Antarctica sounds like an amazing opportunity. Also, had no idea you were shooting for medical school–that’s awesome!

This game is the most fun that I’ve had in an MMO since Star Wars Galaxies, and it has none of the bad aspects of that game. Especially since STO is free, and SWG wasn’t.

There was absolutely no gameplay documentation, at least none that I could find, included with the download. However, there is a TON of useful documentation available on the game’s wiki and on other fan sites. So once you get past the “how do I do stuff” phase and get serious about what you’re doing you’ll have most of the info that you’d ever need. Provided that you do as I do and play the game in a window and keep a bunch of tabs open on your browser (which should be Firefox).

BTW, I should also mention that the server(s) appear to be quite stable. Which I find refreshing. Perhaps things have improved in the world of MMOs in the past 4+ years since I last played a MMO, but uptime is important to anyone who’s addicted.

Another aspect that I love is that if you exit in the middle of a mission (deliberately, or because of getting unexpectedly booted) the game will take you back to where you last were and you lose no progress. I can’t emphasize just how wonderful this is.

Last, but certainly not least, is that ‘dying’ seems to have no long-term detrimental effects. None whatsoever. This is in marked contrast to the XP losses that I’ve been used to in other MMOs. The most that may happen is you suffer an injury. Which can be readily healed.

I’ve used the ‘noble sacrifice’ technique a few times in Borg battles today to help my teams achieve mission goals. Charge in, take out out a key enemy vessel to bump up a kill progress counter, then get blown away by that vessel’s now-angry guardian cubes trying to escape. Game resets you to someplace outside the edge of the combat zone. Wash, rinse, repeat.

My ship and crew are now powerful enough that I, without assistance from any other ships, can chew up a Borg sphere in under a minute. I can take a solitary cube to about half it’s hull before it obliterates my ship. And I’m doing this with a cruiser, not an escort (which are purpose-built warships). Through watching others, and my own experience, I found that loading the ship with all beam arrays (no torpedo launchers) and giving enemies ‘broadsides’ (where both fore and aft arrays can fire on the target) I maximize my firepower. Currently, that’s SIX beam arrays (3 fore and 3 aft) all ripping into a target once I turn broadside to them.

Escorts can pack more forward firepower, and mount powerful cannon, but they are vulnerable to being flanked. Given my general ineptness at fine motor control, I get flanked a lot. So I opted for a ship type (cruisers) that has a stronger hull that mounts more guns and in a balanced distribution, and have much larger crews so that my ship can take lots of crew casualties and stay in the fight.

Well, that’s enough for now. A huge thank you to Lambach for cluing me in to this game via this blog. Perhaps we’ll meet in-game sometime.

– Commander Kitano Jin, U.S.S. Osprey, 5th Exploration Fleet