Producer Steve "SalamiInferno" Ricossa, Jr. shares details about the upcoming Fleet System expansion in this entry of the Season 7 News Dev Blog series.


Link to the blog.

Top of the line science consoles blending romulan technology "to assist you with blending your technology with theirs".

So is this the way Federation ships get hold of cloaking devices?

Season 7: The Grind Continues
Season 7: The Dilithium Plot Thickens
Season 7: Grind II
Season 7: Tedium Intensifies
Season 7: The Story Forgotten
Season 7: Bugged System Bonanza
Season 7: Old Rope
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Season 9: Potential PvP Content...

It's expected that Cryptic will be stripping the ability to earn dilithium from STFs. That's a massive influx of fleet resources that we could loose. Therefore we're going to have to spend more real money to make it up - Or stop altogether.

According to Tribble, Cryptic is going to charge people for picking up duty officers from the Academies that are currently free. While one person doesn't make a massive amount of DoFF's from the system, a fleet worth does make an impact on it's development. If we will be made to pay then that's more real money needed to make it up plus more dilithium going into a system with very little return.

Let's not forget that it costs dilithium to buy ships now, a LOT for new players.

At the rate Cryptic is monopolizing STO - it's soon going to become more expensive to play Star Trek Online FTP then it ever was under the subscription system. That is NOT progress. That's a sign that the developers simply wish to sponge as much money out of the playerbase before moving on.

Dilithium is simply becoming too important a currency to strive for anymore. Fleet starbases will languish at Tier II - III.5 as people realize that grinding for identical starbases simply becomes too much like work, and less of a game.

For any developers that read this, it's time you took a step back and considered the long view. Don't drive people away simply because you have the ability to.

So a fleet all but ignoring the regular Starbase projects
Heretic said that Starbases would take 7 months to finish with no downtime between projects.
So half of that is 3.5 months. It will take "less than half", so lets say 3 months.
3 months of all but ignoring your regular starbase projects, with no downtime between the Embassy projects...

Only 2 sub-tracks, 3 tiers, and lower XP costs per tier. Loose extrapolation from what I saw on tribble and stowiki, a maxed-out embassy looks like a slightly larger investment equivalent than a tier 2 starbase, but less than tier 3.

I really appreciate that the hint from Ask Cryptic held true, that embassies and other holdings would be smaller side-projects and the Starbase would still be the big project for fleets. My biggest fear for S7 was that our already crushing starbase grind would be joined by an equally steep embassy grind, and that when S8 hit we'd still be buried under tier 3 or 4 of them both only to add something else similarly demanding.

Either somehow the wrong article was posted or I would suggest reading the dictionary description of "detail" because that was certainly not giving any kind of details ... it a fluffy, generalist, full of padding long article that said nothing.

Season 10: We might start looking at finishing the KDF in a couple more Seasons.

And I can't wait to see what it costs in project terms to unlock the embassy bartender and chef.

500 rotgut and 500 Ale?

2000 Osil (sp?) twists?

And the new dilithium costs....

so small fleets like mine (5 players) will either have to give up progressing one base over the other, or commit to doing nothing in the game but grind, grind, grind.

Even if they raised the dilithium refining cap, I doubt it would help. I hardly ever grind out all 8k per dayas is.

Should be substantially faster than that, if things are proportional to starbases. There's only 64,000 XP in the subtiers, compared to 750,000 XP in the starbase ones.

Assuming they stay proportional at all three tiers, time wise, it should be slightly less than tier 2 in all three starbase tracks (75,000 XP), but probably more expensive because you spend half of that at tier 3 costs, not tier 2. Cost wise, this is hitting the point where a starbase is no longer a viable solo project, not the point where they become an unmanageable group project.

So full of "WIN"