Welcome to Patch 28, TOS Arc 3. There’s a lot of great stuff in this arc. There’s a battle pass, event store, new missions, new officers, and some new and interesting events. I’ll talk about the events in an article coming out later today, but first, and most importantly, we’ve got the headline that I’ve been looking forward to for a long while.
Refits
Having been playing Star Trek Fleet Command for almost two and a half years, and writing about it for nine months now, this is the thing I’ve been more excited about than anything else. For the first time in the game, the Enterprise can look like… the Enterprise. Not like the JJ Enterprise, but as the honest to goodness Enterprise.
This one has me giddy. Honestly giddy. I want this like a kid wants their first bike.
So, you may be asking, how does it work?
Players level 15-plus will have this feature unlocked, so they can start earning the “ship cosmetics.” These ship cosmetics include refit ship skins, and new projectiles.
At the moment, only ships level 34+ will have the refit “skins” available for them. So this month, that’s the Enterprise, Augur, D4, Enterprise-A, Hehg’ta, and Tribune. There will be more ship skins available in the future.
Some, but not all, of these new skins will come with unique buffs. For this month, all of these new buffs will be the same, and it’s a pretty incredible buff. Even better, it’ll apply whether or not you’ve got the skin equipped on your ship or not.
The top six skins above are all going to give you +70% to weapon damage against hostiles. And this will be added to any research or officer buffs you’re already getting. This is going to change the way you play the game. They’re going to really help you in faction rep grinding.
But the fascinating one might be to the ISS Jellyfish, which will take on the appearance of the battle-scarred Commodore Matt Decker’s USS Constellation. (As an aside, why didn’t we get Commodore Decker in this update. I suppose I can’t complain all that much, as I didn’t think of it until just now.)
So this is what your ISS Jellyfish will look like after the refit. I think this looks amazing. But just as cool as the new look will be the new ability your Jellyfish is going to have.
+50% to the ISS Jellyfish’s ability against hostiles. Not a 50% increase, but +50%. And when you realize that the Jelly’s ability starts at a +15% damage bonus every round, that stacks each round this becomes monstrous. So your level one Jelly now does +65% bonus damage per round against hostiles. My level 20 Jelly will do 84% more damage per round against hostiles.
The in-game consequences of this are going to be huge. Especially in the capital systems of Sol, Romulans and Kronos. Players who could previously only knock off the regular level 49 traders will now have a chance against the heavies. This will break up a lot of the congestion in those systems, and some of the resentment from of the bigger players who were knocking off the heavies to spawn the regulars, only to have players (like me) come in and kill the 49s. (Sorry TJ.)
The ramifications of this towards players unlocking blueprints for G4 ships, completing higher rep level dailies and in other hostile events will be enormous.
Unlocking the Refits
In order to unlock the ship refits (or skins), you’ll have to earn shards for them, much like you do for officers. The projectile cosmetics will have a generic shard, and you’ll be able to unlock any you wish.
The Constellation skin for the ISS Jellyfish and the G3 ship skins will be earned through events. The G4 skins will be available to buy with TOS salvage parts.
The projectiles will be available in the battle pass, through alliance events, and from other chests.
Refitting your Ship
Once you’ve unlocked your refit, you’ll apply it to your ship by clicking on the “Refits” button while your ship is in drydock.
New Officers
So we’ve got two long-awaited officers TOS Pavel Chekov and TOS Montgomery Scott. I can’t imagine that anyone’s going to be all that surprised by this one. Both of them are functional officers, giving you impulse speed, and in the case of Scotty, increased warp range.
Event Store
And with TOS part 3, the event store is back. There will be all the usual stuff, blueprints, materials, resources, ship upgrade parts, officer shards, officer recruit tokens, missions, latinum, and yes, avatars and frames! And you’ll earn event store tokens by completing events this month.
Missions and Events
Yes, there will be missions and events and a battlepass this month. I’ll be releasing an article about that later today.
Improvements
In what I’m calling the Nowonshall Memorial Confirmation button, you’re now going to get a warning if you’re ever spending more than 100 latinum on anything. So now you won’t accidentally spend tens of thousands in latinum fixing a ship, for example.
Your missions tab defaults to last viewed, and won’t keep hopping back to the top each time you enter that screen. The same will be true for your officer screen, which will stay at your last position, rather than jumping back to the right.
And the last thing you’ll really notice, the problem of officer power showing vastly differently when assigned and not assigned to a ship has been fixed. They’ll now be more or less the same.
Bug Fixes, Bug Fixes, Bug Fixes! Hooray!
We’ve got a bunch of new of bug fixes in this patch. Without going into all of them, here are some highlights:
- Probably the one I’m most excited to see fixed is the black box bug. That one’s been really “bugging” me for a while (I’m so sorry for the pun.)
- As many people have noted on my server have noted that there have been issues with the chat block feature not working. That problem has been nailed down.
- Another issue that affected my alliance and others was being unable to score in Takeovers, despite paying the entry fee and having ships in the system. That’s been fixed.
- K’Bisch‘s Defensive Mining ability has been fixed. He’ll now appropriately reduce the damage to your miners when attacked.
- An issue with some players missing their second builders has been rectified. Also, the problem of scrapping ships not showing up has been fixed.
- They’ve also fixed some localization issues.
- The disappearing UI problem has been fixed.
- The problem of some Romulan Miner rewards not being consistent with the other factions has been fixed. I’m going to have to remember to fix my Faction Blueprint calculator now.
And with that, have a great month, and enjoy this new TOS, Arc 3.