Voyages challenge - apparently the biggest problem in the game - possible tips for people struggling
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While many of us are completely shocked at the incredible level of saltiness over the voyages daily challenge, I have to acknowledge some of you are raging hard over it. First I would suggest maybe take a step back, and think about the actual impact to you if you for some reason can't complete the challenge. Missing out on 200 honor isn't the end of the world, even in the sad little world of STT.
To try and help out, If you are struggling to meet the challenge with your level of resources and available time try the following:
1. Look at the forums for tips (voyage planning tool) on how to maximize your voyages. If you can get to 4 hours or 6, you can cut the time needed to play to get the challenge completed.
2. Before you go to bed, send out your voyage. When you wake up, you just have to open the game and select a delimma. Then check back any time during the day at least two hours later. You're 2/3 there.
3. Ask your fleetmates for advice how to improve. That's what a good fleet does, they help the little guys grow stronger.
4. Keep working on improving your crew. The stronger they are, the longer your voyages can go. If you can get to 6 hours on one voyage, you are home free on the challenges.
To try and help out, If you are struggling to meet the challenge with your level of resources and available time try the following:
1. Look at the forums for tips (voyage planning tool) on how to maximize your voyages. If you can get to 4 hours or 6, you can cut the time needed to play to get the challenge completed.
2. Before you go to bed, send out your voyage. When you wake up, you just have to open the game and select a delimma. Then check back any time during the day at least two hours later. You're 2/3 there.
3. Ask your fleetmates for advice how to improve. That's what a good fleet does, they help the little guys grow stronger.
4. Keep working on improving your crew. The stronger they are, the longer your voyages can go. If you can get to 6 hours on one voyage, you are home free on the challenges.
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Essentially one of the key points is to ramp up the gold and silver skills over the others. The wiki explains this better, but a balanced crew will not get you any where near as far.
Try to get a balanced crew roster though, having 6 fully fused super-rares in each skill will get you to 4 hours easily every day, and probably six hours. So it makes sense to get your crew leveled as soon as possible. Once you're at 4 hours you literally only need to jump in a few times a day and hit those buttons. Time it with shuttles and you'll find the goodies pouring in.
Honestly, if you're new the number of cadets you'll pick up will massively help you with cadet challenges and filling out the cryo vault (you get free dil for this). Plus the chron return from voyages is far better than the natural replenish rate, and you get heaps of honor, trainers and 0-2* items. It's really worth doing anyway.
So instead of raging, just enjoy. If you miss out on some daily honor, you'll be missing out on much much more from voyages if you don't do them.
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I only have online access outside of my working day, on Wi-Fi only at home, I don't have a smartphone to access during the day. I am a level 52 player (VIP 5) and been playing for a long time, successfully achieving all the dailies almost every day.
I have been running voyages pretty constantly since they were introduced, and normally achieve between 5 1/2 hours and on the odd occasion up to 6 1/2 hours, depending on the skill sets.
A typical scenario is for me to start a voyage in the morning before work, then there is the first 2hr dilemma waiting when I get home. I immediately hit that, which is normally around 6:30pm, by 8:30 pm I hit the second 4 hr dilemma, then sometime between 10pm and 10:30pm I normally need to recall (having not reached the 6hr dilemma), the recall takes at least 2 hrs to return, by which time it can be past midnight, when I am in bed asleep. By the morning I am able to collect and restart the voyage for the new day. As you can see I am only able to achieve 2 dilemmas a day, and with the daily reset at 5am in the UK, it is now impossible for me to achieve this new daily, and therefore complete all dailies for the 200 Honor.
Even shifting the voyage start time, to reach a 4hr dilemma in the mornings, all I have time for is to go about another hour and recall before work. I normally cannot guarantee a 6hr voyage, so I can't just leave the 4hr - 6hr running unattended, as it will more often than not run out of antimatter, it still only works out that I achieve 2 dilemmas in a normal working day. I don't have spare, and never use any dilithium to extend or speed up recalling voyages, so that is not an option.
However you look at it, as it stands it is impossible for me to achieve on a daily basis.
A mobile game should be fun and while challenging, ultimately should not be a chore which interferes heavily with daily life. For phd to meet the required dailies now, it'd have to impact his/her daily life by missing work which is an unfair situation. Of course phd would value his/her job over the game, but that choice shouldn't even be put forth.
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I would say this situation exists with every multiplayer game. The more you play, the more you can progress. Those who play less will fall behind those who play more. It's human nature to want to compete, but everyone needs to find their balance with work and personal lives.
Honestly I am a little surprised at a level 52 not being able to achieve a 6 hr voyage.
Would you mind putting up some of your roster? There might be some modifications/hints/prioritizations that can be done to give you a better voyage experience.
Umm, if this is a MOBILE game, why do they make it available via Facebook, and my LAPTOP?
So in this analogy, Microsoft produces a game for Xbox and Windows, but designs it to work out better for Xbox. That's how I see this change.
And if I am "not who this game was designed for", then maybe I am not the one who should be paying DB as I have been.
I am able to achieve 6hrs on some occasions, if the skills are combinations of DIP / SEC / CMD, and a good choice of ship, but more often than not there are ENG / SCI / MED in the mix, and I don't have enough to cover those combinations. I can comfortably achieve 5 1/2 hrs without too much trouble in most combinations, without the need to use the STT Voyage Estimator anymore.
I have around 12 5*'s some of which are FE, and many 4*'s also a fair number FE/FF, with 135 crew (if I remember rightly). I can achieve all cadet missions on all 7 days at all levels. Those not out on a voyage go out on my 4 shuttles.
Just because a game is primarily Mobile, should not exclude it from other less mobile platforms. As I said I have been happily playing the game for nearly 2 years, along with other so-called mobile games, on my iPad at home. It is normally not necessary to be logging on every hour or so to continue to enjoy the game. I'm just not someone who gets withdrawal symptoms if I haven't checked my phone in the last 10 mins!
I get where you are coming from, I was hoping that in looking at your roster in more detail it could be determined a character or several characters that you already have that just need a citation or leveled to give you the edge against your pain points. MED, for instance, is becoming less of a hole for me due to the recent Admiral, and other additions -- so leveling her and fusing her up became a priority.
I would say that really depends. Remember that you lose 30 for a failure but only gain 5 for a win.
I have had several voyages where I have heavily focused on getting a good gold and silver score and let my other stats drop only to find that I am still winning on my silver stat when my voyage is under 200 AM.
Having a Gold and Silver score of over 10,000 for example is pointless if the rest of your stats mean you fail every hazard after about 30 minutes in.
Gold and Silver stats are used more frequently than the others. So yes, you fail them more---
There's a balance, too much disparity can lead to a wide range of possible durations, whereas the closer they are the easier it is to predict.
It you have 10k on gold and silver and 2k on others, I'm betting you'd make it further than say 8k gold and silver and 4k on others.
I think the simplest way to formulate a "good" strategy is to pick a Dilemma threshold (2/4/6/8/10 hr) and try to optimize to it.
For the 2 hr dilemma, the skill cap is 2500 (that is, you need a 2500 skill to pass hazards). If your goal is to break 2 hrs, your priorities should be:
4/6/8/10 hour strategies are similar, but with different thresholds.
4hr -> 5000
6hr -> 7500
8hr -> 10,000
10hr -> 12,500
etc
There are lots of ways to make this more complicated or nuanced, but I think that this strategy is one of the easiest to implement.
*BUT* it is still recent memory when my F2P account couldn't even do a 2hr run. Didn't have a 5* ship and didn't have crew levelled enough (It took nearly 3 weeks for me to get a 5* ship off of Dabo). In that time I was still able to do all of the dailies, now I wouldn't be.
All adding this to the game has done is give the haves 25,000 credits and 25 Merits and punished some have nots by removing 200 honor. It's a poorly thought out addition to the game, and the easiest way to deal with it is just to remove it, or at least remove it from the overall daily challenge. Or better yet have it count toward the daily challenge, but leave the challenge at 10 dailies so that I never have to play arena again!
Using 2750 AM as a starting point, my spreadsheet has 8k/8k/4k estimated at 7:31 and 10k/10k/2k estimated at 7:35.
By any measure, results would be pretty similar. However, one setup requires 28k total skill and the other requires 32k total skill. I would imagine you could build a 10k/10k/2k setup with overall weaker crew than you could with 8k/8k/4k since it would require 4k fewer skill points overall.
Edit: 6k/6k/4k setup would average 6:30.
I second this. I had a DIP/SEC voyage where I loaded DIP to 10,000 and SEC to 9000ish, with the other four all between 1500 and 2500. I lost so much AM in the first six hours that it wasn’t worth extending beyond then. I hit 7.5 hours before running out of AM on my current voyage (SCI/SEC) with about 8000 in both the primary and secondary skills and 3000 in the others.
It might be interesting to do the predicted maths.
However, if you have 10k in both gold and silver that would mean that 6 out of 10 hazards would be at the high level with 4 out of 10 at the low level.
That means out of every 10 hazards:
We would expect to lose 4x30 AM= 120
Gain 6x5 AM = 30
As well as lose 1 AM for every other log entry.
That starts to go downhill pretty quickly and you are almost certainly not going to get to a point where your primary stats fail.
With the second voyage the higher results for the secondary stats might compensate for the lower primary stats (we wouldn't start the AM drain until the secondary stats fail - a win for the secondary stats gives you the same as the primary stats)
The important thing to know is when 2k stats start to fail compared to 4k stats
Skill checks go up about 1250 per hour (2500 per dilemma).
Edit: So 2k starts failing around 1:36 and 4k starts failing around 3:12
You can see most of that information here as well as experiment with different compositions:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bm0emOz-eNHU-_YCH741vG4DxRltoyS4tWvA6cee3V8/edit#gid=0
Edit: Keep in mind, this calculates an AVERAGE. Based on the ACTUAL hazards you experience, you could over-perform or under-perform. I've seen variance as big as 30-45 minutes (both directions)
Actually it's other way around. Biggest problems are Med/Eng/Sci. While Com/Sec have Picard and T'Kuvma for fast big increase, for older players Kortar too. There is also Kahless and his powerful Voyage scores even as 1/5. And there are plenty of others (I got 7k Com while stuffing Med/Sci as priority earlier today just by side skills).
In fact in my crew skills file I just sorted crew by multiplicatives of 10/10/10/10/25/25 and top 12 got me (without starbase) 6417, 7497, 2730, 3882, 3888, 4211. So my best 12 people for voyage NATURALLY gave me this for Med/Sci (10/10/10/10/35/25 is just much worse on sorting crew, for Com/Sec/Dip I even use 10/10/10/10/15/15).
1. Send out voyage
2. Check back 2 hours or more to do dilemma
3. Check back 2 hours or more to do dilemma
4. Check back two hours or more to do dilemma and recall voyage.
5. Now should be next day back to one.
You have to be able to login 4 times with at least 2 hours in between each login. @Phd this is not something with your time constraints that is possible. Note here I am just doing six hour voyage.
You at least need one more login either during work or at night.
Edit2: if you can get 6 hour voyage. You need to get 1st dilemma at 6:30pm, 2nd 8:30pm, and , 3rd at 10:30pm then recall. However, you know you can add a minute for each dilemma and if you are later than 6:30pm everything is pushed back. But I am wrong to think not possible. Just means no leeway for the most part.
Edit: only way to reduce this you have to be able to guarantee 6 hour voyage and then you speed up the return voyage with dil. (Not worth it to get 25 merits and 200 honor)
That way same time you return you send out voyage.
The 25k credits mean a pair of 4* replications every week. That is not inconsequential to anyone.
I don't understand your quibble about Antimatter. Dropping to 2700 doesn't change the calculations hardly at all. And matching Ship+4 traits is not that much different than Ship+2 traits. Either way, I maintain 10k/10k/2k and 8k/4k/4k perform approximately the same given the "expected" AM ranges. Higher AM levels, however, will lead to better returns from the 10k setups than the 8k.
I don't mind agreeing to disagree on the total crew. Different people with different crews will have different problems constructing their voyages.
2700 AM is only two matching traits if your ship trait matches. That's pretty poor.
I think the worst that I've had is 5 crew traits and that's because the game decided I needed to bring multiple Bajorans (or some other low quantity Alien). A lot of the time the game will give you easy traits. Something like multiple Starfleets, Doctor on both MED seats, etc.
Personally for skills, I go for 9k/9k/??. In order to hit 8 hrs you do not need 10K. Getting a success right before the 8 hour dilemma isn't really helpful. This way I still get successes past the 7 hour mark. This will also give me a lot more space to play with traits and off skills. My current MED/DIP Voyage has Mirror Picard in it simply because I was able to achieve 9k9k and I can now slot in high skill characters with good traits. Last night this Voyage hit 8h38m with a subpar ship (2550 AM). I expect roughly the same with this one.
When you get Spore drive for four days in a row you know RNG is against you
Similarly, players could get 100 honor for completing 5 Daily Missions, then the additional 100 for the next 6. (And really, it should be 150 due to mission inflation.)