Warp
Traveling at Warp speed is a method to quickly complete both Away Missions and Ship Battles.
Any regular mission or Cadet Challenges that has been "three-starred" can be completed using Warp. Expedition Event missions are ineligible.
Each difficulty level of Away Missions are three-starred by collecting all rare rewards while each level of Ship Battles are three-starred by winning in under 20 seconds.
All players can automatically travel at Warp using chronitons. From VIP 3 onwards, the player can travel up to Warp 10, completing multiple runs of the same mission at once. All players, even players without VIP, can travel at Warp 1 from time to time by watching a short advertisement ("ad warp"). Ad warped missions do not cost any Chronitons, so it is often advantageous to use the ad warps on high-cost missions..
Pros and Cons
Traveling at Warp has both advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
- Save a considerable amount of time by not only skipping the whole mission walkthrough/battle but also skipping the traveling animation to the location the mission takes place.
- Quickly dump batches of Chronitons into a mission to speed up the collection of items that are needed a lot, such as Clothing Pattern.
- The player will always receive the full (repeat-) Captain XP reward for that mission.
- For Away Missions, the path yielding the most rewards will be chosen automatically, including missions with a 4-reward-path. Locked nodes are not relevant.
- It is not possible to either unintentionally reduce the rewards by accidentally failing a node or missing a reward node, or completely failing the mission.
- Missions will always succeed.
- Away Missions can still be completed even if the necessary crew is on a shuttle mission.
- (Reduced) Crew XP will be received in the form of Crew Experience Training tokens, which can be collected, instead of using it directly on the away team/ship crew.
- Drop rates of items stay the same when using Warp.
- The player will end the warp at the same space location they were at when then warp was started; a Warp sequence can be considered as warping to the mission location, completing the mission, and warping back.
Disadvantages
- The Credits rewards for Warp speed missions will be reduced to 70%, independent of the Warp factor.
- The Crew XP for Warp speed missions will be reduced to 70%, independent of the Warp factor. This applies to all away missions and assumes a 3-team crew for ship battles. For non-warp battles with teams of 2 or 4, this factor is different, see the table below. Note the amount received when using Warp is not influenced by the ship you have currently active.
Away Mission | Ship Battle | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
2-crew | 3-crew | 4-crew | ||
Crew XP | 70% | 105% | 70% | 52.5% |
How to interpret these values?
For Away Missions, the amount will always be 70% (usually rounded to the nearest possible Crew Experience Training distribution, but for some missions off by a few 10s or more). Note that for difficult missions/levels, this can mean "losing" about 70-90 XP points per warp mission.
For Ship Battles, it depends on your best available ship. If you don't have any 3- or 4-crew ships, you can actually benefit from using Warp, as you will receive 105% XP as opposed to completing the battle manually (you will still receive only 70% Credits, though).
However, if you have a 4-crew ship available, using Warp will give you only about one half of the XP you would receive if you completed the mission manually. So especially for high cost (=high yield) missions, it will always be worth to actually play out the battle, giving you 150-200 XP points more.