These are the voyages...(Voyage discussion)
in Make It So!
I've wondered for a while whether we are going to see any improvements or additions to the voyage game mode. Just for background, I've been playing for close to 2.5 years and have been consistently hitting 10hr voyages, with no refreshes, in all skill combos for quite a while (Med/eng and med/cmd are the ones most likely to fail on an unlucky run).
Once 10hrs is achieved it seems like there is no where to really go with this game mode. Sure, there are incrementally better voyage crew out there but the hurdle to get to the 12hr mark is too far to reach to justify the investment cost (to star-up legendaries purely to get a tiny increase in voyage length) especially when the reward is just more FFFE purple/blue/etc crew to toss out the airlock. I figured I'd just toss out a couple ideas I've thought about regarding voyages and see what others think:
1) Quality of life request: Please rank the ships by how much antimatter they have when factoring in the antimatter bonus at the voyage crew selection screen. This seems like such an easy improvement to save all of us from having to scroll through all our ships every time we start a voyage to find that one max-5* ship that matches the bonus trait.
2) Another quality of life one: Make it so we can delete voyage reward crew right at the collection screen and not have to then go searching through our roster to find the duplicates to toss out the airlock.
3) (I saw this was mentioned in at least one other thread on here) Add Legendary crew to the drop table. They can be old legendary crew, whatever seems balanced. I'd say make it possible for them to drop starting at the 8hr mark, with the chance increasing each hour after that.
4) In order to make 12hrs and beyond a realistic possibility, make it possible to unlock two additional voyage crew slots. In my mind I've called these slots "Passenger" and "Stowaway" and they are wild-card slots with no skill type requirement and with different additional trait bonuses then are already available in the other slots. For example, "Passenger" could have trait bonus for "Royalty", "Ambassador", "Merchant", among others; while "Stowaway" could have "Thief", "Criminal", "Temporal agent", etc. The traits are obviously up for discussion and I think should focus on bringing in traits that aren't already covered in other crew slots.
Just some thoughts.
Once 10hrs is achieved it seems like there is no where to really go with this game mode. Sure, there are incrementally better voyage crew out there but the hurdle to get to the 12hr mark is too far to reach to justify the investment cost (to star-up legendaries purely to get a tiny increase in voyage length) especially when the reward is just more FFFE purple/blue/etc crew to toss out the airlock. I figured I'd just toss out a couple ideas I've thought about regarding voyages and see what others think:
1) Quality of life request: Please rank the ships by how much antimatter they have when factoring in the antimatter bonus at the voyage crew selection screen. This seems like such an easy improvement to save all of us from having to scroll through all our ships every time we start a voyage to find that one max-5* ship that matches the bonus trait.
2) Another quality of life one: Make it so we can delete voyage reward crew right at the collection screen and not have to then go searching through our roster to find the duplicates to toss out the airlock.
3) (I saw this was mentioned in at least one other thread on here) Add Legendary crew to the drop table. They can be old legendary crew, whatever seems balanced. I'd say make it possible for them to drop starting at the 8hr mark, with the chance increasing each hour after that.
4) In order to make 12hrs and beyond a realistic possibility, make it possible to unlock two additional voyage crew slots. In my mind I've called these slots "Passenger" and "Stowaway" and they are wild-card slots with no skill type requirement and with different additional trait bonuses then are already available in the other slots. For example, "Passenger" could have trait bonus for "Royalty", "Ambassador", "Merchant", among others; while "Stowaway" could have "Thief", "Criminal", "Temporal agent", etc. The traits are obviously up for discussion and I think should focus on bringing in traits that aren't already covered in other crew slots.
Just some thoughts.
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Comments
This being said, I love the flavor you've presented for your proposed additional crew slots. Would add a lot of value to some otherwise underutilized traits as well.
There's another interesting potential here, if you don't mind me grabbing your idea and running with it. Voyages are already the best source of rewards in the game, and adding legendaries (or constallations) in the loot table only biases this further. However, what if those additional crew slots were optional, and had some sort of disadvantage. You can add a Passenger, but now your return is slower. You can add a Stowaway, but fewer credits will drop. Maybe there are several slots, you can only chose one, and each has its own disadvantage. "Stowaway has Temporal Agent, do I want to add Braxton there and get the antimatter boost even thought I'll get fewer chrons?"
Complex to implement and balance, although it probably wouldn't require a tremendous amount of UI work. And given the number of platforms STT supports, I imagine even small UI changes are a handful.
Starport
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Maybe. I think the idea has merit, but it would be too complicated to implement and too easy to acrew up the whole thing.
On that note, one other concept that might make Voyages more interesting, maybe have a reason to add other ships to your voyage? Like, you pick the primary ship and crew it, but you can also pick two different escort ships, and different types of escorts have different effects, like having a chance to boost a stat on a challenge or take a hit from the antimatter on a challenge loss, or give a small "speed" boost on an a challenge win, or increase the chances for the next part of a quest chain to occur if you get one already?
Just something to add that bit of extra flair to voyages and ships.
I've spoke on Voyages before. So, I'll be vague. It's something that was way way great the first time, and some times after, but I think and feel it needs continued improvements. This event ? is so key to the spirit of Star Trek, it deserves extra attention, and keyword on: maximum fun! Make us feel like we're really venturing forth into the unknown, with all the bells and whistles of all that goes into Boldly Going to where no one has gone before. Maybe, as it already is, fun on board too.
Wishing you great successes in life, and all that is Star Trek, Dear Reader! -Turen
2. Deleting unwanted crew on the Voyage screen would be lovely. It's not quite as important as ranking ships, more a minor time saver, but would still be nice.
3. Adding old legendary crew to the drop seems sensible. Having more high level option Dilemmas would also be nice.
4. I very much enjoy the idea of two new slots. But from a programming standpoint, that could be tricky for them to implement.
I also proposed the idea of "Voyage Boosts" in another post that would specifically be useful for long term players... Basically when we delete crew, we would get at least one (possibly more for higher quality crew) trait oriented voyage boosts that we could use to fill trait slots on our ships to raise the antimatter to higher levels.
Similarly, we might take unneeded ship schematics and toss them into the "antimatter chamber" to boost antimatter on a Voyage. I'd prefer that to tossing then into the replicator.
Shuttle nine hour boosts are very useful for getting some sleep at night (though I wish they were eight hours for double rewards instead of nine), but we could also use Voyage "doubling" boosts that can be applied to Voyages. (Voyage boosts in general would be lovely, but an extension on the two hours would be the most useful.)
Basically, it would be great if you could head to bed, or to a business meeting, and apply a boost that extended the time to the next dilemma by 8-9 hours, that would have the effect of doubling or tripling the rewards (at the expense of having no Dilemmas during those eight hours.)
Our sleep cycles and meeting schedules would love you!
As far as Voyage boosts go, it would be a lot of fun, when deleting crew, if we got a random trait from the crew member, in addition to honor, and we could use the trait tokens to fill trait slots on the Voyage that crew members aren't filling.
Add random ship battles to "Dilemmas" on Voyages. Instead of getting a random dilemma, another ship attacks you! You can choose to AVOID or BATTLE. If you avoid, you just get any of the random crew members and items you normally get during a dilemma at that particular hour into the Voyage.
If you choose to BATTLE then you go into a standard arena battle against a random weekend event type of ship. You would have to use the ship you selected for the Voyage in the battle, but could choose any of your extended crew to man the ship.
If you lose, you get any of the random crew/items you normally get during a dilemma. If you win, you get SILVER or GOLD equipment cache and a single PREMIUM REWARD pull from the Portal.
Yes, yes, yes +1
Seems like it would be easy enough to do, just take the current voyage engine, with event unique dilemmas at the end of each two hour period, and restrict crew eligible to be on the ships to specific variants and traits. Points collected will naturally be greater for players who are able to achieve longer voyages without returning, so as usual, players with better crew or more dilithium will "win".
Might give people a chance to dust off a few rare and even uncommon crew just to fill the seats. It could be fun.
I would like to weigh in on the question of voyages if I may. I tend, for the most part, to set the voyages in motion in a sort of "set and forget" manner. I let them run their course, collect whatever they're going to collect within the pre-dilemma period and then resolve the dilemma and recall with whatever "loot" they have garnered.
In the meantime I am concentrating on faction missions, event activities and galactic map missions.
I believe I have covered every available option in every available dilemma in doing it this way and, to be perfectly honest, I'm getting tired of flushing Rikers, Worfs and Trips out the airlock.
I think that the base voyage dilemmas need expanding in some manner. Having said that, yes, I probably need to forego some of the shorter, and less "profitable" activities and push some voyages out.
Perhaps additional dilemmas are needed and certainly with an expansion in the number, and nature, of available crew pick-ups that can be gained. I have to make the observation that, in the main throughout the game, the range of available "reward crew" seems heavily weighted toward the male gender (trying not to read anything into that one...!!! LOL) This does seem to be prevalent on voyages where I have often been able to pick-up three male crew members in one mission.
I don't know how complicated the addition of dilemmas is but I would assume that the attachment of more of the 800 plus "crew retrieval" individuals shouldn't be too difficult, no?
Live long and prosper,
CS
That would help you with most of your questions.
You might also want to check out “The Voyage Project” threads on The Bridge:
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/15954/the-voyage-project-part-1/p1
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/17493/the-voyage-project-part-2-sort-of/p1
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/17903/the-voyage-project-part-3-tool-included/p1
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I’ve always thought it would be nice to find a way to increase antimatter during the voyage. This could be done through the “discovery” of it along the way, or through the stowaway idea you have mentioned. More times than I can count, a lack of a few minutes worth of antimatter has doomed my voyage just prior to the dilemma.
I also like the idea of finding legendaries on the voyage. Specifically, I’d like to see Decrepit Legendaries added into the reward tables.
The repetitive dilemmas are another issue. It would help a lot if you could at least mark certain dilemmas as "never show me this again" - at least then there would be a reasonable chance of seeing the end of some of the three part dilemmas.
I just completed my first 20-hour voyage and while the 8 purples are nice I think that the investment of time, (and in my case dilithium), warrant some gold.
At this point, I can't see going for another 20 anytime soon.
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Maybe every 6 (or 8) hours a voyage has a chance to drop voyage tokens...