I think prioritise good voyage crew, with a range of skills. As my fleet mate pointed out, use Quipped crew, the proficiency bonus will work wonders.
The gauntlet opponents seem to be weak. I have only gone to ten hours. I would prioritise total skill over putting in a 1/5 gauntlet crew. 5/5 gauntlet crew would be fantastic though.
Maybe put in one reasonably strong for each skill.
The gauntlet bonus traits seem to be chosen from a small selection, it would be good to know what these are, but I don't think it's too important.
There does not seem to be any advantage to having multiple bonus crew, although I got the impression at least one will add a bonus, similar to how only one is needed for skirmishes. So add in Robin Hood, the Queen, or Wizard Hemmer.
Bonus AM is only as important as a normal voyage. Aim for more if you are going to be renewing with dilithium, or balance with skills if not.
The real trick is planning which crew to use, and in what order, in encounters. Use skill or crit bonuses if needed.
The crit bonuses are pretty much free from opening packs for time bonuses.
Just going to ramble a bit, feel free to chalk it up to "old man yells at clouds" and move on if you do not vibe with what comes next.
Is this voyage event fun? I am going into it cautiously but I will be honest, I do not really understand what is going on, what I should be doing, and I find it even more daunting a task to try and figure it out when apparently the only way to get clarification is to enter the Discord jungle and wade through thousands of comments hoping to find something of value.
I sent my event voyage, but the process of selecting made very little sense to me. Do I prioritize strong Gauntlet numbers? Do I prioritize strong Voyage numbers? Do I need to care that a card gets a bonus?
Other than Locutus, none of my strong Gauntlet cards had a bonus. I did the best I could when sending it out, I hit some decent numbers, I don't know. Staffing the voyage was not a fun process.
Resolving the Gauntlet parts is stressful. Cards I sent with no bonus suddenly HAVE a bonus during the Gauntlet, so now I am even more confused about how I should be staffing these things.
It all just sort of feels like an event built around constantly moving goalposts. It probably is not actually that way to the people that understand what is going on, but I am not one of those people apparently, very little of this feels intuitive or consistent, and the only way to try and get clarity is to jump into the Discord hivemind without a Borg Queen to harmonize the stream and hope to get lucky without getting crushed in an avalanche of replies.
So yes, is this fun?
Is this fun?….
Nobody seems to think so. Very daunting to start this event unless you are a lucky few have been able to pull the voyage fast forward tokens, and recognize the subtle difference as they look similar to the encounter skip, and know how to use them.
The crew selection can be confusing, myself, I followed my own path that made sense by choosing well rounded bonus crew selections of picards and costumed traits rather than specific event or proficiency crew.
The goalpost is constantly moving. Each encounter gives specific % increases to certain skills as the encounter opponent strengths increase.
The highlight colors are maddening. What is the green for? Why is it yellow or green or yellow and green? I assume that prof increase has something to do with the colors but really its just distracting.
Why did it give me a 3* explorer ship when I have several lvl 10 explorers ?
They've spent so much time programming this new exciting event type, so that we can all be confused by the over-complication of it all, and lack of instructions or information.
The lack of engagement is disappointing. Once you've passed the first few hours, You get a gauntlet style “encounter” every 2 hours.
The concept is still viable. The current application is not. With some changes it may indeed become fun.
My problem with the event is that they're using a 4* ship as the featured vehicle? I have a few other ships with "Explorer" but they only give +100AM instead of +500. Can we please use 5* ships in the future? Also, the bonus for other ships using the preferred trait should be, in my opinion, 250AM, there's no reason to have such a small boost for working over the years to get a ship to 5* when some of these ships are rarely added to the monthly arena.
There does not seem to be any advantage to having multiple bonus crew, although I got the impression at least one will add a bonus, similar to how only one is needed for skirmishes. So add in Robin Hood, the Queen, or Wizard Hemmer.
I don't believe this is true. I ran an initial Voyage event with 7 crew that gave antimatter bonuses, and I got multiples of 9 VP per loot drop after the first 15 minutes. I decided to recall that one and start a new one to test this hypothesis using a subset of antimatter bonus giving crew from the last one: Wizard Hemmer, Age of Sail Picard, and Locutus. Now, I'm only getting multiples of 7 VP per loot drop.
I wonder if the loot drop VP progression goes something like:
The gauntlet gets a bit more challenging at 12 hours. {Spoiler Character} who pops up at the end of the chain then has a top roll of 1400.
I went all out on Quipping up crew with the gold and silver skills but it's left me feeling exposed in the encounters when other skills are being tested (eg my best SEC roll is Locutus). I'm pretty sure I'll get to 20 hours on one token, but I don't know how much use that will be if I'm failing encounters at 16-18 hours. Next time round I'm going to send enough gauntlet-y people that all possible skill combos have at least half-decent coverage.
I decided to just send a "chill" voyage. It had strong voyagers, decent gauntleteers, 12 bonus crew, and zero Quipment. I did the first handful of Encounters and then used the boosts that let you skip Encounters...
I decided to just send a "chill" voyage. It had strong voyagers, decent gauntleteers, 12 bonus crew, and zero Quipment. I did the first handful of Encounters and then used the boosts that let you skip Encounters...
...here are the results:
Not super fun.
My voyage of barely 10 hours had over 44,000 points. I had Robin Hood; perhaps he gets a big bonus.
This is a very slow moving event type. I just hit 10hrs and I'm below 50K VP. It doesn't help that we were never told about the change in encounter times; I'm pretty sure I wasted a lot of time because I thought the first one would be in 30mins, like in the Beta. Why wasn't this information included in the event description?
2 thumbs down from me. Here 24½½ hours into the event and still not at 100k vps and knowing that for once participating in an event i wont get the threeshold.
Currently at 203rd place so its the same for most players
Also seeing the same issue, although it started for me when I was at about 1 day 8 hours into the voyage -- no voyage text, no display of Antimatter, and the fast forwards I just used did not bring up any encounters, so I think my VP is stagnant. I submitted a ticket.
I am going to agree with many of the above posts: the voyage portion of the event is not that fun and is not worth the effort. The amount of VP earned in relation to the time spent is horrible. If they repeat this again, they need to offer increased VP earned while voyaging/encounters or offer better rewards within the voyage.
* For skirmish and galaxy (supply) events, I can play on my time. Yes, it is more tap intensive, but it is on my schedule.
* For faction (shuttle) events, more VP is earned and better rewards than voyage. The event tells me exactly when the shuttles return and there are enough buffs around to extend or shorten the times as I need. And I can send extra shuttles if I have the tokens.
The voyage event doesn't specifically tell you when the next encounter is. The rewards for a successful encounter are underwhelming. It seems that being diligent with the timer, one would be hard pressed to achieve 350K VP in the 4 days without using a bunch of speed/skip buffs -- assuming one sleeps at night. 24 hrs in and I am at 61K VP.
1. Publish the voyage skills before the event starts. We need to coordinate this event with our regular voyage, but for a lot of the world the events do not start at the beginning of the day when we send out regular voyages (ex. I'm US EST, event started at noon). I tried to preplan the voyage, but if I'd have know it was SCI/DIP I would've kept my Chef Pike with his cookie quipment off my regular voyage.
2. Goes for regular voyage too: stop auto-selecting a low level ship just because it has the bonus, when a max level ship gives more antimatter.
3. Publish what the bonus VP is for event crew. I wasn't sure about staffing Robin Hood or no since I'd never put a super rare on a voyage. For Factions/Galaxies you can visually see how effective an event super rare is. No idea here.
4. Publish the time until next encounter, somewhere, anywhere, reason obvious.
5. I do not mind the encounters. I find them mildly enjoyable. But the timing at voyage start is awful. Even if point 4 is addressed so you'll at least know when the next one is, you will still need to babysit your phone until you reach the 2 hr mark. I do not like babysitting my phone. I already log into this game too much as it is. Now because my regular voyage and event voyage are out of sync, I'm asked to log in every hour to resolve something.
6. The consumables for this are not great on all fronts.
a) The encounter skips are good, but I only have 2? Why aren't these in the shuttle packs like the other boosts?
b) The crit boosts, got plenty of these but didn't have any difficultly with encounters until I hit 12 hours. I failed that encounter but I honestly just wanted to turn the boat around anyway so I could do Continuum and I was about to run out of gas. And if I was more experienced staffing these voyages I think I wouldn't have needed any help still at 12hrs.
c) Crew refresh, again I only have 2, but also didn't need them.
7. Make crew able to be used in Continuum while they are on a voyage. Continuum will be feasible if sending multiple 12hr event voyages is possible to still collect the threshold rewards (can't tell right now). But to be competitive in a voyage event, the dil spend to complete Continuum early will need to be anticipated as part of the resource price of a long event voyage.
6. The consumables for this are not great on all fronts.
a) The encounter skips are good, but I only have 2? Why aren't these in the shuttle packs like the other boosts?
b) The crit boosts, got plenty of these but didn't have any difficultly with encounters until I hit 12 hours. I failed that encounter but I honestly just wanted to turn the boat around anyway so I could do Continuum and I was about to run out of gas. And if I was more experienced staffing these voyages I think I wouldn't have needed any help still at 12hrs.
c) Crew refresh, again I only have 2, but also didn't need them.
They are all in the shuttle packs. You just need to buy a bunch of packs to get enough
6. The consumables for this are not great on all fronts.
a) The encounter skips are good, but I only have 2? Why aren't these in the shuttle packs like the other boosts?
They are, but I think they have extremely sucky odds. I'd been hoarding shuttle boosts for some time and pulled something like 5 encounter skips including 2 of the gold ones from ~50 rare-or-better 10-pulls just before the event started. At this point given the way people are talking about them I'm starting to wonder if I actually got lucky getting a 1% rate ...
I have to be doing something wrong with this event. I have 19 hours left and I only have a measly 38,000 points. This is very frustrating, especially when I see the number one player has 3,630,280 points. I will probably never play a voyage event again.
I have to be doing something wrong with this event. I have 19 hours left and I only have a measly 38,000 points. This is very frustrating, especially when I see the number one player has 3,630,280 points. I will probably never play a voyage event again.
This is essentially the second beta test for the voyage events. Just focus on the skirmish phase and you'll be fine.
I'm going to try some new Voyages to test my theory. Thank goodness the new Encounter schedule is much more frequent!
All right, with a few Voyage event runs under my belt with different crew compositions, I have some more data. The Ship bonus seems to apply only to antimatter, not to VP drops. The Encounters always have the 8, 32, 72, 128, 200, 288, (392, 512, 648, 800, 968) VP structure with a multiplier that increases with every full Encounter victory, so bonus crew only seem to affect the VPs given through loot drops during the Voyage.
I'm reporting the VP drops I got after 1m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 45m, 60m, 90m, 2h, 4h, 6h, and 8h. Missing data result from my terminating a Voyage early to try something new.
With 7 bonus crew (1 150 bonus, 1 100 bonus, 5 50 bonus):
?, ?, 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81 (I think the first two a 1 and 4, but my records were poor at the time)
With 3 bonus crew as a subset of those run above (Wizard Hemmer was the 150, Age of Sail Picard the 100, and Locutus the 50):
1, 2, 7, 14, 21, 28
With 12 bonus crew (mostly Costumed, including the 3 bonus crew above; I had to run 2 terrible Engineering primary super rares, which made me use some boosts just to get this far in the Voyage):
1, 4, 11, 23, 34, 45
With 4 bonus crew so far (Wizard Hemmer; Locutus, Kamin, and Horseback Picard):
1, 3, 7, 15, 22, 30, 37, 45, 52, 60, 67
Who knows if this will be maintained in subsequent iterations of this event? I'd be surprised given how low the overall VP count has been, but a similar principle might remain at play, in which more bonus crew give more loot VP drops. I'm going to run a Voyage after the one I'm running now crashes to test my 0-bonus extrapolation.
We get 50 AM for the trait, 50 AM for minor bonus crew, and these stack, so Costumed Picards get 100 AM. Explorers get nothing. Big bonus crew get 150 AM, but this does not stack with the trait.
Then there is the mess with which bonus crew get bonuses to VP. Do 100,150 AM crew give a bigger bonus boost than 50 AM crew.
Multiple crew only count once, so to Robin Hoods will count as one.
Then there's the matter of Picard Day Riker counting as a Picard.
He doesn't have the costumed trait.
This is far too complicated, and will need a decent spreadsheet before next event.
I think the Voyage event concept is a cool idea and I hope that if it is run again in the future that the changes mentioned in the in game message (thank you BTW for sending that in game!) but for this time, we are almost done with the voyage portion and I still have no real idea what is going on.
I sent my first voyage with 12 "bonus" crew and only scored what, 33+K for 12.5 hours? I have sent a second voyage out, this time with an immortalized Wizard Hemmer, a 6-pack of Gauntlet all-stars, and 5 beefy voyage cards to round out my team and have just over 40K VP at the 10 hour mark. I also have not used a single one of those Encounter skips on this second voyage as I got the feeling on the first voyage that it was not quite giving me the full multiplier, but i am not sure.
So the adjustments I made from my first to second attempt had positive results (yay!) but still not really moving the needle on actual progress. Assuming I get up to ~60K VP after the 12 hour Encounter and replicated that 5-6 times for a full 4 day event, that would get me close to the magic finish line of 350,000 VP but that would be a LOT of work for 4 straight days. Just my point zero two dollars' worth but I feel if you design something that requires that much work, the reward should be increased. If a player invests in immortalizing the feature legendary card and uses it as intended every two hours for 4 straight days, that return should be great enough to not have to even consider worrying about completing thresholds.
Comments
The gauntlet opponents seem to be weak. I have only gone to ten hours. I would prioritise total skill over putting in a 1/5 gauntlet crew. 5/5 gauntlet crew would be fantastic though.
Maybe put in one reasonably strong for each skill.
The gauntlet bonus traits seem to be chosen from a small selection, it would be good to know what these are, but I don't think it's too important.
There does not seem to be any advantage to having multiple bonus crew, although I got the impression at least one will add a bonus, similar to how only one is needed for skirmishes. So add in Robin Hood, the Queen, or Wizard Hemmer.
Bonus AM is only as important as a normal voyage. Aim for more if you are going to be renewing with dilithium, or balance with skills if not.
The real trick is planning which crew to use, and in what order, in encounters. Use skill or crit bonuses if needed.
The crit bonuses are pretty much free from opening packs for time bonuses.
😆😆😅 i spent 3 days repeating myself in fleet convos trying to explain this. 🤦🏻♀️
Is this fun?….
Nobody seems to think so. Very daunting to start this event unless you are a lucky few have been able to pull the voyage fast forward tokens, and recognize the subtle difference as they look similar to the encounter skip, and know how to use them.
The crew selection can be confusing, myself, I followed my own path that made sense by choosing well rounded bonus crew selections of picards and costumed traits rather than specific event or proficiency crew.
The goalpost is constantly moving. Each encounter gives specific % increases to certain skills as the encounter opponent strengths increase.
The highlight colors are maddening. What is the green for? Why is it yellow or green or yellow and green? I assume that prof increase has something to do with the colors but really its just distracting.
Why did it give me a 3* explorer ship when I have several lvl 10 explorers ?
They've spent so much time programming this new exciting event type, so that we can all be confused by the over-complication of it all, and lack of instructions or information.
The lack of engagement is disappointing. Once you've passed the first few hours, You get a gauntlet style “encounter” every 2 hours.
The concept is still viable. The current application is not. With some changes it may indeed become fun.
I don't believe this is true. I ran an initial Voyage event with 7 crew that gave antimatter bonuses, and I got multiples of 9 VP per loot drop after the first 15 minutes. I decided to recall that one and start a new one to test this hypothesis using a subset of antimatter bonus giving crew from the last one: Wizard Hemmer, Age of Sail Picard, and Locutus. Now, I'm only getting multiples of 7 VP per loot drop.
I wonder if the loot drop VP progression goes something like:
1 bonus crew: 5 VP multiples/drop
2 bonus crew: 6 VP multiples/drop
3 bonus crew: 7 VP multiples/drop
4-5 bonus crew: 8 VP multiples/drop
6-7 bonus crew: 9 VP multiples/drop
8-10? bonus crew: 10 VP multples/drop
?11-12 bonus crew: 11 VP multiples/drop
I'm going to try some new Voyages to test my theory. Thank goodness the new Encounter schedule is much more frequent!
I look forward to your future information on this. Of course, this may change again for the next event.
I went all out on Quipping up crew with the gold and silver skills but it's left me feeling exposed in the encounters when other skills are being tested (eg my best SEC roll is Locutus). I'm pretty sure I'll get to 20 hours on one token, but I don't know how much use that will be if I'm failing encounters at 16-18 hours. Next time round I'm going to send enough gauntlet-y people that all possible skill combos have at least half-decent coverage.
...here are the results:
Not super fun.
My voyage of barely 10 hours had over 44,000 points. I had Robin Hood; perhaps he gets a big bonus.
Yes.
You can also let the AM run out, and then recall.
Currently at 203rd place so its the same for most players
Also seeing the same issue, although it started for me when I was at about 1 day 8 hours into the voyage -- no voyage text, no display of Antimatter, and the fast forwards I just used did not bring up any encounters, so I think my VP is stagnant. I submitted a ticket.
* For skirmish and galaxy (supply) events, I can play on my time. Yes, it is more tap intensive, but it is on my schedule.
* For faction (shuttle) events, more VP is earned and better rewards than voyage. The event tells me exactly when the shuttles return and there are enough buffs around to extend or shorten the times as I need. And I can send extra shuttles if I have the tokens.
The voyage event doesn't specifically tell you when the next encounter is. The rewards for a successful encounter are underwhelming. It seems that being diligent with the timer, one would be hard pressed to achieve 350K VP in the 4 days without using a bunch of speed/skip buffs -- assuming one sleeps at night. 24 hrs in and I am at 61K VP.
It should be easy for long term play to hit old rewards, 130k and 3 copies of the super rare.
It's what I often aim for in galaxy if I don't want thr legendary.
F2p players should be able to build up boosts over time, and decide which events to blow them on.
As it stands, well done to Tilting point for making this a hybrid event.
1. Publish the voyage skills before the event starts. We need to coordinate this event with our regular voyage, but for a lot of the world the events do not start at the beginning of the day when we send out regular voyages (ex. I'm US EST, event started at noon). I tried to preplan the voyage, but if I'd have know it was SCI/DIP I would've kept my Chef Pike with his cookie quipment off my regular voyage.
2. Goes for regular voyage too: stop auto-selecting a low level ship just because it has the bonus, when a max level ship gives more antimatter.
3. Publish what the bonus VP is for event crew. I wasn't sure about staffing Robin Hood or no since I'd never put a super rare on a voyage. For Factions/Galaxies you can visually see how effective an event super rare is. No idea here.
4. Publish the time until next encounter, somewhere, anywhere, reason obvious.
5. I do not mind the encounters. I find them mildly enjoyable. But the timing at voyage start is awful. Even if point 4 is addressed so you'll at least know when the next one is, you will still need to babysit your phone until you reach the 2 hr mark. I do not like babysitting my phone. I already log into this game too much as it is. Now because my regular voyage and event voyage are out of sync, I'm asked to log in every hour to resolve something.
6. The consumables for this are not great on all fronts.
a) The encounter skips are good, but I only have 2? Why aren't these in the shuttle packs like the other boosts?
b) The crit boosts, got plenty of these but didn't have any difficultly with encounters until I hit 12 hours. I failed that encounter but I honestly just wanted to turn the boat around anyway so I could do Continuum and I was about to run out of gas. And if I was more experienced staffing these voyages I think I wouldn't have needed any help still at 12hrs.
c) Crew refresh, again I only have 2, but also didn't need them.
7. Make crew able to be used in Continuum while they are on a voyage. Continuum will be feasible if sending multiple 12hr event voyages is possible to still collect the threshold rewards (can't tell right now). But to be competitive in a voyage event, the dil spend to complete Continuum early will need to be anticipated as part of the resource price of a long event voyage.
They are all in the shuttle packs. You just need to buy a bunch of packs to get enough
They are, but I think they have extremely sucky odds. I'd been hoarding shuttle boosts for some time and pulled something like 5 encounter skips including 2 of the gold ones from ~50 rare-or-better 10-pulls just before the event started. At this point given the way people are talking about them I'm starting to wonder if I actually got lucky getting a 1% rate ...
This is essentially the second beta test for the voyage events. Just focus on the skirmish phase and you'll be fine.
All right, with a few Voyage event runs under my belt with different crew compositions, I have some more data. The Ship bonus seems to apply only to antimatter, not to VP drops. The Encounters always have the 8, 32, 72, 128, 200, 288, (392, 512, 648, 800, 968) VP structure with a multiplier that increases with every full Encounter victory, so bonus crew only seem to affect the VPs given through loot drops during the Voyage.
I'm reporting the VP drops I got after 1m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 45m, 60m, 90m, 2h, 4h, 6h, and 8h. Missing data result from my terminating a Voyage early to try something new.
With 7 bonus crew (1 150 bonus, 1 100 bonus, 5 50 bonus):
?, ?, 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81 (I think the first two a 1 and 4, but my records were poor at the time)
With 3 bonus crew as a subset of those run above (Wizard Hemmer was the 150, Age of Sail Picard the 100, and Locutus the 50):
1, 2, 7, 14, 21, 28
With 12 bonus crew (mostly Costumed, including the 3 bonus crew above; I had to run 2 terrible Engineering primary super rares, which made me use some boosts just to get this far in the Voyage):
1, 4, 11, 23, 34, 45
With 4 bonus crew so far (Wizard Hemmer; Locutus, Kamin, and Horseback Picard):
1, 3, 7, 15, 22, 30, 37, 45, 52, 60, 67
Thus, after 15 minutes,
Bcrew VP/drop
3 7.0
4 7.5
7 9.0
12 11.5
By interpolation and extrapolation,
Bcrew VP/drop
0 5.5
1 6.0
2 6.5
3 7.0
4 7.5
5 8.0
6 8.5
7 9.0
8 9.5
9 10.0
10 10.5
11 11.0
12 11.5
Who knows if this will be maintained in subsequent iterations of this event? I'd be surprised given how low the overall VP count has been, but a similar principle might remain at play, in which more bonus crew give more loot VP drops. I'm going to run a Voyage after the one I'm running now crashes to test my 0-bonus extrapolation.
We get 50 AM for the trait, 50 AM for minor bonus crew, and these stack, so Costumed Picards get 100 AM. Explorers get nothing. Big bonus crew get 150 AM, but this does not stack with the trait.
Then there is the mess with which bonus crew get bonuses to VP. Do 100,150 AM crew give a bigger bonus boost than 50 AM crew.
Multiple crew only count once, so to Robin Hoods will count as one.
Then there's the matter of Picard Day Riker counting as a Picard.
He doesn't have the costumed trait.
This is far too complicated, and will need a decent spreadsheet before next event.
I sent my first voyage with 12 "bonus" crew and only scored what, 33+K for 12.5 hours? I have sent a second voyage out, this time with an immortalized Wizard Hemmer, a 6-pack of Gauntlet all-stars, and 5 beefy voyage cards to round out my team and have just over 40K VP at the 10 hour mark. I also have not used a single one of those Encounter skips on this second voyage as I got the feeling on the first voyage that it was not quite giving me the full multiplier, but i am not sure.
So the adjustments I made from my first to second attempt had positive results (yay!) but still not really moving the needle on actual progress. Assuming I get up to ~60K VP after the 12 hour Encounter and replicated that 5-6 times for a full 4 day event, that would get me close to the magic finish line of 350,000 VP but that would be a LOT of work for 4 straight days. Just my point zero two dollars' worth but I feel if you design something that requires that much work, the reward should be increased. If a player invests in immortalizing the feature legendary card and uses it as intended every two hours for 4 straight days, that return should be great enough to not have to even consider worrying about completing thresholds.