Starship Combat in Timelines

Read on StarTrek.com

Summary

• PvP (Player v Player) battles, as well as PvE battles versus AI which happen as part of a story
• Get some knowledge about who the opponent is and their ship, outfit crew to battle stations and engage
• Putting crew in battle stations give players access to their specific actions
  • Scotty: Great at engineering, get fix up the player's ship
  • Picard: Great diplomatist and commander, can convince the enemy to sort of lower their defences
  • Worf: Great at tactical, can cause heavy damage
  • Q: A maverick, chancy to use but when his ability goes off it can inflict a lot of negative statuses on the enemy
• Different versions of characters have different abilities

Speculation and Analysis

• In a comment posted on the YouTube video, Disrupter Beam states that "Starship Battles are currently turn-based, much like many RPGs, so they do not require fast mouse movement."
• Health bars for both Shields and Hull are shown, seemingly for the player's ship and their opponent. When a ship is hit by weapons fire, the Shields bar is depleted, followed by the Hull bar. When the Hull bar is completely depleted, the ship explodes.

• Damage to ships is visualized

• A number of actions can be seen. It appears that the player and their opponent chooses one of these actions, fitting the turn based gameplay hinted at above.

• Assigning crew members to battle stations provide access to their specific actions, although not all actions appear to be associated with a specific crew member
• The following actions are seen:
  • Lock and Load (Data)
  • Initiate Cloak
  • Power Up Weapons
  • Reconfigure Shields
  • Reverse Deflector Polarity
  • Power Up Thrusters
  • Attack Pattern wej
  • Deflector Harmonics
  • Good Day to Die (Worf)
  • Evasive Pattern wa'
  • She'll Break Apart (Scotty)
  • Resistance is Futile (Locutus of Borg)
  • Charging Targ Attack
  • Attack Pattern Alpha
  • Jackel Mastiff Defense
  • Make It So (Picard)
• It appears ships can have Shields, Hull, Weapon and Defense stats. These can be altered by adding crew to their Battle Stations. It also appears that ships can be levelled up.

• When selecting a crew member, icons can be seen. These may correlate with skills, as mentioned in the Conflicts in Star Trek Timelines dev blog.
  • - United Federation of Planets logo, possibly diplomacy
  • - Command division insignia, likely command
  • - Sciences division insignia, likely science
  • - Shield icon, possibly security
• Icons for each Battle Station are also visible, in addition to above these are:
  • - Operations division insignia, possibly engineering stat or ops station
  • - Starfleet Medical logo, possibly medical stat or medical officer station
• Traits mentioned in other blog posts can also be seen, for example Locutus has the Borg and Human traits
• Voice over clips from the shows appears to be present

Transcript

<embedvideo service="youtube">https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=169&v=kJNXwKbxO_I</embedvideo>

Rich Gallup: Executive producer

Tim Crosby: Lead game designer

Rich: Hey everybody, I'm Rich Gallup executive producer here at Disruptor Beam

Tim: I'm Tim Crosby, lead game designer

Rich: And we're here to talk to you about

Tim: Starship Battles!

Tim: Ship battle is when you take your starship and you fight another starship in the game

Rich: What are you favourite parts about ship battles as they currently exist in the game?

Tim: They look awesome, you have your ship, you have another ship, there can be a big battle with other ships around fighting, exploding

Rich: I agree, it looks awesome. They're also fun to play. Obviously still being in development we're probably going to change the way it plays a million times, but tell us a little bit about the systems within ship battles. How do you engage in a battle?

Tim: There are PVP ship battles which is against another player and there are ship battles that are single player versus a computer opponent that happen over the course of a story. In either case you get some knowledge about who your opponent is, and what their ship is, and then you can outfit your crew to their battle stations and you hit engage and you're off fighting

Rich: Battle stations are one of the ways that I think really shows how much we like the IP of Star Trek because when you slot in Locutus

Tim: Yeah

Rich: And he straight up says

Locutus of Borg: Resistance is futile

Rich: It's on!

Tim: Totally! And his action, when you put him into the battle station that gives you his specific Locutus actions. So in the battle that will provide you an extra boost.

Rich: Let me shout out some other characters and you tell me a little bit about some of their abilities that you can gain. Scotty?

Montgomery Scott: Alright you lovelies, hold together

Tim: Scotty's great at engineering so he's going to be able to fix up your ship

Rich: Picard

Jean-Luc Picard: Make it so

Tim: He is a great diplomatist and a great commander. What he can do is convince the enemy to sort of lower their defences

Rich: How about Worf?

Worf: Aye captain

Tim: Worf is great at tactical so he can really bring the big guns and do some heavy hitting and do some real damage

Rich: What about your personal friend and mine, Q?

Q: How about a big hug?

Tim: Q is kind of a maverick so he's a little bit chancy to use but when his ability goes off he can inflict a lot of negative statuses on an enemy. Not only are we making abilities for every character but each version of the character we have so the Janeway with her coffee cup versus Janeway dressed as Queen Arachnia they have different abilities based on that

Rich: So that's our quick look of starship battles in Star Trek Timelines be sure to like and subscribe and come to Star Trek Las Vegas and you'll get to play starship battles in person! In the meantime, I'm Rich Gallup

Tim: And I'm Tim Crosby

Rich: And we'll see you next time, right here at Disruptor Beam