The Giant Fleet Starbase thread

• Dev Blog #1
• Originally posted on Massively
• Dev Blog #2
• Ask Cryptic: June 2012

• Re: Massively Exclusive: Fleet Advancement by Heretic

• Exclusive Star Trek Online Season 6 reveal: Fleet starbases
• Captain's Log Supplemental: An exclusive interview with STO's Daniel Stahl

The "sweet spot" for fleet size is in the 20-50 active player range. Past that, and while the resource collection capabilities would improve, the bottlenecks inherent in the system will most likely lead to a lot more politics about which provisioning projects the fleet should engage in. Below that is perfectly doable, but it does mean it will take longer for a smaller fleet to progress.

Currently, the absolutely fastest a fleet could obtain a fully tricked out starbase is about seven months or so, and even large fleets I expect will take longer than this. The intent is for this to provide a long-term goal, not something that can be burned through in a few months.

As an additional note, we data mined the amount of refined Dilithium, Energy Credits, Bridge Officer Skill Points people earn on average in a week, and used this as the starting baseline for costs, assuming a casual fleet of about 20-25 players. We will necessarily need to iterate on this as we get more practical data from the system as it is actually used by players.

Starship provisioning projects begin being available once you have a Tier I Shipyard (Military track), which can actually happen before you even hit Tier I for your Starbase as a whole. Which ships are available at each Shipyard tier is still being hammered out, but every tier is currently planned to make available additional ship provisioning projects.

When you contribute, you gain Fleet Credit which is what you need to spend at fleet stores. Your Fleet Credit is yours - if you leave a fleet and join a new one, you retain your Fleet Credit.

Each category opens up access to additional provisioning projects. All of them have buff and category-specific operational asset provisioning projects.

For the Military/Shipyard track, this means ships and personal weapons. For Engineering this means personal engines and armor. For Science this means personal shields and deflectors.

Science also opens up access to Transwarp Conduit upgrades as well as a sickbay. Engineering also opens starship repair capabilities, a ship tailor contact and eventually a crafting station as well.

A large number of specialized upgrades also become available from Bartenders and Chefs to Skill Respec contacts to Bridge Officer trainers to Personnel Officers and Security Officers.

So, yes, we've done some fairly expansive data mining on fleet sizes, average frequency of play, average Dilithium, Bridge Officer points and Energy Credit accumulation and expenditure per week. The catch, of course, is that up until now fleets have been social organizing tools and have not had significant functional gameplay attached to them. As that changes, it is possible (read, very likely) that this will impact and change all of the results of the data mining.

We have started with numbers and reasonable guesses for how we expect most fleets to react, and then factored in how much time we want the system to take, but iteration is inevitable.

Regarding the questions about small fleets versus large fleets, I will say that a hardworking, dedicated fleet of five players can easily exceed the productive capacity of a casual fleet of 25 players - in the data mining it is very evident that the difference in earned inputs between a casual and a hardcore player is far more than x5. If you want a high tier starbase, thus, you can either get a lot of people together, or you can work hard, or you can work at a more measured pace and it will just take longer - but you can still get there.

There are no immediate plans for alliance functionality, unfortunately.

The Fleet UI is being redone to work with the new functionality; issues such as more permissions level and better even management can be considered.

An increase in bank slots/tabs has been discussed, but I am not personally sure exactly where those discussions have landed yet.

Fleet Marks and Fleet Credits are yours and follow you whatever your fleet status. Until they are actually expended, they have no impact on your fleet.

Fleet Marks are gained through various types of content and other areas - such as T4 duty officer assignments. Fleet Credits are gained by contributing to a fleet. You can earn Fleet Marks by helping another fleet out in their starbase defense, and then spend those Fleet Marks on your own fleet's starbase. Similarly, you can earn Fleet Credits by contributing Dilithium or commodities or duty officers to your fleet's starbase projects, then leave the fleet, join a new one, and spend your Fleet Credits in your new fleet's stores.

Both Fleet Marks and Fleet Credits are yours until you spend them. You can earn Fleet Marks in one fleet, change fleets, and spend them in your new fleet. You can, in fact, as a member of Fleet A help Fleet B defend their starbase, earn Fleet Marks, and then spend those Fleet Marks in your own Fleet A's fleet stores.

Fleet Marks and Fleet Credits are bound to your character.

The limiting factor is that fleets have no incentive to tolerate such freeloaders. Fleets will extend their invites (or at least limit fleet store permissions) to those who are contributors, or at least aren't fleet jumpers.

As for Fleet Marks, yes, the current plan is that even a solo player earns Fleet Marks, and if the player joins a fleet in the future those marks can be spent as desired at that time.

There are currently no plans for cross-faction fleets.

The basic structure of Starfleet and KDF fleets is the same. There will be some art and flavor differences. House features, however, is not something we currently have in the system in any kind of systematic way, unfortunately.

Duty officer input expenditures for fleet projects are permanently lost.

All inputs - including Fleet Marks - are expended by the individual player. Fleet officers only determine what the selection of fleet projects is available. Those fleet projects will never complete unless individual members of the fleet contribute their personnel Fleet Marks, commodities, duty officers, Bridge Officer points, and/or Dilithium or data samples to a particular project.

Fleet members who contribute get Fleet Credit to the degree they contribute. If the member is booted, they keep their Fleet Credit.

Fleet officers could, certainly, bring someone in, let them donate, and then kick them out, sure, but the booted member will retain their earned Fleet Credit, and the fleet owner will have a hard time convincing anyone else to join their fleet...

The starbase will be primarily accessible through the Fed-KDF neutral zone; we are, as well, investigating other possibilities such as perhaps a transwarp option.

We would like you to be able to name your starbase, but we aren't able to commit to this right now. Longer term, meaning past Season 6, we are keeping the door open to the possibility of fleets controlling additional holdings - possibly other starbases, possibly other things entirely - in other regions of the galaxy.

Customization is something we really (really) want to see, but there are a lot of technical and schedule challenges we have to maneuver around, so we can't commit to anything in particular at launch of the system at this time.

It works much like a standard queue, except you will warp back to your starbase to defend it. Depending on the scenario, the objectives and size of the team may differ. Your starbase will have offensive and defensive capabilities dependent upon the Military, Engineering and Science tiers your fleet has achieved, and we are experimenting with some options of tying some operational assets to affect your starbase's functionality as well.

The exterior and interiors are new - this first set is a conventional base set, and for now customization is primarily a function of the upgrades purchased by the fleet, but we are exploring additional methods and approaches to customization as well.

There has been some talk about tying accolades to aspects of this, but I am not aware of any firm plans for this.

Fleet items will not be tradeable.

There are several things we have put into the system to try to make it work both for small and large fleets.

Progression is gated by several steps:

The first step involves getting the necessary inputs for fleet projects. Larger fleets will inevitably always have an advantage here, as will fleets with people with large stockpiles of fleet inputs.

The second step involves the number of projects that can be going at any one time, which is three normal, plus one upgrade plus one featured, as it stands in the current plan. Projects are how you earn category XP (i.e., Military, Engineering) which is how you qualify for upgrading your Shipyard, Communications Array, Industrial Fabricator, as well as your Starbase itself.

The third step involves the upgrade path. A fleet can only upgrade one thing at a time - that "thing" can be the starbase itself, the outlying facility (e.g., Shipyard), as well as adding specialized contacts to your starbase interior. Where normal projects finish fairly fast (usually under a day as we are currently doing it), upgrade projects can take anywhere from a couple of days a couple of weeks. No matter how many resources you have, this hard gate means it is impossible to fully upgrade your starbase in less than six or seven months, and that would presume you had every input already earned and waiting.

The early tiers are, moreover, aimed to be accessible even if you have only a few players in your fleet. The current estimate, based on data mining, is that a casual fleet of about five active players could obtain a Tier I starbase in about a week.

Rewards, moreover, are generally not simply better as you go up in tier, but mostly just different. For example, at one tier you might have access to an operational asset that allows you to call regular escorts to your aid in starbase defenses, while the next tier up might give you access to Nausicaan escorts. In some cases the higher tier will have different abilities, but the intention is that there is always a reasonable choice for a fleet, and they won't simply always pick the highest tier operational asset, for example.

A small active fleet will probably be able to hit Tier II or Tier III in a fairly reasonable amount of time. A larger fleet will get there faster, but not simply as a multiple of their additional members.

Furthermore, while larger fleets will have a resource advantage, they also have a disadvantage in that there are a limited number of projects, meaning that larger fleets will inevitably see a lot more competition over which provisioning projects are selected. Really want a ship that your fleet won't provision? Might be time to break off and start your own fleet or join a smaller one, or one with a different focus.

The expectation is that most fleets will wind up clustering in the 15-50 active player range. Larger fleets will tend to have fewer resourcing problems but more internal competition problems, while fleets smaller will tend to have the reverse issue.

It's been data mined, and I have tried to run the numbers to bleed this out of the system at a quick but not ruinous pace, but I also have to keep an eye towards keeping the numbers such that what is currently a feast does not become a painful famine when the backlog is eaten through.

Unfortunately, not at launch. This kind of customization, however, is something we would very much like to see happen.

It's not quite as extensive as would be ideal, but yes, there will be workerbees/shuttles on starbase exterior facilities while they are in the upgrading state.

This is something I would like to call some attention to, actually. We had really hoped to be able to include PvP starbase offenses/defenses at launch, and even though we didn't have the time to do this, the design is built to accommodate it relatively seamlessly.

We're still looking at what can be done, but we have been investigating the possibility a number of ideas such as attackers and defenders putting up Dilithium or Fleet Marks in potentially asymmetrical bets for PvP matches. For example, Fleet A knows it's worse than Fleet B, but will accept a 3:1 Dilithium or Fleet Mark bet with Fleet B in return for accepting the challenge. Offensive-only operational assets, for example, might open up an entirely new type of operational asset that could be provisioned for. Perhaps you start with a space battle and if the attackers do well enough it turns into a boarding action on the starbase interior itself.

All of this is entirely theoretical and under discussion, but I wanted to make sure people knew PvP was definitely not forgotten in this design.

Not at launch, but we would definitely like to see additional interior options and themes. Personally, I'd love to see an Orion interior.

There are models built of each stage under construction. We would like to add work bees and such flying around, maybe welding sparks, etc. but It's not really feasible to show them physically placing each girder.
The construction stage is static, and just representative of construction going on. There is no physically obvious progression within it.

Unfortunately no. As has been discussed before, your ship, and your captain are the same entity. If you are looking at your captain on the interior, we can't also show you floating out in space. In addition, the scale for interiors/ground areas is significantly different from the scale of space. As such, the best we could do is position some random ships out the window, and hope that one of them looks like yours. I don't know if that will be done, just hypothetically how it could work.

As it stands, the interiors will be more like ESD. You'll be able to see the space outside, but not the ships that might be on the system map.

Keep in mind that these things are huge. Even T1 is large enough that you wouldn't be able to see ships that weren't parked directly out the OPS window, at the top of the station. Anything parked below the player's horizon wouldn't be visible. Which is where I would expect most ships to be.

The ratcheting of values is based on active account resource accrual rates due to the fact that with the exception of the duty officer system, more characters on the same account doesn't generally allow you to accrue resources significantly faster.

A fleet of one account with a lot of accounts is certainly doable, and can indeed have a starbase, but it will probably take a lot longer to get there.

The numbers are actually pulled directly from data mining of what the average casual player makes in a week versus how much they spend in a week. It's true, there is a significant backlog of accrued Energy Credits and Bridge Officer Skill Points, which means at the beginning of the system there will indeed be a period where people are not sweating those currencies at all. Once the reserves are depleted, however, then suddenly the value for both of these currencies is expected to rise in comparison with Dilithium.

The game has not had a significant sink for either of these numerics since the game launched, but it is possible now to see a day when both numerics will actually be sought after.

The numbers are based on 25 players playing casually, defined as logging in 2-3 times a week and playing an average of three hours each session. The data mining shows, as well, that the effects of more aggressive and expansive playing dramatically offsets numbers, meaning that 5 players who play very aggressively will actually outstrip a fleet of 25 players playing casually.

So, several points here, and I will try to hit the major ones.

On the issue of time to completely finish out a starbase, if all of the rewards were achieved only after 7+ months of play for a large fleet, I would completely agree with your assessment. This system is not designed to be like a Feature Episode, however, that you can play through quickly; it is intended to be a long term system that will be with a fleet for most of that fleet's lifetime, especially once one takes into account potential expansions to the system.

As such, it's not like character progression where you only really care about the rewards at the end of the trail; each tier has roughly comparable rewards, with subsequent tiers expanding your options without making the previous tier's rewards obsolete. This means a small or casual fleet that only gets to Tier II or III will have, in fact, about half of the potential top-tier rewards in the system.

If the measure of success is only on exhausting a system, then sure, this could be considered a major grind, especially for a small casual fleet. My hope is that people will instead see the system as it was designed, which is an essentially endless road with rewards all along the path.

If anything, there are more things that impair large fleets whose members will have a harder time getting their needs prioritized unless they have a very responsive and organized fleet leadership, and who will have fewer input options per player, since projects will tend to fill up faster.

Those screenshots are a little out of date, but the most expensive Dilithium cost is the starbase facility upgrade from Tier IV to Tier V, which is 1,250,000 Dilithium. The average Dilithium cost currently for a project at Tier V is about 30,000 for a non-upgrade project (upgrade projects are generally about three times that cost, but only ever need to be done once).

By comparison, the current, subject-to-change Dilithium cost to upgrade a starbase from Tier 0 to Tier I is about 22,000, and the average Dilithium cost for a project at Tier 0 is about 3700 Dilithium.

You do not have to defend your starbase.

There will be intermittent starbase Red Alert defenses that present opportunities to members of your fleet to earn Fleet Marks, but if you do not engage them, or if you do and your starbase is brought offline, there is no effect to gameplay once you leave the instance.

There will also be queueable fleet actions that you can generally invite non-fleet members to participate in as well that will involve various scenarios around your starbase, but these are optional, and again, if you do not choose to engage them or engage in them and damage accrues, as soon as you leave the instance your starbase will be fully operational. (In fact, it is possible for a single fleet to have multiple of these scenarios going at once in separate instances - in this case there is no effect across instances).

Starbase scenarios are only there to provide opportunities to earn Fleet Marks, which are necessary inputs to progress your starbase. There will, as well, be other areas of the game that give similar opportunities to earn Fleet Marks.

We discussed this, but the resolution was that most of the major sources for bridge officers are being slowly ratched back, so the current surplus is likely a temporary thing.

Also, it's really hard technically to get an unpacked bridge officer to work like an item input.

Project slots are freed up only after the upgrade is complete, not merely after it is funded.

Yes. All provisioning projects, including ship provisioning projects, are repeatable.

Projects cannot fail.

There isn't anything currently planned for providing discounts, but there are a number of different contacts planned, and more may be added to the current list at some point.

The current mechanic is for a pure sink; assigning duty officers - or bridge officers, for that matter - to specific positions is something we've discussed and would at some point entertain as a possibility, as it is indeed a very cool idea. Right now, however, we don't have the bandwidth in the schedule to accommodate that.

I was thinking of it more as "permanently being stationed on the starbase", but I have to admit I am really fond of this idea of blood sacrifice, so maybe I should update the descriptive tooltip text...

The metrics are aimed such that a fleet of 20 or so active casual players would probably take up to a year to completely exhaust the system - but that's literally taking every single upgrade and focusing laser-like on development. A smaller fleet will take longer, but the early tiers are very accessible and rewards are spread fairly evenly across all tiers - the intent is that a small fleet of 3-5 people would probably hit Tier I, for example, in about a week.

The intent of the system is to create a system, not a pre-specified piece of content that everyone does every part of. A fleet's starbase should feel like its own starbase, and different from others based on the fleet's development choices. The fleet advancement system is designed to provide a backdrop of social group advancement while you are doing all the other things that a character does, not to be something everyone focuses exclusively on indefinitely.

Yes, very small fleets will have a harder time gathering the necessary resources for the higher tiers; it's still, however, perfectly doable, it will just take longer.

In other words, the goalposts that should be focused on are individual upgrade and provisioning projects and category tiers, not exhausting the system. The important questions are how hard it is to get individual upgrade and provisioning projects and particular categories, not how hard it will be to exhaust every last possible upgrade - which inevitably will include a lot of upgrades your fleet really probably doesn't care about.

Larger fleets, as well, will also have their own challenges that I think are being overlooked in some quarters. There are a limited number of projects that can be active at any one time, and extremely large fleets will have fewer opportunities to earn Fleet Credits than smaller fleets. Moreover, the competition for project slots for provisioning will inevitably turn political.

We realize this system as it is isn't going to be painless for everyone, but adding any functionality at all to an existing mechanic - in this case fleets - was going to result in that challenge. The expectation is that over the next year the game will probably see fewer very small fleets of 1-2 people and fewer very large fleets that are more than about 30 active accounts, but people will still be able to play with very small or very large fleets, but it's true, there will be consequences and trade-offs.

This is a really good question with a really complicated answer.

Trying to be somewhat concise (still have projects to finish up building today, and all...):

• Active players is calculated by those players who have logged in in the last four weeks.
• The average is actually a set of two averages - the average size of a fleet and the average size of a fleet for all players who are in a fleet.
• The benchmark of 20-25 active players is based on both of the above types of averages.
• The mode of fleet size is actually a bit lower, closer to 15.
• The median fleet size for players is much higher, meaning most players who are in a fleet are in a fleet with significantly more active players than 20-25.

Put more simply, most players who are in fleets are in fleets that are noticeably larger than 20-25 active players. The most frequently occurring fleet size is closer to about 15 active players, but this actually represents a significant minority of fleeted players.

Associated together, this is where we come to a target fleet size of 20-25 active players, which is what the costs are based off of.

Smaller fleets can still do all the progression, but it will take longer. Smaller fleets who consist of members who are more active than the average player (i.e., log in more than 2-3 times a week) will produce and progress at or better than the 20-25 active player expectation. Larger fleets may fill up their resource requirements faster, but that depends on people in large fleets trusting that everyone else is pulling their own weight as well.

My strong suspicion is that the average amount of contribution per player will decrease the larger the fleet is. The reality, however, is that all of these numbers are best guesses and founded on various sets of assumptions. As we see how things perform in the wild, we will adjust number has necessary.

Fleet alliance-style functionality isn't on the schedule, unfortunately. It's a very good idea for a feature, and hopefully we'll be able to fit it in at some point in the future.

I do not believe there are any changes to current fleet uniform functionality for launch of Season 6.

The resource costs are determined by the number of active players we expect in a fleet multiplied by the time we want a fleet to take for each tier, then divide that by the number of projects a fleet can run over a week.

From there, we then analyze for all active players at max level the number of EC, Refined Dilithium, Bridge Officer points, etc. they are earning versus how many of these resources they are spending on a weekly basis, and then plug those values in to come up with the final values.

Where a model like this can break down is if the mean deceives. That is, if the frequency distribution between, say, casual and hardcore players is very extreme, or if the distribution between numbers of people in fleets is very extreme. In this instance, these discrepencies do exist, so we are trying to chart a middle path that will accomplish the design goals and work for most people and most fleets.

Q: (James_Bailey) What upgrades for the Fleet System are being considered in Season 6.

Dstahl: If you are in a Fleet, one of the first new features that you will see in Season 6 is the new and updated Fleet User Interface. In addition to an updated Home Page, you’ll notice a new Tab for Fleet Holdings which will represent major projects that your Fleet has undertaken. The first of these new Fleet Holdings will be your Fleet Starbase. Once Season 6 goes live, Fleets may immediately travel to a specific system location and begin projects to construct and advance their Starbase. As players complete projects, they will earn Fleet Credits. As projects complete, the Fleet Starbase will undergo a transformation and unlock new rewards that players can spend their Fleet Credit on. In addition, new group focused missions are being added to help supply necessary items needed to advance your Fleet’s Holdings.

Q: (Alastor_Forthright) How will Fleets pay for and support their Fleet Bases? Will it be balanced so that Fleets that are small are not held to a disadvantage to larger Fleets with people constantly on?

Dstahl: Fleets will need to gather existing items as well as earn new items, such as Fleet Marks, in order to contribute towards Fleet Projects. Depending on the project, the mix of items needed can change. Items needed can include physical items such as Weapons or Gear, Commodities, Dilithium, Duty Offices, Fleet Marks, and just about anything else you can find in the game. Once you’ve gathered all the materials and kicked off the project, a standard project construction timer starts. This also means that if you have all the materials, there is only so much progress you can make at any given time, given the time needed for the projects to complete. We have pulled a lot of statistics on what the average, active Fleet size is and we are ensuring that it is not impossible for small Fleets (which are the majority) to have a viable progression path.

Q: (Roman12291969) Is there any way the Galaxy map can open up, and make that real time? Where fleets can really have a stake in what’s happening, and you can actually fight for key sectors?

Dstahl: The ideas about having a territory control game or one big sector are exciting to the team. This is one of those features on our to-do list, but it’s not on our current schedules. We have several steps in-between planned in order to get us to a place where we could do that. Having Fleet operated Starbases is one of those steps.

Q: (mindwipecjg) With the upcoming Fleet Starbases can we look forward to an option where you can gain additional duty officer missions?

Dstahl: While we are still finalizing the details of how Duty Officers connect with Fleet Starbases, we can say that Duty Officers will be a requirement for the completion of Fleet Projects. We also expect Duty Officers to be involved in the earning of additional Fleet Marks. There are no specifics on whether that means additional duty officer missions yet. This is the kind of feedback we’ll be looking for when the Fleet Advancement system and Season 6 hit the Tribble Test Servers this month.

Quote by RodgerPM

But we're not competitive at all. Nope. Nuh uh. We just happen to be awesome enough that we'll get there first, haha!

Quote by LesleyA

I think the system will ultimately hurt us as a fleet regrettably.

Quote by LesleyA

We have three fleets which will all be seeking upgrading starbases, 2 fed plus 1 kdf and players will be encouraged to upgrade projects where possible. I say where possible as the devs have already pointed out that some folks will be so keen to be able to afford snazzy T5 Nova's that they will prevent others from donating to the projects and thus being able to afford a T5 nova when they become available.

Quote by LesleyA

Bad-will will inevitably ensue as I doubt the provisioning tasks will be set as often as folks would wish as fleet officers would decide they have other priorities (such as making it look all singing and dancing). I actually see many more smaller fleets forming with an optimal size equivalent to the number of ships generated by provisioning tasks.