Hints and tips

[Undergrid]

Any interesting titbits, share them here.  I'll start.

Finish in one of the top 6 in a fleet engagement, Something Undergrid seems to do quite regularly, and you get an extra piece of loot as a reward.

[Arathrael]

Just discovered this one: if your away team doesn't appear with you when you beam down to the planet, try the command '/FillPetTeamList'. Worked for me just now.

Also, '/cmdlist' lists all the /commands. There's a lot of them. You can do macros and binds as well, similar to how they're done in City of Heroes by the looks of it.

[RichardWhitely]

You will rarely need to run back to the starbase in SOL (Reachable through Transwarp). You can 'sell' loot to your replicator through the inventory screen and you can turn in missions and get new mission by hailing Starfleet with the button below your mini map.

You only need to go back to the station for promotions and promotion missions to get your new ships.

There is a beam out button on the map, and under the radar when you finish a ground mission.

Lieutenant skills cost 100 to level, Lieutenant Commander cost 200 a level. but I didn't make it past 20 in CB
BO skills tier 1 cost 50 to level.

Always keep your away team equipped with a good mixture of 50% expose and 50% exploit attacks. Some weapons have an "Expose" trait, while some are "Exploit". Expose weapons have a chance to put an expose on a target when firing their special attack. When this happens, you'll see a red circle on the enemy.
While exposed, if you fire the special attack of an exploit weapon at an exposed enemy, it will cause a 3x critical hit. If this kills the enemy they will vaporize in the classic TOS effect. You can equip your BO's with a variety of weapon types to maximize the opportunity to get exploit hits.
I keep my away team equipped with only expose type weapons and keep on myself two exploit weapons. When I see an NPC get hit with the expose I blast them and switch to my second weapon ready for the next expose which sometimes happen at the same times.

Do NOT hoard your skill points; you must spend them to advance in level.

When skilling up, try to concentrate on your ship-skills. Ground encounters can be won by good equipment, which can be bought. But space encounters need a good ship to be won, and your skills are making each ship better you'll ever fly. Raise your weapons damages, your energy outputs, your maneuverability etc. by raising the appropriate skills. And only raise those BO-Skills which you use!

In ground combat if you hit (default) button 3 (Knockback) you will hit any characters in melee with you without having to target them.

Your Captain skills work on diminishing returns. So bring all of them up to level 4 and you will get a lot of bang for your buck. Although you can "max out" a skill by dumping points into it, the last few points you put in actually get you very little benefit. There's no reason not to put at least 4 points into all of your Lieutenant skills.

As soon as you get to the place where you can blow up borg spheres press 'p' and look at the list, add some to your hotbar. Repeat when you beam down to the vega colony so you can add some things to your ground combat hotbar.

If you click on a small button to the right of your hotbar you can set 1, 2, or 3 rows of buttons. When on a 3 row setup the officers icons on the bottom of my screen go away and become "hotbar" buttons instead. At least in ship combat.

The rows of hotbars are defaulted to normal 1-0, then alt 1-0 and then control 1-0. You can change those in the keymapper to be shift keys instead.
You can move hotbar buttons around by hold and drag using the RIGHT mouse button.

Mouse over the little icons around them, one will let you add a second or third row to the bar so you actually have room for all of your abilities.

There is a way to just fire all available phasers and not your photon torpedoes with space bar. In the options under keybinding, scroll down and you'll see there are 3 things you can bind: Fire all energy weapons, fire all projectile weapons, and fire all weapons.

To go into social under the HUD map in upper left and turn on my Grouping options

You can press the 'R' key to toggle full impulse on and off --- this should be Shift + R or you can change it in your keybinds to whatever you want it to be.

Right click a button on the hotbar menu to turn on its Auto-fire. Only two buttons at a time can be auto-fire. You still have to fire the first time yourself with spacebar, and to stop shooting you un-target them.

An addendum to the enabling auto-fire tip (enabled by right clicking on the weapon icon): Currently, you can only auto fire one forward energy weapon and one rear energy weapon - people are asking for this to change, but now that phaser fire actually is taking energy and has to charge up again, constantly firing ALL energy weapons can easily cause you to not be able to fire any while the capacitors recharge.

The 4 arrow keys below your Page Up and Page Down keys are bound to "divert power to that shield", for those of you looking for a keyboard shortcut. If your inventory is open, the arrow keys will not properly work on your shields.

Don't hold onto Kits your class can't use.
Use the exchange for big items but sell off the useless junk to your replicator. You usually get a little over half the value in the item description if you sell it to a vendor. Your fellow players would be happy to buy your item and you'll make more money. No one wants to buy the gear you start the game with. Don't try to sell it on the market for 5000 energy.

To use those batteries you keep finding in space you have to first put them into your ship's 'device' slots.

Tribbles multiply in your inventory and, in closed beta, ate the food in your inventory.

The Replicator (standard on every ship) is used in several missions throughout your career. If you are asked to provide something (Medical Supplies, Holodiscs, etc.) make sure to check your Replicator (found at the bottom of your Inventory window) to see if you can make them rather than flying all over sector space looking for somewhere to buy it.

You get a few of your bridge officers through missions but you can purchase them at the starbase in personnel but once you purchase them don't look for them in inventory they are not there, go to Assignments with "U" key for your ship and you can then activate the BO to either Join or Train one of your other BO's. Right click on the officer for the options. I believe "commission" is the option that makes them active.

Take the engineering bridge officer as your first during the tutorial, their 'emergency power to shields' ability will compensate for many newbie errors.

You can have more Bridge Officers than your ship has consoles for. The officers not assigned to your ship can still be used on away team missions so you can have an army of tactical officers or multiple healers (science officers) if you so chose. Not always the ideal choice as you have to spread out skill points but you can do it if you want to.

Make sure to look at what skills the officer has coming down the line. Pumping a bunch of points into an officer with a cool skill then realizing that all the rest they get aren't ones you want sucks.

You get one free Tailor respec for each Boff you get. If you buy "unknowns" you can make them look like anything (gender is set though). You can even pick the voice of your NPC crew that way (not avaialbe for players, as our avatar never speaks).

Bridge officers cannot use Kits.

The buttons above your team in ground combat includes a target my target button. Focus fire is your friend.

If you disconnect/log in the middle of a multi step mission, you will come back to the game in sector space outside the system with a button to the side of your screen saying "Continue with X mission" which will pick up at the step you left off.

Also in the list on the right side of the screen it lists your missions and objectives, it also tells you where to go IE Patrol Mec System has go to Kinjer system thus hearing in chat where is Mec system gets you the response Mec=Kinjer (hopefully this will be fixed in another patch)

Open map as soon as you get out of the tutorial and into space, you have 3 tabs Area Map, Galaxy Map, and System list.
Area Map = This shows all the planets in the sector, The Dots are Systems Click on them to travel to them
Galaxy Map= This shows you the different sectors, you will notice each sector is named, the current sector is the Sirius Sector and it is broken down in 3 sections Vulcan, Orion and Rissa. So when you get the mission patrol the Vulcan Sector you are patrolling systems in that sector but not Vulcan.
System List+ all places you can travel to are listed in here.
Each sector map in the game is a sector block made up of three sectors each of which has a patrol mission named after it. These missions tend to take you further and further from Sol, leading you into the missions.
Transwarp is a power you get but is not put in your hotbar go to Powers and then drag and drop Transwarp to a hotbar slot. It takes you from wherever you are to Sol System, there is a cool down, I think 30 minutes but it may be more.

Phasers work on shields, torpedoes work on hulls.
Most enemy ships hit really hard from their fronts and even rears, so stay to the sides of bigger ships as best you can (tractor beam rocks for this) and eat their broadsides while giving them yours and turning into them to torp as it refreshes.

May not help directly, but you can access the bridge when out of the tutorial and combat via the small triangle (aka down arrow near radar) on the map.

If you want to sit in your captain's chair, jump up on it and issue the /em captainsit command. You will notice when you select /em captain a context sensitive help screen will appear which lists related commands. This also works for /em dance as you have different dances such as the robot etc.

There is a button on the keymapper for toggling on and off the lock camera to target. It is the 2nd to last option on the "camera controls" section of the keymapper, and is mapped to the X button I think.
However, if you hold the mouse pointer over the option on the keymapper, then it has a popup that says, "To be used in conjuction with the /stopTargetSSOviewtarget" or some-such computer code lingo. I recongnise it as a slash command macro.

Emotes can be accessed by bringing up a popup menu right next to the chat bar. It is the little Star Fleet icon to the right of the text line.
Or you can emote by just typing in the command, but like City of Heroes the emotes are proceeded by a semi-colon, not a slash. You type; wave and not /wave to make your toon wave at somebody.

stolen from this thread: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=58220