New Life and New Civilizations?

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Where?

Earth Spacedock? K7? Starbase 24? Memory Alpha?

How many times have I been hailed by a Federation planet or colony to kill Klingons, scan alien cocoons, or rescue traders from Orion pirates? I've lost count.

These missions feel lifeless. If I'm beaming down to a planet with technology capable of subspace communication I'd really like to see a village, a town, a city, a metropolis - something. Right now the only planets that seem to exist are planets with erratic weather, sparse vegetation, and no visible indigenous life.

I'm not suggesting that every planet needs to be some huge open-ended map but I would like to see some sort of population - or population center at least. A static city full of NPC's that parrot a few scripted phrases would be a great start. Perhaps a few merchants and traders or a mission tree that originates and stays on a single planet.

There are a lot of little things that Cryptic could do to make the game a bit more vibrant and less like a port of Starfleet Command. It's still early and I expect there will be a great deal of content pushed out in the months to come but I would have liked a bit more of this at launch.

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Lifeless is right. I've said it a lot, but the majority of the content is hollow facade. I've heard they're working on animals, but it won't add all that much to the maps, and won't fix the real problems with the missions. A city environment would be excelent, they coudl lift a few square bloxks of Millennium City with a little redress and even that would be good. But, over all, they need to concentrate on adding game mechanics, fixing and monitoring story logic, and avoiding contrivances.

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Lifeless is right. I've said it a lot, but the majority of the content is hollow facade. I've heard they're working on animals, but it won't add all that much to the maps, and won't fix the real problems with the missions. A city environment would be excelent, they coudl lift a few square bloxks of Millennium City with a little redress and even that would be good. But, over all, they need to concentrate on adding game mechanics, fixing and monitoring story logic, and avoiding contrivances.

I concur, I played 100+ exploration missions and never saw an alien on a planet which was not a mob trying to kill me.

MajorD, where di you hear that animals are on the way please ?

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fixing and monitoring story logic, and avoiding contrivances.

very well said. of course, Star Trek in General becomes a bit forced and contrived and considering the material and the medium I can live with a certain amount of it. However, I would like to see a bit more non-combat content - there was an excellent post a few weeks ago where someone went to a lot of trouble to put together some makeshift images of minigame ideas but I can't seem to find it.

Be that as it may a serious component that is lacking in the Life department is the social element that should be pervasive in any MMO. Of course, this too has been said many time by many people. I'm just another voice in the crowd here.

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It's still early days and who knows whats planned really.

I'd prefer to have seperate first contact missions which would eventually lead to new cultures joining Starfleet.

Jack Emmert stated at the Vega Star Trek convention that you would meet new civilizations and they could join your bridge crew etc.

But then again he also stated he wanted players to "fully explorable ships" so who knows lol.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

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I have a feeling there will be a lot more exploration content added in the future as a lot of people clearly want it.

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I would like to see some away missions where part of the mission is to avoid been seen by the pre-space or pre-warp locals. If you are seen, your reward is affected.

Part of such a mission might even include a 'if you get seen' side mission that you do to minimize the impact on the locals as much as possible.

Just a thought.

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I would like to see some away missions where part of the mission is to avoid been seen by the pre-space or pre-warp locals.

Ooooh there is one in the star clusters. You need to beam down and scan 5 blinkings while avoiding contact with an iron age society. Problem is there is nobody on the map (as usual) and you can go everywhere without being detected :(

I would like a real mission like the one you suggest.

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I had an exploration mission where my first officer said
there was a pre-warp civilization on the planet that was activally watching their sky.
Got pumped, and than the let down came.

I just flew straight to the planet, beamed down and did the usuall
kill anything that moves and scan the blinky things.

Mission done.

So where was that civilization I had to avoid?

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I concur with all that is being said, however at this point it would just be nice to actually just go to Earth. At least San Francisco with Starfleet Academy.

They could do a few missions here and there where you return to do something for the academy by the request of a higher ranked officer. This in of itself would go a long way to making the game feel more civilization friendly. I mean it wouldn't be hard, they could use the same general idea of the current away missions but make it look like Earth \ Starfleet architecture and paste an overlay of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

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I would like to see some away missions where part of the mission is to avoid been seen by the pre-space or pre-warp locals. If you are seen, your reward is affected..

This brings to mind something from the U.S.S. Aszura mission - it's a straight-forward mission: reroute the venting plasma, kill the pirates, rescue the crew. However, there's no REQUIREMENT that you actually stop to help the injured crew. All you NEED to do is get to the aft cargo bay and beam out. Fine. I can go with the assumption that once you can contact your ship you just beam everyone up at once. If that's the case why add the ability to beam each crew member out individually?

Add a level of risk to a mission like this - allow those injured crew to be killed or captured by the Orions, Klingons, Gorn, etc... You get additional merit and reward points for getting those crew members out safely before saving yourself... conduct going above and beyond the call of duty - exemplifying the best qualities of a starfleet officer - needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one).

There would still be no requirement for you to take the extra time to do this but it would affect the overall reward of the mission. Perhaps in certain circumstances you're awarded additional unlocks (medal of valor or some-such) to be displayed on your uniform.


There was one mission I liked where you actually had to arrest a Ferengi smuggler by tagging him for transport. That was good but has a lot of potential for improvement. Whatever happened to "Set phasers to stun" (or heavy stun for that matter?) I'd like to see a mechanic added that allows you to stun and capture an adversary and take them into custody as a prisoner of war. Again, doing something like that adds an additional bonus to your mission reward because you took the time to use tactics and non-lethal force to complete the mission. The doesn't have the be an option for every mission but it would be nice.

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For 5,000 CP you can buy new civilizations on newly explored worlds ;)

Mark my words, it'll be something like this or some such.

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This brings to mind something from the U.S.S. Aszura mission - it's a straight-forward mission: reroute the venting plasma, kill the pirates, rescue the crew. However, there's no REQUIREMENT that you actually stop to help the injured crew. All you NEED to do is get to the aft cargo bay and beam out. Fine. I can go with the assumption that once you can contact your ship you just beam everyone up at once. If that's the case why add the ability to beam each crew member out individually?
.

They used to have a accolade for scanning all 12 crewman, now they don't that I can tell.

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My only real complaint about the game is the severe lack of exploration. I mean, I get hails from alien civilizations who want medical supplies or provisions (which my replicator inexplicably cannot replicate). I can't beam down to their planet and look around.

I can't enter buildings on planets I beam to. There are no real exploration quests, just "Click this and *PEW* *PEW*"

I can't interact with the world in which I find myself. It's a big, empty set. We have static flora and fauna, etc.

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For 5,000 CP you can buy new civilizations on newly explored worlds ;)

Mark my words, it'll be something like this or some such.

This is what worries me. There's something that really annoys me about purchasing additional content for a game that has a monthly subscription fee.

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Ooooh there is one in the star clusters. You need to beam down and scan 5 blinkings while avoiding contact with an iron age society. Problem is there is nobody on the map (as usual) and you can go everywhere without being detected :(



ummmmm.. you could have just beamed down to an uninhabeted area, you lot seem to forget the key part of the prime directive: contact with a pre-warp civillization is forbidden.

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ummmmm.. you could have just beamed down to an uninhabeted area, you lot seem to forget the key part of the prime directive: contact with a pre-warp civillization is forbidden.

Yeah! That's why Kirk and Picard always followed the Prime Directive.... Oh no wait they didn't. :) Seriously though I think it would be a fun mission. You find that you have accidentally interfered with a civilization and now you have to figure out how to fix it. That would be a good challenge. Hmmmm.... Perhaps vaporizing the whole village is not the answer.

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ummmmm.. you could have just beamed down to an uninhabeted area, you lot seem to forget the key part of the prime directive: contact with a pre-warp civillization is forbidden.

Nope : your science officer tells you they are less than 1000 meters away and advises you to beam up.

Furthermore you're missing the point : the problem is not that it's unbelievable, the problem is that a lot of players want to meet aliens on the planet surface, not just a weird textbox asking for ten units of crap or a bunch of mobs trying to kill you because you want to scan 5 useless pieces of rock.

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They used to have a accolade for scanning all 12 crewman, now they don't that I can tell.

Zinc said that the accolades will return. I can't wait because I liked the names a lot (futility accolade for killing ten borgs :D )

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Zinc said that the accolades will return. I can't wait because I liked the names a lot (futility accolade for killing ten borgs :D )

I thought they were missing. At least I have the satisfaction of having saved 12 crewmen.

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Exploration, imo, does not = shoot phasers at X amount of klingons/orion, beam down and shoot at some more of said enemies. i want to actually do some exploring, not just patrol missions of "unexplored space"

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Furthermore you're missing the point : the problem is not that it's unbelievable, the problem is that a lot of players want to meet aliens on the planet surface, not just a weird textbox asking for ten units of crap or a bunch of mobs trying to kill you because you want to scan 5 useless pieces of rock.

Exactly.

Also, not every alien encounter has to be with a pre-warp or even pre-industrial civilization. It could be "random colony of Federation citizens" with all the appropriate technology (or lack thereof). What passes for a colony now is a few static buildings dropped on some flat area of poorly detailed terrain.

The sooner cryptic gets rid of the "go pay for my 10 units of stuff" and "go scan alien poop on that planet" missions the happier I'll be.

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Exploration, imo, does not = shoot phasers at X amount of klingons/orion, beam down and shoot at some more of said enemies. i want to actually do some exploring, not just patrol missions of "unexplored space"

Obviously there are constraints to game mechanics that limit how much "explorable space" there can be but there is definitely a way to make exploration missions more enjoyable. Take a mission where you have to scan anomalous readings in a nebula; instead of just spamming the scan and use button to collect resources build a mini-game around it and make it interesting. Make it something you have to interact with that has some discernible effect. Make a 2-D game (as though you were seated at a bridge console) where you have to make fast and accurate adjustments to the deflector array to collect resources. The better you do the more you collect. Just an example.

That said, I'm not saying anything new here. My only hope is that Cryptic has incorporated something like this and will be implemented in the first big content update.

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i totally agree with you guys.. missions are for the most part rather lifeless, alcking detail, and there is no choice and no consequence...

the npc dialogues are basically either "accept" or "continue", the ground missions are basically "kill x of those /scan x of those /collect x of those" - where x is the total number present..

the famous starfleet tricorder is hardwired to scan for anomalies, you cant scan for lifeform or at least for the next mission objective..

there are many possibilites, but currently the game is missing out on a lot of its potential.. we will see how it developes..

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the famous starfleet tricorder is hardwired to scan for anomalies, you cant scan for lifeform or at least for the next mission objective..
In some of the missions, you can scan for the next objective, it'll say "X anomalies near by", but it'll often (although not always) point to the nearest significant thing to check out (which could be an anomaly, or it could be the next objective)

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I had an idea that could enchance much of you want...a better Trek universe and such things could easily added.

Take a look

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=112123

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It's still early days and who knows whats planned really.

I'd prefer to have seperate first contact missions which would eventually lead to new cultures joining Starfleet.

Jack Emmert stated at the Vega Star Trek convention that you would meet new civilizations and they could join your bridge crew etc.

But then again he also stated he wanted players to "fully explorable ships" so who knows lol.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Don't trust anything Jack Emmert says. He's like the Molyneux of the MMO community.