Fair warning: I’m about to commit a small act of heresy. Space is not the final frontier, not when you’ve got the entire multiverse to explore in Star Trek Timelines. Disruptor Beam’s story-driven RPG gathers characters from every non-J.J. Abrams …
Fair warning: I’m about to commit a small act of heresy. Space is not the final frontier, not when you’ve got the entire multiverse to explore in Star Trek Timelines. Disruptor Beam’s story-driven RPG gathers characters from every non-J.J. Abrams iteration of Star Trek ever to hit the small or big screens and puts them under your command as you attempt to prevent the past and present from literally colliding.
You’ll get some guidance from Q, though that comes with the usual caveats that apply when an extra-dimensional being is involved. For a more human touch, we’ve been scurrying around the game under both impulse engines and warp drive to put together our Star Trek Timelines Tips, Cheats and Strategies, hopefully allowing you to live longer and prosper more while doing so.
All set? Then engage!
Having so many characters in Star Trek Timelines doesn’t just give the game its main hook. It’s also essential to advancement and success to gather as many different crew members as possible.
Since the missions you’ll encounter require a mix of crew skills in order to complete — especially if you want to earn all possible rewards — you’re going to need a crew with a wide mix of skills. Each character can only have three skills (some have as few as one), so even the rarest and most powerful characters will only be able to help you past a certain range of challenges.
Fortunately, you can acquire new crew members in several different ways:
Note that you do have a limit as to how many crew members you can have at any given time. Duplicates of the exact same crew member can be fused together to create one more powerful character of the next higher rarity. For example, two one-star Security Chief Worfs can be combined to make one two-star Security Chief Worf. However, duplicate one-star characters serve no purpose and should be dismissed to free up space on your roster.
Just kidding. You don’t actually have to feed your crew in Star Trek Timelines, as they have food replicators for that. What you do need to know is how to level them up, improve their skills and raise their level caps.
Crew members earn experience simply by participating in missions, either as an away team member or manning a battle station during a ship battle. You can also give them extra XP by tapping the ‘Train’ button on the upper-left section of their profile and assigning them experience boosts that you can earn by completing faction missions.
Once a character reaches max level (and they’ll get there pretty quickly), you’ll need to raise his or her level cap by filling all four equipment slots. Equipment is good on its own since each piece of gear raises one of the crew member’s skills or ship abilities, but completing the full set is the only way to open up higher levels.
Need to know where to find a certain piece of equipment? Simply tap on its picture and then tap the ‘Build’ button if it needs to be crafted or the ‘Get’ button to find which missions offer it as a potential reward.
Just in case you didn’t believe us when we discussed the need for a diverse, buffed-up crew, you’ll see for yourself when you start diving into away missions, which provide the bulk of the gameplay in Star Trek Timelines. On each one, you’ll have to pick three crew members and use their skills and traits to get through a series of challenges in order to assure a successful outcome.
The nice thing is that you aren’t choosing blindly. When you warp to the location of an away mission and accept it, you’ll see a decision tree at the top of the screen that shows you exactly what skills will be required in which order. Except for the first and final challenges of each mission, you’ll almost always have a choice of two or three different skills to advance to the next step.
For reference, the different skills and their icons are:
When you have a crew member selected with the proper skill to tackle one or more of the challenges, you’ll see the icon on the decision tree change from white to gold. Nodes on the tree with a star beneath them grant rare rewards if you can achieve a critical success.
Another thing to keep in mind when picking your away team are traits, which are the descriptive terms you’ll find attached to each character: Human, Klingon, Starfleet, Prodigy, Inspiring, etc. Every away mission will have a list of suggested traits, and when you pick a crew member with a matching trait, it will turn green.
Each challenge is just a comparison of a crew member’s numerical skill plus a random number (you’ll find the range in parentheses next to the first value), but matching the proper traits can give you bonus points that can be the difference between failure and success. Thus, while it’s not wise to make traits your primary selection criterion, it is wise to keep them in mind.
If you fail one challenge in an away mission, don’t despair. That will make some of the subsequent steps more difficult, but it won’t tank the entire mission unless you fail on the final step.
Earlier in its development, Star Trek Timelines had a more complex system for ship battles that matched up nicely with the effort the developers obviously put into the lovely 3D graphics. They ultimately settled on something much simpler, so much so that it doesn’t require that much of you except properly timed taps.
Before entering into a space battle, your primary goal is to get the best possible crew members into the battle stations you have available. Each character has a ship skill that either increases damage, improves weapon accuracy or increases your ship’s avoidance, so it’s good to pick a mix of skills. Tapping a battle station will bring up your entire list of crew, along with icons that show what ship skills they have and how big an improvement you can expect.
Once you enter battle, your ship will fly and shoot automatically. Now your job is to activate the crew skills using the icons at the bottom of the screen as quickly and often as you can. The icons will light up orange when they are available, then slowly deplete as they are used. The bars will then refill in blue, turning orange when they can be activated again.
And that’s seriously all there is to it. There’s no way to improve the ship you have, though you can earn different ships by collecting schematics. Powerful ships take hundreds of schematics to build, so obtaining one is more of a long term goal.
While in the middle of a episode, you’ll no doubt notice the dialogue choices you’ll have and how your answers can be slanted toward one faction or another. That’s because every episode involves a dispute between multiple alien races or organizations from different parts of the Star Trek franchise, and your decisions and actions will help one of them come out on top.
The most efficient way to approach a dispute (which would make Spock and Data proud) is to see what the faction reward is before you jump into an episode and then aim your actions toward that faction. Once you’ve scored enough points with them to improve your relationship and make sure they are the winners, the game will let you know.
Aside from the episode reward, currying favor with a faction allows you to visit their homeworld and Faction Center, where you can buy equipment or schematics with credits, merits or Dilithium.
