them have stat modifiers for the mission they're attached to.
many posters on this forum have suggested that if the maintenance time does not start until the reward is collected then runs for say another 8 hrs more even if the duration of the mission time ran out many hours before this would be unfair and perhaps including the maintenance time with the mission time would make it more sensible.
collecting rewards tonight from missions I ran early yesterday even with ships that had fairly long maintenance cycles i can confirm that not one of the ships was added to the maintenance tab, so the way I see it is we have the best of both worlds here.
if for some reason we happen to be logged into a character when a mission timer runs out we can claim the reward, the ship will go into maintenance and we can run missions in the freed up slot with alternative ships but if we are not logged in when the mission ends and we collect the reward much later when the mission time + the maintenance time has already passed we can collect the reward not only freeing up the slot but also putting the ship back into service at the same time.
alternatively it could be that when we collect the rewards say 4 hours of an 8hr maintenance cycle has passed and the ship will go into maintenance but just for a further 4hrs.
this is what I would say the evidence of my recent activity with the system suggests.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
As long as a mission is running, it's blocking a mission slot. You can't slot any other mission. So it doesn't really matter that some ships are still busy with a mission, you can't run any new missions anyway.
But the maintenance means that you have mission slots available, but your ships are not yet ready.
On top of that, you have a small selection of missions you can take any time, but you also see two missions that will become available as you start missions. If you see a good mission (like a Tour of Duty Stage mission, or another mission with good rewards), you can consider spending pass tokens. Or send a small/weak ship on a mission it might fail. Or maybe you decide the current missions are also worth doing and risk not having your best ships ready when the cool missions come around.
Basically a central game element here is that you have two types of resources / opportunity cost. Mission Slots and Ships. The maintenance system decouples slots from ships, as slots are available sooner than ships.
An alternate way instead of maintenance might have been that you have some kind of command tokens that (in fiction) represent the time you need to organize a mission, and then the command token would become availalbe sooner than the mission complete.
But that would cause one valuable element to miss - that high tier ships are occupied longer. (A system where more advanced ships with better qualifications for the mission take longer for it would make no sense, right?)
But hey, maybe we can still use the fiction I describe above for the current system:
The Mission Duration is actually the briefing time, e.g. time you and your flag staff requires to brief the captains of the ships under your command to perform the mission.
The maintenance time then is actually something else entirely - it's the time it takes for a ship like the one you just ordered away to become available again. Low tier ships are of course more common, so are more readily available to be send on missions.
But this fiction also has its problems - why would you get the rewards when the briefing is over?
In the end, it's an abstract system. DOFFing has its weird aspects, too. Like why can my 50 person-crew on the Defiant consist of 400 duty officers? And what are 800 crew members on my Galaxy doing while the other 212 are working? Why do so many people die during turbo lift maintenance? How often am I debriefing these prisoners? Would a Klingon really sell Klingon colonists into slavery?
(I have combined two actual quotes here, not intending to mislead)
As has been pointed out multiple times in these threads it does make sense. In the real life military ships and especially aircraft DO go into maintenance after every single mission. And especially aircraft DOES spend more time in maintenance than on duty. So this actually makes a lot of sense. You can argue about the precise relations, you can argue that ships (RL) indeed do get less time while in use, but when they do get maintenance they do get a lot. In our gaming that would mean something like "after 20 missions your ship is in maintenance now for 2 complete weeks", which players wouldn't like either, so I think "splitting" that up and thus increasing the post mission cooldown for single assignments is a good decision for gameplay reasons.
I'm sad to say, that as a player with only 2 ships at the T5+ mark, and the rest are well, pathetic, I can only do 1 Admiralty Mission a Day, 2 If I really play it right. But right now, the requirements I have are way too high for any of my ships to accomplish. I needed my only science vessel, and both my cruisers just to get a decent success rate on a mission that requires 150+ Eng, 80 Tac, and 190 Sci, and I have NO pass tokens so I can't skip them to get to the low eng/tac/sci that I can do. Either the Maintance times needs an overhaul, or the requirements needs an overhaul.
I am seeing this Admiralty Ship System as being nothing more than a grab to get me to spend money. You claim that it is not intentional, but it LOOKS like it was DESIGNED that way. And lower-tier ships being useful. Sorry, I can't do any more missions until tomorrow. I am not getting any use of this system.
And based on the Class of my Captain, why would I need a Science vessel when I am built to Kill not to Study? Having a cruiser makes sense since they are also include the battleships and additional warships, and I generally fly Escorts. So I had to spend money for a single Science Vessel just to help me get past these ridiculously high Science requirements. Here's the thing, I don't want a Science Ship. I don't want to fly it, but I was forced to get it so I can get through some Admiral missions. Thanks for trying to say that it was not intentional for it to be seen and used as a grab for cash.
Once the mission I have going in the Admiralty Ship System, it will be the last mission I do until you guys overhaul the system to make it more friendly with those with very few ships.
I also noticed that the ships that still required maintenance had been moved to the maintenance tab before I claimed the rewards for the missions they took part in, I can only assume this was done automatically when I signed into the character.
after signing in with each character the first thing I did was collect the rewards from the missions so the ships that were in maintenance would only have been in the maintenance tab for a matter of a few seconds before I collected the reward, nowhere near enough time to account for the reduction in their maintenance times.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Yes, we all remember the "five year mission" setup, and you are right. But real life ships already are designed for multiple months, sometimes years on a mission (especially nuclear submarines). That doesn't mean they do not get maintenance every now and then. After every encounter a ship would make a thorough check whether everything is still working. Yes, even after 15 minutes. You have to take systems offline to switch components and similar, which happened a few times in the series (mostly as a pretense to not getting away or something like that), that is maintenance because during that time you normally cannot do things like transport from A to B or similar.
And in the "5 year mission" and our "Admirality mission", the terms "mission" refer of course to different aspects, let's call them "strategic mission" and "tactical mission", where the first one consists of multiple of the latter. And after every of the latter there should be maintenance as much as possible (think of all the repairs the events of an episode would make necessary in quite a few episodes of the TV series).
But you could argue (we wouldn't know since most of it happens offscreen due to not being really interesting TV material in itself) that these are way shorter than in game when looking at the relations between mission time and maint time. But then we would have the other aspect, the "major maintenance" after the time assigned for missions runs out. Which would mean after a few "tactical" missions we'd get a major maintenance which would indeed need weeks to stay in relation - from a player's perspective I would consider that more inconvenient than the times as they are now.
About "several hundred years ahead": the more complicated technology gets, the more maintenance it tends to need. So there would be an argument for the times being even longer than when compared to today. We can't be sure of course whether that trend would continue, or stop, or maybe even reverse in the next 400 years.
You can of course argue that the whole maintenance system isn't fun and should be abolished for gameplay reasons. But I don't see any problem with realism here (apart from the fact that all times, mission and maint, are way shorter than they would need to be if played to scale)
I think the thing is with maintenance it kind of forces you to use you ships wisely where possible, I guess if there was no maintenance players would just use their best ships wherever possible and hardly ever use low tier ships, having maintenance or cooldown if you prefer makes you consider your choices more wisely.
obviously the best mission with the higher requirements is where you need to use you best ships and smaller missions that where the requirements are very low are ideal for lower tier ships then finally any missions where the requirements fall in the middle ground you can usually fill with middle tier ships.
ok so there is going to be times that you just cant meet the requirements no matter what ships you throw at it and that's just the time you have to just do the best you can with what you have and hope for the best.
on one character I was slotting some missions on yesterday I actually ended up with no more ships I could use at all, I had laterally used every ship in my lineup and they were now either in maintenance or on a mission, I cant believe this would ever happen if there was no maintenance cycle for ships so I guess that's proof positive that this system gets you to use most if not all of the ships you have.
all in all I confess I like this system even more so now that I realise it gives every one of your ships a purpose at some time or another and now with the knowledge that the maintenance cycle doesn't start when you claim the rewards but after the time period for the mission its on its even better.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
One thing I would really like to see, being a Romulan dominant player, is the ability to import high-level Fed/Klingon ships I've purchased into the system. I know I can't fly a T5 or T6 Federation Dreadnaught (nor would I want to on my Romulan), but since I've purchased it, I would really like to be able to import it into my Admiralty roster. Same would go for my Klingon-aligned Roms. Considering how few ships the Romulans have compared to the Federation, it would really help to fill my roster. Not to be greedy, but since we are all one big happy Alpha Quadrant, why can't my Fed have purchased Klingon ships in his roster, and vise versa? Kind of like "The Klingons assigned a ship to work with Rakhohl's fleet".
Overall, I'm enjoying the Admiralty system because it isn't just a click-through mini-game. You have to put some thought in to it.
Quiet that.
The new system is the greatest grind relief and the most alt friendliest thing I have witnessed for a long time in this game.
The CD times maybe something to get used to, so is the prioritization and planning for the missions. But for me it’s ok, especially under consideration of the rewards. Without the long CD times one would get so much out of this system that one does not need to play the actual game itself at all in order to progress.
I found to set priorities to grab the “special circumstances” rewards or "event" or how they call it to be the greatest asset for the time being. Hope they are here to stay and not just some promotional idea. That would be annoying, the rest hardly is.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Agreed. I actually could live with longer mission times on the very short ones (15 mins) so that they won't finish while your only online just doing minor stuff (setting up doffs and now admiralty, selling loot, looking at the exchange, maybe hop into a red alert) without any other changes whatsoever.
Same here. Since most of my toons are maxed out in leveling concerning "what I really want" and now are only getting (very welcome but not really necessary) stat boosts and manual making options (you can always buy them for ec), I am mostly looking at the event. VR mats, dil - go for it. Of course I consider the actual rewards, too, but many only offer common mats and XP and then the only thing that would be interesting is a possible crit - but I consider that mostly not worth investing my precious T6s and give the T1 ships a go. Still often a 5% chance, so every now and again it will even work. Then there's probably going to be a party on the miranda.
I may be doing it all wrong, but as everybody else, I still have to learn how to run the system.