The Trouble with Klingons ...

Cuttysark

... unlike Tribbles I have oodles of Klingons lurking in my corridors! Not only that but I have Ferengi and Cardassians that are wanna-be Klingons also! And I'm running out of Gagh and Bloodwine!

Is there a good reason to have all of them since I find them difficult to level up at my stage in the game? Are there some that I can safely 'airlock' without living to regret it?
( just so you can see I'm just a newbie and whom I have: https://datacore.app/profile/?dbid=1164223834923010 )
Just looking for some personal opinions here. (not links to the 'big book' ... ) Thanks in advance.

@Shan
Thanks for giving me a kick in the rump about posting! I was fixated on the nice gold box in my profile page that says:

"Please note that you will not be able to create a new discussion until your account is old enough and has reached the proper rank"

I now know that that can be ignored safely. LOL

Data1001

In my opinion, you could stand to do a ton of housecleaning.

I would start with the cadets. For now, keep only the ones you absolutely need in order to complete the daily cadet missions (until you star them all and can warp everything, after which you can freeze them).

It's also not a bad idea to only hang on to 3* and 4* crew who are either really solid or are main cast characters, unless you have them fully fused. So you could clear a lot of space there, as well.

The other thing I noticed is that you are spreading around your leveling a lot. I did this as well in my first months of playing the game, and it was a mistake. It really slows down your progress. My advice would be to focus on your 4/4 or 3/4 crew (and some of the stronger Legendaries) and choose one or two at a time to work on. Having a whole bunch of crew between level 30 and level 60 isn't doing you any favors, frankly. Leave any 1/4 crew who you haven't decided if you'll be keeping unleveled. That way you won't have wasted a bunch of resources and chrons on someone who might later just be going out the airlock.

Bylo Band

I always tell my new people to work on cadet challenge crew first, so if you are still working to complete the daily cadet challenges, 100% of your resources should go there. Most days they offer a tremendous boon to your ability to play the game, and even on Tuesday and Sunday they offer useful rewards for newer players. To that end, you want to focus on 2* crew with the following traits: female, alien, Starfleet. Somebody like Festive Jadzia Dax fits all 3 and is usable Monday through Friday. 2* crew like Boomer Mayweather are not useful at all as he is male, human, and not Starfleet. Then there are crew like Lt. Commander Data and Security Chief Worf who are useful Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.

After you have the weekday cadets under control, shift to the weekend cadets. Saturday is 3* female crew and Sunday is alien crew, so 3* crew like Lwaxana Troi fit both, so focus your efforts there.

Then I recommend focussing on voyage strength. Here, until you get a decent stable of 5* crew to work with, I would recommend you work on 3 skill 4* crew who are main cast. You always want to send 3 skill crew on your voyages, and since resources are limited, focussing on main cast first will help you be stronger in more future events, as main cast get featured from time to time. From your current roster, crew like Scared Scotty fit this description nicely.

Odo Marmarosa

All the 1*s, 2*s, 3*s and even the 4*s will ALL come back around eventually (exception is the 1/3 Sisko you get for changing your username). I would not recommend airlocking your existing 2/2 and 2-3/3s unless you get desperate for crew space, but 1/2s and 1/3s could be unless they are needed for cadet challanges. Eventually level and freeze them, but do not take on any new 1-2-3s until you reach the point where you can level a crew memeber from 1-100 in less than a day; then you can quickly level and freeze for collections and achievements as they drop.

Looking at your crew from lowest level up, airlocking your 1/3 Barclay, LaForge (unless he is helping you this event) & Yates. 1/3 L. Troi and Saavik you can airlock unless you need them for weekend challanges. 1/4 Klingon Quark, 1/4 Martok and 1/4 Tactical Burnham are probably your most expendible super rares at this point. Quark in particular is an expensive build for low tier stats.

As always, never airlock a vanity crew if you really don't want to.

Bylo Band

Odo Marmarosa wrote: »

1/4 Klingon Quark, 1/4 Martok and 1/4 Tactical Burnham are probably your most expendible super rares at this point. Quark in particular is an expensive build for low tier stats.

Good catch, I actually made a mental note to single out Klingon Quark and forgot Yes, he is quite bad, a few months back he was a feature crew for a Galaxy event and his stats were so low he wasn't even the top choice to build the items in his skill combos!

Cuttysark

Thanks all
I was debating flushing "KIingon Quark" out of the airlock! I now think he can go to So'vakor (?) and die a happy Klingon! LOL A slot I can use to better advantage.

RaraRacing

It depends on how you want to go forward ...

1. You don't mind airlocking crew to pick them up later ... but be warned, it might be tempting to fill up crew slots quickly again and so this becomes a real churning wheel of airlocking crew because you'll always be short on space.

2. Build up your crew slowly and making sure you have space for event crew that comes in and the odd crew from voyages. This means not doing any portal pulls for the foreseeable future until you have your crew situation under control.

Whichever you choose, the following are good starters:
1. Freeze any immortalised 1-3* crew right now no matter how good they look to you at the moment (Jazz Riker, Chapel, Sato, Jadzia etc. etc.).

2. As Data1001 says ... focussed levelling ... pick two crew, 1 easy and 1 more difficult and focus on levelling those two to 100 ... e.g. take Boomer Mayweather and Vulcan Wedding T'Pol --- freeze Mayweather when complete and pick another easy one; Glinn Damar --- in the meantime you'll be levelling T'Pol too and she'll become someone you will use for DIP and voyages. After T'Pol, go with Burnham.

I haven't gone through your crew in too much detail, so I've just listed a couple that popped out and looked easy ... basically you want to level 4*s who can multi-task ... be used as 3-skill crew on voyages, be used as base crew for shuttles, will be handy for events etc.
In the past, I used to let upcoming events dictate who I wanted to focus on levelling ... with the upcoming mega including Astrophysicists then the likes of T'Pol and Burnham would be good choices.

Also, try to pick crew who aren't that difficult to level (consult the STT crew cost finder page for that), low-hanging fruit as it were ... so the Doc La Forge you might pick up this event, forget about him for a while.

3. If you are fine with the consequences, you can safely airlock any 1-3* crew ... there are crew who are very valuable (female starfleet aliens) so those should be last out if you choose to do that ... and fuse crew ... but those are for later. It all depends on where you draw the line for usefulness in how you play the game.

Bylo Band

Oh, @Cuttysark, here a few other tips I used when I was starting out to power through some tough crew level ups.

1A. As was just suggested, after you select your difficult crew to work on, start running shuttles for their faction, often those crew will require items that can only be acquired from their faction store or their shuttles - for example, if you are working on a Klingon, start running KCA shuttles because they are the best for the various alcohol-based drinks favored by Klingons.

1B. If you have no pressing need to run specific shuttles for leveling, start pre-farming hard to acquire items by running Federation shuttles (for ancient films), Augment (for medical and science experiments), Section 31 (for holoprogrograms), or Borg (if you are not picky, they can pretty much drop anything). When I was starting out, unless there was a faction event going I would assign each faction a day and just run shuttles for them all day, to farm up the listed items. It will help you out a lot down the road.

2. You can also warp expensive missions every 30 minutes (on average) to help you farm up expensive items needed to build equipment. Space battles are especially good for this as once you have a 5* ship from the dabo wheel you can kind of blitz through the galaxy map completing all the space battles, allowing you to warp them later.

3. Don't forget to use up all your replications each day. Assuming you have the fuel for them, you can make steady progress advancing crew every day by replicating equipment or components they need to build their equipment.

Cuttysark

@Bylo Band Your comments are helpful! As per your last post:
1A: I started doing exactly that a couple of days ago for dealing with my Klingon equipment. After sending my biggest and best off on their assigned voyage(s) I then run KCA/KE faction shuttles with the riff-raff I have left.
1B: As sort of a spin off on this if I am equipping one of my crew and have to get an item that is hard to produce I will often just bite the bullet and run the process several extra times at least until get double the quantity required. I also run through some of my older 'warp capable' missions just to see if items I need are highlighted.
2: I've been lucky and have had several 5* ships since I started playing. Of course leveling them up is just a matter of time and luck at the Dabo wheel ... (I don't buy schematics since I'm not a 'space whale' and never will be. LOL)
3: I fall sadly short on this. I keep forgetting! It is a great thing to remember and I will have to keep my nose to the grindstone on this aspect. When I first started out I made the bad mistake of just replicating the full item on everything regardless ... oops ... now I dig down the tree (if I can) and just replicate the sole part that is holding things up.

Cuttysark

@Odo Marmarosa
"...never airlock a vanity crew if you really don't want to..."

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a "vanity crew"?

Odo Marmarosa

Cuttysark wrote: »

@Odo Marmarosa
"...never airlock a vanity crew if you really don't want to..."

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a "vanity crew"?

Any crew you keep because you like the character, art or episode; especially one with poor stats that you might not otherwise keep.

[10F]risky Dingo

This is all solid advice and there is not much I can add. I will say this, something I notice with a lot of new members is spending honor for gold trainers. I realize this is tempting, but IMO it is also a mistake. If you have not already, save ALL of your dilithium until you can buy all four shuttle slots. Once you have those (and have maxed faction reputations) trainers will become so abundant that they are used as replicator fuel.

The only other thing I can add are resource sites. You may already be familiar with them, as you linked your crew with the DataCore app, but here they are anyway:

The big book. Recently brought back, this can help you decide if you're going to try and keep (or level) new crew from an event. I recommend keeping and leveling anyone tier 3 or up.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CYR5jnqtacbQM9MIsXp6ATs84Q3rbRM3SmKmUtBvlJ0/view#gid=329681894

The doroexplo uses the big book's rankings and formats it in an easy to read/navigate web page.
http://stt.doroexplo.com/all#

Last, is the little book. Same as the big book, but for crew 3* and down. I think this one might be particularly useful for you.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RKdRtJcePeey-921OCVKcU41YZTmFpVThXE10Uff-aA/edit

That's all I got. Hope it helps! [=

[10F]risky Dingo

I recommend keeping and leveling anyone tier 3 or up.*
*As long as you can get all three (3/4) crew from the threshold.

marschallin

I purchased trainers with honor at the beginning because my strategy was to immortalize all the 1,2, and 3 stars, and by far the biggest hold-up on that was trainers.

But I think the important thing was that I had a strategy and knew why I was buying trainers. I don’t recommend buying them here and there with a disorganized strategy.

DavideBooks

My advice (particularly of you spend very little) is to save all dilithium for crew slot sales. Avoid the pack temptation. Crew slots give you the freedom to field more crew. I have bet on packs and won, but I almost always lose. Crew slots are great. The expedition event we just did was easy for me crew-wise. I never lacked for crew and hardly had to search at all. Time needed to play was a bigger issue, but I digress. Save dilithium. Save portal pulls until you immortalize your low crew and can be rid of them.

Cuttysark

So, I thought I would put some of the good advice above to use. Maybe pick 1 or 2 to level up to 100. Hmmm, decisions decisions. Okay, maybe use the tier rankings as some sort of guide (even though I really don't consider them all that reliable ... but saving that for another time and post)

I have seven Tier 1 crew:

CRUSHER, COMMANDO: 1/3*, lvl70
SHRAN, EXPEDITION: 2/3*, lvl50
BASHIR, RACQUETBALL: 1/3*, lvl60
JADZIA DAX, TOURIST: 2/3*, lvl46
DUCAT, KLINGON: 2/3*, lvl50

SITO JAXA, CADET: 2/2*, lvl60
TORRES, INJURED: 2/2*, lvl20

Only the 2* crew are FF.
I've had problems bringing Torres up in level ... (darn Klingon!)
Sito Jaxa gets big rave reviews on the 'big book' list so I'm thinking I just might start with her and see how she flies.

What do all you think?

Cuttysark

DavideBooks wrote: »

My advice (particularly of you spend very little) is to save all dilithium for crew slot sales. Avoid the pack temptation. Crew slots give you the freedom to field more crew. I have bet on packs and won, but I almost always lose. Crew slots are great. The expedition event we just did was easy for me crew-wise. I never lacked for crew and hardly had to search at all. Time needed to play was a bigger issue, but I digress. Save dilithium. Save portal pulls until you immortalize your low crew and can be rid of them.

First thing I did was to grit my teeth and decide to purchase the monthly dilithium pack each month. I am glad I do. I am of the opinion that the game wouldn't even be playable without a reliable source of dilithium. (DB has us over a barrel on that one) I use part of it each day to extend 1 journey and when/if necessary to purchase crew slots. I am at the point now (at 145 slots) where I need to wait for sales or 'gimmies' to get more though. I have about 1200 dil right now but we all know that doesn't go far in this neighborhood.

Purchasing crew packs are not even a temptation for me! LOL

I did manage to get 3 nice, shiny new 4* crew Sunday between some freebie portals, journeys run amok, and the Campaigns Reward ...

Synthetic Commander

Cuttysark wrote: »

So, I thought I would put some of the good advice above to use. Maybe pick 1 or 2 to level up to 100. Hmmm, decisions decisions. Okay, maybe use the tier rankings as some sort of guide (even though I really don't consider them all that reliable ... but saving that for another time and post)

I have seven Tier 1 crew:

CRUSHER, COMMANDO: 1/3*, lvl70
SHRAN, EXPEDITION: 2/3*, lvl50
BASHIR, RACQUETBALL: 1/3*, lvl60
JADZIA DAX, TOURIST: 2/3*, lvl46
DUCAT, KLINGON: 2/3*, lvl50

SITO JAXA, CADET: 2/2*, lvl60
TORRES, INJURED: 2/2*, lvl20

Only the 2* crew are FF.
I've had problems bringing Torres up in level ... (darn Klingon!)
Sito Jaxa gets big rave reviews on the 'big book' list so I'm thinking I just might start with her and see how she flies.

What do all you think?

Great choice. I used Sito Jaxa constantly until they introduced warpable cadet missions. She is definitely a good investment.

I'll disagree with the prior statement that dil is a requirement for this game, lots of people play VIP0 with zero money investment if that's where you are at. It's slower progress, but there are far more tools available than their used to be to develop at a reasonable pace (monthly purple free 1/4 from daily rewards, free campaign 4/4 every month, community rewards in events, etc).

Cuttysark

@Synthetic Commander
The Dilithium comment is just my personal opinion ... of course one can go without the monthly pack. (humor alert!) I just can't imagine doing so! LOL One, most likely, would hit that proverbial "brick wall" sooner or later, throw themselves out the airlock, and just quit playing never to be heard from again. ;-)

Data1001

I will go against a popular opinion here and state that I don't believe it's smart to buy a bunch of extra crew slots with dilithium. I haven't done it, myself. Having limited space keeps you more organized, and forces you to focus on a smaller roster, which is extremely helpful in the early stages of advancement in the game, since it's then not a temptation to spread your resources around equally to a much larger group of crew, thus slowing growth. Buy the extra shuttles, for sure, but don't waste your dil on buying more and more slots every time you're able. My 2 cents.

Cuttysark

@Data1001
"Buy the extra shuttles" ?? Is this a permanent thing? Or a do it every time thing?

Data1001

Cuttysark wrote: »

"Buy the extra shuttles" ?? Is this a permanent thing? Or a do it every time thing?

You can purchase up to 4 total shuttles, to own permanently. (Of course there are shuttle tokens now for a one-time use, but that's not what I'm referring to.) The faster you're able to do that, the better return you'll get during the missions you run during the week, and of course during Faction events. It's not quite as important as it once was, since the introduction of Voyages and Campaigns have given players more ways to collect resources, but it's still a crucial part of game play that you want to take care of when you're able.

Cuttysark

Thanks for that info ... I was unaware of it! If it helps in faction events then that is great news since that is the only kind of Event I really enjoy doing.

MiT Sanoa

I fully agree with @Data1001 on the shuttles - they should be your first priority for spending dil. They will even help you with the Klingons if you choose to run their missions.

Dirk Gunderson

[Mirror] Sanoa wrote: »

I fully agree with @Data1001 on the shuttles - they should be your first priority for spending dil. They will even help you with the Klingons if you choose to run their missions.

I’ll third (fourth?) this statement. If I created a new account, I would put as much dil as possible into the third and fourth shuttles. Shuttle tokens maybe change that math a little, though they will be limited for those who don’t get the premium campaign track. Regardless, even if you don’t have good enough crew to get the same success rates on the extra shuttles you’ll still get something from failed shuttles...which is more than you get from not sending a shuttle at all.

Buying crew slots for credits is fine but the dil cost skyrockets so much that it’s better to be judicious about what crew you keep and save your dil for more valuable things like event packs (especially the discounted mid-week and wrap-up packs) - definitely don’t spent dil on regular premium packs, though, because the portal pool is so diluted that it’s hard to fuse any one particular crew in a reasonable amount of time.

Cuttysark

Thanks again for all the advice. I may get the 3rd shuttle for now but will have to wait awhile for the 4th due it's high cost. I have been debating the extra shuttles vs cost but now that I am reminded of at least some rewards even for failed runs it all makes better sense now.

UPDATE: Sito Jaxa has been immortalized ... and I tossed Rifle Janeway in there too, with a citation, since she was sitting around @ lvl100 and looking bored. FF Jazz Musician Riker is up there too but is still 2 items away from being FE and those items are going to take some serious replicator work (of which I only get 1 shot a day). Maybe I'll try some shuttle missions for those various components?

LOL Now on to my next victim ...

[10F]risky Dingo

I recommend joining a fleet ASAP. Most fleets have maxed replicator usage; meaning, you'll get to replicate 4x a day instead of one.

JiveDutch

When i started playing my first purchases were soem crew slots and the extra shuttles.

With the extra shuttles it is also easier/faster to get to the daily Faction Mission mark of 7 , and it will substantially boost your leveling in factions, during faction events and in gaining items.
If you dont have good crew, just put in miserable crew ... as failed shuttles give trainers which you can use to level crew and do count towards mission progress ( missions get easier to complete from failures )

Travis S McClain

I wrote a thread with some catch-all universal recommendations that might be of some help. It even includes a flowchart made by @Data1001!

Cuttysark

@Travis S McClain Thanks for the link ...

Speaking of Klingons: I've sorta been debating throwing 'Injured Torres' out of the airlock. But for some reason she has been given a tier 1 rating. I just can't see it. So I am left with a dilemma of my own. LOL

JiveDutch

Injured Torres ... the card i could have used to complete my Jury Rigger collection for cheap instead of expensive 5* citations if she had arrived just a few weeks earlier ....