Star Trek Online ship tactics, part 2

Part 2 of the Star Trek Online starship tactics video premiered over at IGN, and there are a couple concepts clarified over a few subjects -- but as with the last video, it's nothing really new. The gameplay footage that's attached to the explanation is quite compelling however, especially with the boarding parties where you can see the little shuttlecrafts head towards the Romulan ship. Let's take a closer look at each of the concepts the video covers.

Power management.

Power management is going to play a big role, which we known about for a while. You can see some detailed pictures of part of the power management UI in yesterday's article, located along the bottom of the screen with words like Defense, Attack, and Speed. Say you have 100 units of power, in STO you're going to be able to devote 25 of those units to the shields, 10 to auxiliary systems, 50 to weapons, and 15 to the engines. Power allocation will not be immediate, it will have some sort of delay associated with it. That means you'll have to think ahead about your strategic choices.

Damage and repair

Much of the ship repair takes place behind the scenes outside of the player's control. You won't be going down to engineering and banging on counsels like Scotty; the STO designers want to keep the player involved in action as much as possible. While we'll need to wait and see how the actual game turns out at launch, we can read into this a little bit and postulate that there won't be too much of a death penalty. In fact, we can see in the video ships coming out of what looks like a ship building facility. Could this be the STO version of resurrection? Time will tell.

Boarding Parties

Players will be able to send their crew over in shuttle crafts to board enemy ships. These boarding parties will try to take over parts of the ship's systems, decreasing the combat effectiveness of the enemy ship. Think of Worf and crew going over to a Borg vessel and knocking out the shields or transwarp drive. That's what boarding parties appear to be simulating.

Overall this video wasn't as interesting as the first part, but it's still good to see some of these concepts in action that we've been hearing about for a while.