Why is every battle in Star Trek Online to the death?
That’s not quite true — there are (in my up-to-LT9 experience) a couple of canned cases where folks surrender (rescue the scientists from the Gorn ship, for example). But 99% of the guys you encounter fight a Bitter Battle to the Death. Klingons, Gorn, Undine, Orions … they’re all totally into fighting until you blast them into a flaming hulk whose warp core shortly goes boom.
Why?
I think it would be interesting if at least some of the “Bad Guys” were willing to try and flee. Yeah, the Klingons are all about honor and that, but even there, “Only a fool fights in a burning house.” Some of these guys should be willing to wild-weasel their way out of combat, to live and fight another day. Even moreso Orion pirates, and Undine with added info about the Federation.
And, in some cases, people should be willing to surrender. And then the Feds have to decide whether they can afford to just leave the shattered hulk behind (to perhaps escape), send over a prize crew (reducing overall ship efficiency), or blow the bad guys to anti-matter flinders.
But every fight to the death (except when the Fed ship manages to break away)? Not quite believable.
I agree, concept wise, that it’s a bit daft, but have you tried running away? It’s really hard!
Two things make it almost impossible:
1. When in combat, you can’t travel very fast (and certainly can’t get to full impulse).
2. Everyone else (enemy groups) seem to be able to travel exactly the same speed as you, making a retreat at any speed difficult.
I have been able to escape a couple of times (although it was more a case of trying to reach some beacon or other without getting caught up in a long battle!), but it only really worked because the enemy AI told them not to chase me very far beyond their designated area of space.
I got away by putting my ships power into the engines and hitting the evasive manoeuvre (or whatever it’s called) power. This gave me enough of a speed boost to get away from that group, but like I said, only because they weren’t smart enough to follow me very far.
As an aside, all of a sudden and without any warning, I got bored.
I’m something like Lt Cmdr 7 (level 17) and have had some great missions (you’ll know them when you see them!), I’ve got some good BO’s who now have some nice equipment, and I’m very attached to my dinky science ship, but something suddenly fell off.
I think the problem is lack of content, which happened during my Lt levels as well. Once you’ve used up the interesting episode missions, which have good story lines, fun locations and a mix of ground and space combat, you’re left with a mixture of ‘explore/protect this system’ and ‘join this fleet action’ stuff. I’ve done a couple of fleet action missions, but the ones I have now (Crystalline Entity for example) require a big chunk of time and a lot of organisation to complete successfully, which doesn’t really fit with my dip-in-and-out style of play. As for explore/protect missions, I’ve lost count how many of those I’ve done now.
Maybe I played too much too soon (inc. both betas). Maybe I should have spread the episode missions more thinly, doing explore/protect missions between each one. Maybe the novelty has just warn off. Whatever it is, I’ve lost the urge to play for a while, which is a real shame.
Hopefully, after a little break, I’ll get back into it and will at least get to captain a Commander level ship.
Glad you guys are having fun. Keep us posted.
(Sorry for such a big post! Got carried away.) 🙂
No worries — always like to see big comments. 🙂
I’ve had about 50% success with the Evasive Maneuvers power. It’s not quite so awful given that death-respawn is relatively painless, but given that there are some missions where the bad guys just cackle, “You haven’t seen the last of me!” and warp out, it’s a bit annoying. The trick seems to be to do it before you’re in the final stages of getting wiped out, while you still have enough shield power to keep boosting the rear shield as they plonk at you forEVAH.
There should be a better way to do it.
Re getting burnt out — it can happen, certainly. Hasn’t on my end yet with STO, but the possibility is still there. I tend to still mix a fair amount of patrol with the actual missions; despite having three toons up in the high LTs, I haven’t found myself getting bored … yet.
This post made me think of Brasse’s latest STO comic:
http://www.thebrasse.com/game-comics/330