…I gotta wear shades

Well, it looks like the changes I mentioned a couple of weeks ago are going ahead, so I’ll soon be moving to a new job in a new (and warmer) country.

While this is great news for me, I’m afraid it means that The Engines Cannae’ Take It! is going to have to go on hold for at least a few weeks, and possibly longer depending on how things work out.

I’m going to leave the comments open for now, and will be keeping an eye on the site as time permits, but there won’t be any new articles until further notice, and new posts will probably be few and far between. If I get the chance, I’ll try to update the existing articles with the changes in Season One: Common Ground, but I can’t make any promises.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s offered words of encouragement or support over the past couple of months, and I hope that the articles and posts continue to be useful for all players of Star Trek: Online. As soon as there’s any more news about the future of the blog, I’ll let everyone know – but for now, have fun.

Official site updates

Last Friday saw a slew of new posts to the Star Trek: Online official site, focussed on coming updates:

• The second State of the Game since launch discusses the release of the first Special Task Force, the opening of the public test server Tribble, and Season One: Common Ground (previously known as Update 1 or the ’45 day patch’), as well as touching on bugs and communication between the dev team and the players (something which Cryptic has been making a real effort to improve recently)
• Season One: Common Ground Fact Sheet provides an overview of some of the new content and features that will be coming in Season One
• STF: The Cure Overview offers some details about the second Special Task Force, which continues the story from Infected and once again pits high level players against the Borg
• Expanding Universe, Part 1 is a new video preview of some of the new features and content that are on their way in Season One, The Cure and beyond.

To be honest, there’s not much in any of these that will be new to those who pay attention to the Dev Tracker on the official boards, but I appreciate that not everyone is quite as obsessive as checking that as I am, and it’s nice to have the key information gathered together.

More Starship Mechanics updates

I’ve done some more work on Stealth Detection Ratings, and updated the Starship Mechanics article with the new information, although I’m still not very clear on how the rating is actually used.

I’d also like to thank ConcreteDragon for pointing out that I managed to completely forget to update the examples and Implications sections when I updated the ‘Tier Modifier’ for Impulse speeds and turn rates on Thursday. I’ve made the appropriate changes now.

Starship Mechanics updated

Just wanted to thank Tiran_Diaz for pointing out that the ‘Tier Modifier’ for Tier 1 and 2 ships is actually 192, not the 200 I’d been using. I’ve updated the Impulse Speed and Turn Rate sections of the Starship Mechanics article with the new number, which more accurately models the results in-game (and makes more sense).

Starship Mechanics

There are quite a few aspects of how starships function in Star Trek: Online that aren’t very well explained. The new Starship Mechanics article grew out of some testing I did to determine the relationship between the ‘Captain’ skills and a ship’s speed, turn rate and hull strength, but has expanded to cover several other aspects of how ships function.

Like all articles here, Starship Mechanics is a work in progress, but more so in this case than usual. As I mentioned a few days back, the amount of time I have to dedicate to The Engines Cannae’ Take It! may be significantly reduced in the near future, so rather than waiting until I had everything I wanted to cover, I’ve gone ahead and published what’s finished, and touched on some of the areas that I’m still investigating.

Anyway, I hope you find the article interesting and/or useful – please let me know what you think, and if you spot any mistakes or errors.

(Please note that some of the information in the Starship Mechanics article supersedes that previously presented in the Ship Power Levels article. I’ve updated Ship Power Levels with links to the appropriate sections in Starship Mechanics.)

Tribble updated

The public test server, Tribble, has been updated with a new version of Update 1 for testing – you can find the current release notes on the official forums.

This is still an incomplete version of Update 1, with more features due to be added as the dev and QA teams continue to work on it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff to check out already.

Starship Weapons Overview updated

I’m currently unable to play due to the connectivity issues being suffered by many European players, so I’ve taken the opportunity to update the Torpedoes section of the Starship Weapons Overview with new information on torpedoes and crew damage.

Mini patch

Just a few bug fixes this morning – you can read the full notes on the official site.

Awesome Ship Status updates

Just had my first chance to mess around in-game since last Thursday’s patch, and was extremely happy to notice the updates to your ship’s Status tab in the Character Status window. When scanning through the notes for last Thursday’s patch, it might have been easy to overlook this little gem:

• Status Window: Improved the ship stats that are displayed on the status window.

But what it means is that a whole range of previously hidden stats are now visible in-game, and update according to your power levels and captain’s skills. Given the amount of time it’s been taking me to work some of these things out the hard way (with stopwatches, copious pages of scribbled notes and endless testing), this should make finishing the article I’ve been working on for a while much, much easier. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it done in the next few days, even with the potential changes in my current situation.

The future’s so bright…

Following my recent trip, it seems that big changes may be in store for me in the near future. It’s all very exciting, but it will probably mean that I won’t have a lot of time to dedicate to the The Engines Cannae’ Take It!, at least for a while.

Nothing is currently set in stone, and I should know more in the next week or two. In the meantime, though, if updates and new articles are a little less frequent, please bear with me.