Fleet Managment: Easy or Highly Involved?

[GamerX51]

I'm a fairly new STO Player who's been soloing for a few weeks now. I'm getting up in rank - captain right now, but working on getting up to admiral status. I've seen that some of the very best ships in the game are fleet variants, which means you have to be in a fleet to get them.

I'm not particularly interested in joining someone else's fleet and would like to stay solo if possible, since I can't really play often or participate in events, so I'd like to know if it's possible to create my own solo fleet and manage it myself.

[Attilio]

It's certainly possible. You'll need a team of 5 people to help you start the fleet, but they can leave once its created. However, to unlock all of the benefits that fleets have (including ships) you'll need to progress through the various fleet holdings which is already time consuming for a large fleet. Doing it solo is certainly possible but will take a lot longer.

If your goal is only to get ships than I would say its not worth it. You're better off spending your time earning dilithium, converting it to zen, and buying ships from the store. Those are just as good. Frankly though, what really defines a ship is the equipment. The ship itself is only a small part.

[GamerX51]

Wait - You can actually convert dilithium directly to Zen?!  I didn't know that!   How can I do that?

What I'm chiefly interested in in the Imperial refit of the assault cruiser - that thing looks totally awesome, and I really, really want it.

Just to clarify, though; just HOW time consuming is advancing through fleet holdings - what's involved and what would I have to do?

[Attilio]

For the Zen conversion, check the right lower corner of the minimap. Click the down arrow then click Dilithium Exchange. There you can buy Zen from other players.

The fleet holdings are months of grinding for just a single holding, and that's with a large group of people working together. It works a lot like the reputation system, but with much higher requirements. A single project could require over 1 million Energy Credits, 200,000 Dilithium, plus a variety of other stuff like experience, duty officers, R&D materials, etc.

Essentially you run some projects to get a certain amount of XP then run upgrade projects after the minimum XP requirements are met. I'm sure you can find videos and articles online for more details, this is just the basics.