You've murdered Klingons, Romulans, Devidians, Jem'Hadar, Cardassians, Breen and even some Borg if you were unlucky enough to reach the final lot of missions before hitting the level cap. Well done, you!

Now, as you find yourself standing on Earth Spacedock, in the First City or in New Romulus Command, you've got a question to ask yourself - what next?

Playing at level 50

Star Trek Online's endgame largely consists of grinding through the reputation system, available in one of the tabs on your player sheet. There are currently five main reputation factions, with a sixth coming next month:

- Omega Force shoot borgs
- Dyson Alliance hang out in a big Dyson Sphere (I understand they play Sing, Sing, Sing on New Year's Eve)
- New Romulus farms pigbunnies
- Nukura kills spiders
- Undine Task Force (upcoming) squishes alien tripods

Level 50 play largely consists of running Special Task Force (STF) missions, which reward marks (currency) for whichever faction is involved with the specific STF. You'll get very familiar with certain STFs, particularly the ones involving everyone's favourite collective, the Borg.

How can I be good at space ships?

I'm glad you asked! Today I'm going to teach you about cruisers. Why not escorts or science ships? Because they're a bit more complicated, and a bit more fiddly to use. With the cruiser build I'm going to detail below, you'll be geared up to go in no time.

This guide will focus on Federation characters - for Romulans and Klingons, ask in the comments and we can talk through your options.

Step 1: Get an Assault Cruiser

The Sovereign-class cruiser is a really viable ship for the build we're going for here. It's just an all-round good ship, with the added advantage of looking pretty decent as well. If you missed out on this at level 40, grab a Mirror Assault Cruiser on the Exchange. This is the same as the Assault Cruiser but has extra crew and looks different! This may cost you a few hundred thousand credits (depending on market trends), but it's worth it.

(If you want to spend some money on a ship, have a look at the Avenger and Excelsior class for Federation characters. For Klingons, the Mogh is great. Romulans: Get the Scimitar. It's not just the best cruiser in the game, it's the best ship in the game.)

Once you've got your ship, for the time being you can forget about what's equipped to it. Trust me, where we're going, we won't need equipment for a while.

Oh, while you're on the exchange? Jump into the Personal Weapons category and grab yourself a Mk XII gun. You'll need it.

Step 2: Sphere of Influence

This is the first stage of our grand plan to outfit your new ship with great weapons and equipment for almost nothing. You're going to run this mission a few times, because we want all of the available mission rewards. This means:

- Once for the Warp Core
- Once for the omni-directional antiproton beam array (provides a set bonus with the warp core to give you +10% antiproton damage)
- Six times for the Mk XI antiproton beams the mission gives out on replays

This looks gruelling. It is gruelling. BUT it will save you a lot of money and you'll wind up with a buffed, powerful suite of weapons. The Accuracy bonus on the antiproton arrays will help you a lot, too - Acc is a great modifier.

Step 3: A Step Between Stars

Once you've run Sphere of Influence once, you'll be invited to visit Dyson Joint Command inside the Dyson Sphere. Your contact will give you an unskippable mission to explore the sphere. Once you've done that, you can safely skip the rest of the (tutorial) missions and go straight to A Step Between Stars.

You're running this mission three times, which seems positively tame compared to Sphere of Influence. Instead of Worf, in this mission you hang out with Tuvok and get to hear him delivering sick burns unto some very bad aliens. It is a reasonably fun mission, so it's not going to hurt too much to do it a couple of times.

From this mission, you'll obtain a shield, deflector dish and some engines. These work together to give you an absolutely brilliant set bonus that gives you bonus shield power and a passive ability that can help fix your hull.

Step 4: The Doomsday Device

Finally, cruise on over and run this mission once (yay) to get a Hargh'Peng torpedo launcher. This torpedo will do you well until you can get something better, and is great for aiming at clusters of enemies due to the secondary explosion it can cause. Fun for the whole family!

Step 5: Putting it together

By the end of this process you'll have seven beams and a torpedo, plus a warp core, shields, engines and a deflector dish. Put them in their appropriate places upon your new ship (torpedo in the front, omnibeam in the rear).

All you need now are a few consoles:

- For your Tactical console slots, you're going to want Antiproton Mag consoles. Mk XIs shouldn't be too financially draining and will serve you well by further boosting your antiproton damage. This will be your bread and butter.
- For Science, take some Emitter Arrays to boost your shield healing. Again, Mk XI should be fine.
- For Engineering, take two each of RCS Accelerators and Neutronium Alloy. Mk XI all round.

Bridge Officer Skills and how to use this ship

This ship is built for broadsiding, and it does it very well indeed. Visit a Bridge Officer Trainer to sort out these skills and teach them to your BOFFs. Don't forget to dump experience points into them so that your skills don't suck!

Ensign Tactical: Tactical Team 1
Lieutenant Tactical: Tactical Team 1, Beam Array Fire at Will 2
Lieutenant Science: Hazard Emitters 1, Science Team 2
Lieutenant Commander Engineering: Emergency Power to Shields 1, Engineering Team 2, Emergency Power to Weapons 3
Commander Engineering: Emergency Power to Shields 1, Reverse Shield Polarity 1, Emergency Power to Weapons 3, Directed Energy Modulation 3

Here's how it works:

For attacking, you're going to want to use Fire at Will as often as it's off cooldown. This lets you rain antiproton death down upon your enemies all over the map, and is good. Use both copies of Emergency Power to Weapons to keep your weapon power boosted, further boosting the power of your beams. Finally, use Directed Energy Modulation on high-value or shielded targets to bypass said shields. On unshielded targets, such as Borg Transformers and Gateways, this won't do anything.

Note: If you're not an Engineering Captain, you'll need a friend who is one to teach your Boffs Emergency Power to Weapons 3 and Directed Energy Modulation 3. Did you know you can offer boffs in the trade window? Neither did I until recently. Trade them over, get them educated, then get them traded back. Easily done.

You've got a lot of skills to use for defence, as well. Here's how to use them:

Tactical Team: You have two copies to chain - like Emergency Power to Weapons, this will allow you to keep it up virtually constantly. This skill automatically manages your shield facings and does so faster than you can. Incredibly useful when under fire from multiple angles.
Emergency Power to Shields: Two copies to chain. Use as often as you can when being shot.
Reverse Shield Polarity: Another great shield healing skill - this turns incoming damage into shield power for a little bit. Use this when you're being shot a LOT to pretty much instaheal your shields.
Science Team: Not only does this skill heal your shields, it clears annoying debuffs like Viral Matrix. Use when being shot or when weird science stuff is happening to your ship.
Hazard Emitters: Clears a very important debuff that Science Team can't touch - plasma fires. The Borg use plasma and it hurts a LOT over time if a fire starts. Hazard Emitters extinguishes the fire and heals your hull over time. Use when your hull is slightly damaged, but this one is best saved for when you're on fire.
Engineering Team: This is your main hull heal. Use when your hull starts to drop - it should keep you in the fight for a bit longer.

What next?

Now that you've got your ship set up, it's time to go and show it off in STFs. Learn each mission and you'll start seeing great results from this build. Remember: other players' ships may do cool stuff, but your ship is built for one very specialised purpose - domination. You won't be blasting out space magic or zipping around like Sisko's Defiant, but what you will be doing is outdamaging and outliving your comrades by sticking to the basics and doing them well.

With this ship, you'll be able to make it through Elite STF missions without too much hassle. This will allow you to save marks and invest them in tech like the Borg Kinetic Cutting Beam (stick it on the back of your ship and retire your torpedo), which has a tremendous 2-piece bonus with the Borg Assimilated Console. You'll also be able to eventually cruise to Tier 5 Dyson reputation, and completely outfit your ship in shiny white space bling.

Enjoy!

If you're a Klank, have a look at the Vo'Quv Carrier. It works like a cruiser except it has a Commander Science slot instead of Engineering, so you lose DEM but gain, say Gravity Well 3. You will also need to spend some dilithium to buy good fighters. This is absolutely worth doing, and if you're a Klank you'll make dil easily through Duty Officer missions.

For Romulans, as mentioned above the best cruiser is without a doubt the Scimitar. But if you don't have $25 or $50 to spend, the Ha'pax warbird will work in a pinch. Bear in mind the warp core/omnibeam trick I mentioned won't work because warbirds can't run warp cores (thanks Sela). I'd recommend running a mission that rewards a singularity core you like at level 50 to get a Mk XI version, and then running a mission called Last Stand seven times to get a set of caustic plasma beams. These are like normal plasma, but they burn twice as fast, which means in theory you'll kill things with fire a lot quicker.

Failing that, jump on the exchange and look for beams of any demonination. Remember to get a matching set and boost them with the appropriate damage consoles though!

While I haven't had to do this yet (haven't yet needed to optimize my boffs beyond what I can get from my own PC's training, the boff skill trainer NPC, or what's available from the small army of bridge officers inevitably found in my Stations window), my understanding is that they don't even have to be fully traded: they can be trained in the trade window UI itself. This is how you can get training from other players for bridge officers that are bound (i.e. can't be traded).