This is more of an interlude between the ending of ‘Star Bunny,’ and ‘Star Bunny II’ since I had no idea where to squish this in before I started to document my interstellar travels across the galaxy in Star Trek Online. During this time from level 1 to 10 as a whee rank of Lieutenant, I flew around the galaxy jumping from sector to sector taking on intro missions, some story missions, side-missions, and just plain trying to figure things out.
Fairly quickly, I got the general understanding of space combat, which is a lot of fun! Ground combat, however, is a smidgen wonky. It’s not bad per se, but it’s just not well worked into the MMORPG aspect as much as it could be. There’s two modes to ground as well: Standard, and Shooter; shooter makes it more in line with a FPS whereas standard is more in-line with MMO’s – just click/target an enemy and pew pew. Standard was giving me trouble early on, so once I learned about shooter mode, I swapped over to that for ground portion of missions only. While running around doing more casual things, I leave it in standard mode; the nice thing is it’s just a quick toggle at the push of a keystroke.
I mentioned in Episode 1 that one can sometimes be able to do mission series out of order, and the missions just scale to your level (or that’s how I believe it works). Somehow while doing all of the early side-missions, at around level 5 or so, I gained access to the Terran Gambit story line missions. I started up the first one, and after a few minutes into it somewhat realized that I probably wasn’t supposed to see this yet as it was showing and mentioning characters I have not yet encountered.
One thing I forgot to mention in the prior Episode is that the missions are mostly voiced and a lot of the original cast from the various Star Treks reprise their roles as their characters from the shows, and it’s absolutely wonderful! The tutorial mission for Starfleet has Admiral Janeway explaining what you’re doing, and the Starfleet general things is narrated by Leonard Nimoy just as two examples. Back to the Terran Gambit, I got through the first mission fairly well and somewhat felt quick (mission lengths vary from 20-30 minutes to sometimes near a hour or more), and decided to just keep going with them since it was fun and I liked where the story was going after the first couple of missions.
The second one tore me up big time. I was still trying to learn ground combat and also blew up my ship a few times in the process. It was a little frustrating to say the least, but I persevered and made it through it, but it took well over a hour to complete! I believe right around that time, along with another couple of side-missions, I was able to obtain level 10 and rank of Lieutenant Commander! The Rank-Up quests immediately come up on the screen and you’re able to accept/warp immediately back to Star Base to claim the new ship for said rank (up to a certain rank). I warped myself back to Earth, and collected my first ship upgrade: The Constitution II (or Refit, depending on your reference point). Initially, once first acquired, it looks like it flew right out of the Star Trek movies, but is capable of a lot of customization choices.
I spent a good hour or so fiddling with the customization options for it, and landed on something that looked like a Mini-Sovereign Class, but with a Galaxy Class styled bridge. Thus the U.S.S. Astera II was christened; I used the same registry number and added an ‘A’ to the end of it, but the names can’t be identical if keeping the previous ship, so I just added a ‘II’ to the end of it and all subsequent ships thereafter.
With all of the affairs taken care of, and back out in space, it was time to see what she could do! Since I was already fairly deep into the Terran Gambit story line at this point, I decided to continue on that, and then figure out how to get back on the right track for the story to be done in proper order.