We continue our series of STO beta preview coverage this week by taking a closer look at ship combat and "space view" gameplay mechanics.

The majority of your time in space will be at sub-light speeds, where all the action takes place. Ships use "impulse" engines, which you control by using key binds or a "slider" graphic in the UI. In addition to varying degrees of speed, you can initiate a full-stop and full-reverse. You can also kick your engines up to full-impulse to move significantly faster, but it requires a lot of your ship's power to maintain. It's not a great idea to fly into combat at full-impulse, because your shields and weapons won't have access to as much power as they normally would.

Power management is a juggling act that plays a large role in ship combat. By default, the UI offers several "presets" that allow you to easily switch between giving priority to shields, speed, weapons or a "balanced" option. In addition, you can manage the amount of power devoted to each of your four shield "sections" while in combat, using either the keyboard or UI. Each shield section protects one area of your ship; fore, aft, starboard and port. When one of these shield sections is completely depleted, a ship's hull is vulnerable to attack, which can ultimately lead to its destruction.

In STO, phaser beams and photon torpedoes are a ship's two main weapons. The energy-based beam weapons are better-suited for weakening an enemy ship's shields, while torpedoes inflict more damage to physical material, like a ship's hull. The basic strategy is to wear down a section of the enemy's shields with your beam weapons, then unleash torpedoes to penetrate its hull. However, each weapon has a specific firing arc; phaser beams can be shot from starboard and port areas, while torpedoes are launched from fore and aft, for example.

Like many other controls, you can either use the keyboard or UI buttons to manage your weapons. By default, the [Spacebar] key will fire all beam weapons, and [Ctrl] + [Spacebar] will fire both beams and torpedoes. When you consider the feat of maneuvering your ship both offensively and defensively, managing your own shields' power while tracking openings in your enemy's shields and attacking with several different types of weapons and abilities, it all seems a bit overwhelming.

But to its credit, Cryptic developed a UI and control system that works effectively, once you get the hang of it. Still, we got better results after tinkering with the key binds and control options to create a custom profile. Many players might come to the same conclusion, depending on their hardware (we took advantage of a nine-button mouse, mapping engine and weapon controls to our convenience).

Once we overcame the learning curve and got the basics down, we had a blast flying around in ship combat. Fans of the Star Trek franchise will probably find it the most gratifying; as a space shooter in the sci-fi genre of games, STO's ship combat isn't necessarily extraordinary. But within the bounds of the 'Trek IP, Cryptic succeeded in developing a faithful, immersive and downright fun representation of ship-based combat. As of press time, the MMO is still in beta, so the few gameplay bugs we encountered aren't worth noting unless they persist after launch.

We noticed a few things in the ship-combat gameplay that disappointed us, like the fact that Cryptic didn't take advantage of the 360-degree capability of space as much it could have. Players do have the ability to fly within all three dimensions, but most of the PvE content we encountered was "focused" on the horizontal plane, probably for accessibility's sake. In "true" outer-space, each dimension should be represented equally, and without preference. But in STO, we noticed that the horizontal plane always seemed to be the "fallback" dimension in which you could find your bearing.

We're also a bit unsure of the multi-tasking that's required to play as effectively as possible; while we're extremely grateful to find gameplay mechanics that haven't been "dumbed-down" too much, we found ourselves a bit inundated when trying to deal with multiple enemies (especially when tracking all our bridge officers' ability cooldowns— along with our own—while attempting to defend our ship at the same time).

But, aside from those and a few other smaller issues, we were thoroughly impressed with our early look at STO's ship-based combat. The graphics and special effects look amazing, and represent the TV series and movies as faithfully as possible. Check back with us as we continue our beta preview series and bring you more STO details, including a look at "away-mission" combat and gameplay!