So the TNG arc is over… kinda. And Deep Space Nine isn’t here yet. So we’ve got an arc that falls somewhere in the middle. But far from being a filler or bridge arc, we’ve instead got one full of new features and content. We’ve got a big new feature, new systems, two new officers, and one feature that we’ve been waiting a long time for is finally here.
And after a long while of events that have focused on the Federation, we’ve now got the pendulum swinging a bit more towards the Romulans and especially the Klingons.
This should also be a great arc for free-to-play players, as a great deal of this content will cost you nothing at all.
Cloaking!
After being announced in the roadmap last week, the speculation behind how cloaking works has been all over the place. Some were more accurate in how it would work than others.
So here’s how it actually works. You can only cloak your Klingon and Romulan ships, which from a story angle makes sense. They’ll disappear and become untargetable.
Cloaking is an active ability for your ships and will require (you guessed it) a new currency to activate. In the same way that you need mycelium to jump your Discovery, you’ll need Tetryons to cloak your ships.
These Tetryons will be acquired from daily gifts, events, and from the store.
Before you cloak your ships, you’ll need to get unlock the capability for each of your ships, and you’ll do this through refits, as seen above. (No, I really don’t have that many shards, it’s a stock photo.)
Here’s what it looks like to equip your ship’s cloaking device.
So here’s a video of what cloaking looks like in practice. It starts with a brief explanation of how cloaking works. Each ship will cloak for a different amount of time, and give an attack bonus. But the cloak will go away once you attack another ship, dock your ship, or if you’re feeling crazy, decide to mine with your cloaked ship. After you’ve cloaked, there will be a cooldown period before you can cloak again.
And there are some other benefits to cloaking. First, you’ll get a 66% chance to hide your name and alliance data from your enemy’s battle logs. So if you want to take a chance at hitting someone you don’t like and not starting a war, you’ve got a 2/3 chance of doing that.
Second, if you enter a system while cloaked, you won’t spawn any revenge hostiles in that system. For higher-level players who tend to be triple-faction locked, this isn’t an issue, but if you’re working faction rep in the high 20s, and working on locking that first faction, this will be extremely useful to you.
Lastly, you can use cloaking to prevent incoming attacks. You’ll just disappear, and be able to avoid getting hit.
Meaningless and Irresponsible Cloaking Speculation
It will be interesting to see if the Defiant cloaks… if we ever see it in the game. I mean, it’s gotta, right?
You could also make the case for some other Federation ships to cloak. We’ve seen both the Enterprise and the Enterprise-D cloak on screen. Wouldn’t it be something if we got a USS Pegasus in the game that cloaked, and then got stuck inside a planet, as sort of a plot-supported bug.)
It would also be really cool if we were to get the ship cloaking sound effect to show up in the game.
Cloaking Background
Just in case you’re curious, the cloaking device, like many others in Star Trek, owes its existence to the needs of a plot. Specifically the plot of the TOS episode, Balance of Terror (which was also the debut of the Romulans.) If you haven’t watched a lot of TOS, Balance of Terror is a great episode to start with. It stars a pre-Sark Mark Lenard as the commander of a Romulan ship and bases its plot on a 1957 submarine movie, The Enemy Below. Obviously, if you’re going to do a submarine movie in space, you need some way to hide one of the ships, and voila, the cloaking device was born.
(And since I know you love trivia like this, one of the officers on the German sub in The Enemy Below was played by the legendary character actor Theodore Bikel. Fitting for this to come up this month, as Bikel made a great guest appearance on TNG playing Worf’s adoptive father, Sergey Rozhenko, in the TNG episode Family.)
Also fitting with the new officers this month, Balance of Terror has a pre-Stonn Lawrence Montaigne.
The Enterprise-D is here… kinda
So we after months of waiting, we finally get an Enterprise-D skin. Hooray!
But there’s good news and bad news.
On the bright side, you’ll be able to get it in the battle pass, and it does look pretty cool. And I want it. There are Enterprise-D refits for the Enterprise and Enterprise-A. The Enterprise skin is in the free battle pass, and the Enterprise-A gets its skin in the Premium Battlepass.
On the dark side, they don’t do anything. It’s just for show. So you get what you pay for.
But it’s a “damaged skin,” and if I had to read tea leaves, I’d wager that we might see more of the Enterprise-D in the future.
A New Worf
So the first Worf we got in the game was okay, the new one is a PvP beast. He’s an epic officer who increases the ship’s Armor Piercing by 30% of Crew Attack whenever the ship scores a critical hit., and give you a massive boost to critical hit chances against players for the first five rounds. If you pair him with Khan, you’re going to raining critical hits down on your opponents in just about every round.
You’ll unlock him through events and the Battlepass, which will be a little bit different than the events you’ve used to unlock the epics in the past.
This one’s more the go hang out with the Klingons Worf from the TNG episode Redemption, which does sort of lead into the Worf we’d later see on DS9.
Borg Stonn
So last month we got Borg T’Pring, and this month we get her logical (if a bit stiff) husband borgified in Stonn. Compared to his original version, this one’s a nice upgrade. He starts off with a 60% increase to ore mining, compared to 40% for Stonn, but this gets even better when you pair him with the Borg Tribble and Two of Ten, who now also give you synergy. So it’s a massive boost to your mining.
He’s also an officer type that I’ve been wanting for a while now – another cargo-size officer, big when raiding. With the obscene amount of resources needed once you go 40+, coupled with the TC and away team research, has become worthwhile again. So he’ll start at a 40% boost, which is where Stonn wound up, and he’ll max out at a 60% boost. And, what’s more, you can pair the two with Two of Ten for a huge increase in cargo size.
You’ll get shards for Four of Ten through events, and there are going to be a lot of them. Completing all of those events should get you a full unlock of Borg Stonn.
New Systems
In conjunction with some of the events this month, we’re getting new systems. They’re faction systems that will count for faction hunts and dailies, but where you won’t gain or lose reputation points.
New Exocomps
So this one will be interesting to see how it plays out, we’ve now got Alliance Exocomps. Any player in your alliance can use them, and all players in the alliance will get some benefit. Though that benefit will be different according to the player’s ops level.
And last but not least… PHOTON TOKENS
I may have buried the lede here, but after months of waiting, we’re all getting photon tokens. Instead of having to wait a month to turn in your loyalty badges, you’ll now be able to turn them in once a week for rewards, and a photon token.
Four photon tokens will get let you unlock your monthly reward chest.
And finally, players level 40+ will have better rewards for both weekly and monthly chests.
If you’ve been saving up your loyalty badges for a while, you can finally redeem them.
And a cryptic image that might be a hint
