Good day, Joe and STOers! No, I didn’t forget about the Jem’Hadar Escort build post. Working on a brand-new account in the midst of 3 other accounts is tricky, especially with new Prodigy stuff going live and wanting to grab some stuff from there.
Looking ahead, I’m seeing a busy end of week and weekend, so maybe the middle of next week, I can finally share what my Jem’Hadar Escort build currently is.
But until then, I wanted to show off the practicality of doing a fairly simple thing (provided one has enough Admiralty ships to rotate it around regularly): Ferengi Tour of Duty.
ADMIRALTY BASICS
Admiralty is a fairly simple concept: The ships you have active in your Ship Roster and that are in your Dry Dock get essentially copied and turned into Admiralty Ships.
Admiralty Ships are DOFF-like “cards” used to match or exceed specified Engineering, Tactical, and Science stats in Admiralty missions. (You just need to have the ship owned [Event unlock; Z-Store Unlock; or single-character ship that’s still in your Ship Roster and/or Dry Dock] to get its card, then you can discard the ship(s) you don’t want to keep.)
You don’t have to match the stats perfectly, but from personal experience, even high-percentage Admiralty Missions fail quite often, so I shoot for matching or exceeding all listed stats for a mission if I’m aiming to get the rewards from it.
Since I started the account with a Jem’Hadar, I didn’t have much with which to work: 1 Tier 5 ship and 1 Shuttle. This is why I’ve been focusing on getting T5 Lock Box ships. It’s not perfect, but I have rotated around one set of Admiralty missions for the Tour of Duty reward. I’m up to 47, of which 21 are one-time use ships (they’re not actual ships; check this blog post from a few years ago for what one-time use ships are).
So, with that in mind, I told you I got to the Ferengi Tour of Duty’s 10/10 mission. I feel it’s now safe to say, if you’re focusing one Campaign in particular, about 20 T5 ships is enough (counting freebies, Phoenix Prize Pack store’s Admiralty-only ships, etc.) to get a single Tour of Duty chain to its completion. (Of course, aim for more, as the EC can be used for Contraband to be turned into Dilithium.)
WHAT DOES THE FERENGI 10/10 ACTUALLY GIVE? I DIDN’T RECEIVE ANY DILITHIUM!
This video, combined with some explanation, will help you understand.
First, the video:
Now, then, the explanation:
The Ferengi Tour of Duty reward used to be 30,000 unrefined Dilithium…straight out.
And the Klingon Tour of Duty reward also used to be 30,000 unrefined Dilithium…straight out.
Assuming you miss a few days (some days, that Tour of Duty won’t rotate around like it “needs” to), that would be 60,000 Dilithium in 14 days. Consider that would be ~4,285 Dilithium per day for doing nothing more than doing some clicking every day.
So in February 2020, Cryptic changed it to the following:
- Klingon Tour of Duty: 40,000 Fleet Dilithium Vouchers (basically, Dilithium you can only use by donating it to Fleet projects)
- Ferengi Tour of Duty: 30,000 Dilithium Bonus Pool.
The Bonus Pool is what I’m talking about today.
Notice in the upper-left corner of the screen, a series of Bonus Pool icons, one of which has a little purple crystal, then a yellow bar, then “30000” next to it.
This is your Dilithium Bonus Pool. You earn 50% more Dilithium on most (if not all) sources of unrefined Dilithium in STO. This includes, but isn’t limited to:
- Story mission rewards.
- Endeavor reward box openings.
- Reputation daily/hourly rewards.
- Admiralty rewards.
- Event Dilithium earnings (both the one-time 25,000-30,000 claims and the 8,000+ daily extra Dilithium for extra Event runs before said Event ends)
The video shows the Event’s bonus Dilithium reward as 10,000 Dilithium.
So fast-forward through me dying a time or two (maybe 3?…) before the end of the queue, I select the Marks I want, and I see quite a huge amount of Dilithium!
15,720 Dilithium! That’s almost enough on its own for 2 full days of refining!
But how? (Okay, the math geeks are getting it, but some of you are point-and-shoot and ask questions later. This is for them.)
- Under normal circumstances, you get 10,480 total Dilithium: 10,000 for that day’s bonus Dilithium reward + 480 for the queue itself.
- Since we have the Bonus Dilithium Pool, those numbers are increased 50%:
- 10,000 * .50 = 5,000
- 480 * .50 = 240
- So we’ve added an extra 5,240 to the 10,480 we expected prior to the Bonus Pool, thus getting 15,720 total Dilithium.
IDEAL STRATEGY
Once the account is a bit more mature, you’d want to do this across all characters for which your time allows. Let’s use a large number, like 10 (plus, math is nicer!).
- Seasonal Events (those that require 20 daily runs out of 30-31 possible) have 10 extra days for 8,000 + 9,000 + 10,000 + 11,000 + 12,000 + 13,000 + 14,000 + 15,000 + 16,000 + 17,000 = 125,000 Dilithium from the extra days.
- 10 characters on Bonus Dilithium means you can make those numbers 50% bigger: 12,000 + 13,500 + 15,000 + 16,500 + 18,000 + 19,500 + 21,000 + 22,500 + 24,000 + 25,500 = 187,500 Dilithium.
- That’s an extra 62,500 Dilithium, or 125 Zen over the course of those 10 days.
Realistically, you can stagger 3 or 4 characters well enough that you’ll not need 16 days to full refine all of this (likely, 12-13: 10 days for the full impact of the Dilithium Bonus + 2-3 days for the last couple characters to refine their windfall), but .
BIGGER PICTURE (not even counting Events)
Okay, so perhaps 10 characters is a lot for that specific strategy to keep Dilithium refining backlogs at a minimum. You’d still benefit from a ton of characters having a ton of Admiralty going on.
Let’s look more generically at this. To get 30,000 bonus Dilithium, you’d have to earn 60,000 regular Dilithium. That total to 90,000 Dilithium you’d get during a period where you have the Bonus active. In terms of Zen, you went from 120 earned Zen to 180 earned Zen.
Yeah, yeah, 60 Zen extra doesn’t seem like a lot…until we multiply that out.
Over 10 characters, you’d go from earning just over $10 to almost $20.
And this assumes a 500:1 rate. How’s it look closer to PlayStation’s rate, which is around 325:1 (likely a bit less, but I haven’t checked lately).
The numbers look better for you. At 325:1, having 10 characters rotating their Ferengi Tour of Duty (10/10) earns you nearly $10 more on the same 60,000 no-boost earnings.
A SHIP LOAD OF DILITHIUM
If you’re a new account, yes, you’ve got a lot less capability than a more established account, BUT by taking time and resources to build up systems like Admiralty, you’ll be raking in the Dilithium for those Zen premium purchases fairly easily. You’ll find it nice to go from refining 60,000 Dilithium on a single character to getting nearly 1 million across your 10 characters in the long-run. And trust me, it may seem like it’ll take a while, but with as many ways to earn Dilithium in the game as STO has, I think you’ll find that’ll go away faster than you think. 😉
I won’t preview what could be the next post because…I don’t know. I may do a few “Joe’s Short STOs” to highlight some stuff I’ve been posting on Twitter…*ahem*…X, but other than that, I’m looking at mid-next week before doing anything more in-depth.
So I’ll simply say, until next time, GO FAST and continue enjoying Star Trek Online.
Joe and STO 