So from time to time, I’m going to throw together a bunch of little things for an old-fashioned notes column. Kind of like the Sunday Morning baseball column that Peter Gammons used to write in the Boston Globe back in the 90s. In columns like this, I’m going to put together a bunch of little things that aren’t big enough for a full post on their own. This one’s got stuff on the Halloween event, Territory Capture prep, and Star Trek on TV.
Halloween Event – Trek or Treat!
For a one-off event, I kinda like this one. It’s essentially a faction hunt with Discovery rewards. As it’s becoming more and more clear that Discovery summoning is going to be a big part of the next patch, these spore drive component rewards should be very useful.
We’ve got a couple days of this event, where you’ll be get points for destroying faction hostiles or upgrading your faction ships.
My newly upgraded Augur (see below) now lets me take out level 49 traders with a few hits, so I can get it done in one shot per faction.
The fun aspect of this one is the Trick or Treat. You get the option for each faction to either take rewards, share or sell your rewards.
Your best option as an alliance is probably to share once, which in most alliances should get you more faction credits than you’d get for “eating.”
In my alliance, for example, with 80 members, we can get 2,000 faction credits per faction if we “share,” but only 1,670 if we “eat”. And we can get another 2,000 faction recruit tokens. Enough to open four faction recruiting packs per faction. That could get you a lot of shards, or if you’re able, transporter patterns.
Since you’re limited to one share, it’s up to you whether you need independent or faction credits more. Given the scarcity of independent credits, and that you can get three of them, that might be your best bet.
Roadmap and Territory Capture
If you’ve missed Scopely Community Manager Panic’s appearance on Talking Trek this week, you owe it to yourself and your alliance to catch up on it now.
I’m going to put out an article on my thoughts on Territory Capture coming up soon.
And while I can’t tell you what else is coming up in the next update, I can tell you that a lot of players are going to like it. There’s more than just Territory Capture.
In honor of the passing of the late Sean Connery today, I can tell you this.
This is the big one, 007.
One last thing, that alliances should start doing now, is work on their communication before the next update. If you don’t have a discord channel for your alliance, you should create one now. You should also work to make your alliance as effective as possible before the next patch. If you’re considering merging alliances, now would be a good time to do that.
If you’re in an inactive alliance, now would be a good time to get into a bigger one. And if you’re in a big alliance with some inactive players, now would be a good time to set them free.
Winding Down Discovery Arc 2
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little fatigued by the hourly burst events. I like the idea of short events, and I think Scopely did a good job responding to them after the problems of the initial launch last month. The rewards are pretty good, especially the Latinum.
But the hourly event for four days out of five is exhausting. And then doing it four times in a month was a bit much.
On the other hand, I really liked the Disco vs. Disco events, and even Stella vs. Stella. I hope those stay in the regular rotation.
The Grueling Trail to Ops 39
So if you’re around level 35, I’ve got some good news for you, and some bad news for you.
The good news is that getting to level 38, and eventually to the Dark Space missions is probably easier than you think it will be.
The bad part is that getting to Operations level 39 is a slog. You’re going to have to upgrade all of your defense platforms to level 38.
The other bad news is that it’s going to cost you an awful lot of parsteel. I’ve had a number of people complaining after I raided them that I’d never be able to spend that much parsteel, when they noticed that I had over 7 billion.
My last platform is under construction now, and I’m under one billion. Time to get raiding again.
Was It Something I Said?
So I love the idea of the inter-server event this week, for those players 39 and above. I think I would’ve liked it a bit more had they run it in a couple of weeks,
But even if I didn’t get to play, it was fun to root on my guy Draugik from my alliance on the leaderboard. Better yet, it was fun to have players from competing alliances get out of his way as he worked valiantly to try to get three free days of bonus refinery for our server. He came up short, but not for lack of trying.
I hope this event comes back, and is expanded to the lower levels in the future.
And Scopely, erm… I’m trying not to take this personally, but you also pulled the Rage of the Klingon Houses PvP event two minutes after I published an article on how to fix it. Too funny.
The Epic Change At Ops 36
One of the best things about getting to Operations 36 is that you no longer get Hijacked Blueprints from Epic Armada chests. They’re replaced with ISS Jellyfish blueprints. And in my experience, (yours may vary), the system isn’t all that stingy in handing them out. In a couple of months, I’m already up to 46 blueprints, and that’s without winning any of the ISS Jellyfish events.
My New Favorite Research
I finally get my Augur up to Tier 5. To do so, I’ve got to say that my favorite research from the Outlaws tree has got to be Ship Component Efficiency.
I needed to upgrade two guns on my Augur to tier it up. The total cost, for both guns would have been 5,436 UC ore (and 1,274 UC crystal.)
Unlocking Ship Component Efficiency made a huge difference, and getting it up to level two made an even bigger difference.
| No SCE | SCE 1 | SCE 2 | |
| 3* UC Ore Cost for Augur (per gun) | 2718 | 2593 | 2569 |
| Savings | – | 125 | 24 |
So this tech saved me 358 in uncommon materials. So this is one tech to work on getting as soon as possible.
New Trek on TV
So we’re three episodes in to season three of Star Trek Discovery. Didn’t care for the first episode. But they’re getting better. The second episode had a cool western feel to it. The last episode, People of Earth, was probably the most “Star Trek” episode they’ve done in a while.
But on the other hand, I really, really liked Lower Decks. And I went into that one thinking I was going to hate it, but it felt more like Star Trek to me than Discovery has at any point. The last season finale was epic, with more of a feel of a movie, and deeper character development than we’ve seen in a while. I’m so happy to have been wrong about it.
Plus, Riker’s Titan swooping in to the Next Generation theme was goosebump-inducing from what was billed as a silly cartoon.
If you’ve missed them, you can binge them in a one-week trial for free, by clicking the image below.
Coming Articles
- All About Armadas
- Five of Ten (Borg Jaylah) and other Borg Officer profiles
- McCoy, Uhura, and Ivanov profiles
- D3 and Hijacked Ships