The officers and equipment you select define how effective you’ll be on the ground in Star Trek Online. Read on for a look at the capabilities of each type of officer, or skip to the end for a cheap set-up that should be able to handle most situations.

Group Composition: An away team is typically made up of your captain plus four officers you pick from your bridge crew. It’s fairly important to have a mixture of specialisations to help deal with a variety of foes, since each brings a different set of powers.

Species & Traits: Every bridge officer comes with a set of traits determined partially by their species and partially by random chance. These can actually rather good – some traits can let an officer shrug off stuns, seduce enemies, melt brains, revive themselves or simply provide a bunch of passive stat bonuses. That said, every species has something to offer in ground combat – I’d suggest putting together an away team you like the look of rather than making sure a single bridge officer deals 5% more critical damage.

Since your captain will always be included in the away team, you should consider the traits you want to equip on them as well. Unlike bridge officers, you’ll have a choice of traits that you can slot (maximum of nine) along with a racial trait (or an extra trait slot for custom aliens) that’s always equipped. Traits are drawn from a shared pool with some restrictions based on race (e.g. Bite is only available to Gorn, Telepathy for telepathic races) along with a few career-specific traits (e.g. tactical captains can make grenades expose targets) and you can pick freely from them.

You can unlock more traits for your captain via lockboxes or the exchange. These can be quite expensive but can give a nice edge in combat – perhaps you’d like to change your engineer’s Orbital Strike into a chasing beam, or to be able to generate holographic decoys when struck?

Abilities: Every officer can bring four abilities, and can learn them via training manuals available from a) bridge officer trainers b) converting another unclaimed bridge officer into a manual or c) getting them from the exchange, lockboxes or R&D.

Engineering: Focusing on absorbing damage, deploying fabrications and sabotaging opponents, an engineering officer can act as a serious force multiplier.

• Bombs (manually detonated) and mines (automatic proximity sensors) are all placed just in front of the engineer. They can be awkward to use effectively, but deal high amounts of damage when successful.
• Drones, generators and turrets can buff your team, heal you or lay down supporting fire. Note that only drones will follow you around, and they can all be destroyed by enemy fire.
• Quick fix, equipment diagnostics and shield recharge let the engineer become a form of healer, improving the damage and shields of friendlies.
• Sabotage, weapons malfunction and fusing armour allow engineers to cripple foes, slowing them, damaging them or switching off their weapons. Special mention goes to sabotage (available in lockboxes or the exchange) since it will destroy and mechanical opponent after a few seconds, as well as disabling weapons.

Tactical: Suppressing foes and dealing damage is the order of the day for a tactical officer.

• Battle strategies and target optics enhance the personal power of a tactical officer boosting their damage and potentially exposing foes.
• Draw fire makes the tactical officer a priority target for enemies – potentially useful, but frequently results in your incapacitation as everyone targets you.
• Plasma and photon grenades deal damage in a small area, punishing grouped up foes
• Lunge and sweeping strikes provide serious close-combat abilities, but be warned, some foes have devastating bite or nanotube attacks.
• Stealth module and ambush let you get the drop on foes, sneaking behind them for bonus flanking damage or potentially avoiding a fight altogether.
• Suppressing fire, fire on my mark and overwatch will improve team durability and killing power against priority targets.

Science: Drugs and mad inventions come out to play with a science officer.

• Electrogravitic field and sonic pulse let you pin foes down or hurl them away respectively – useful for setting up further powers.
• Hyperonic radiation is a lethal damage over time effect that surrounds on unlucky individual, damaging them and anyone near them – so use it on bunched-up enemies
• Hyposprays let you cleanse debuffs and boost combat abilities for teammates
• Medical tricorder, vascular regenerator and nanite health monitor restore health to wounded friendlies
• Neural Neutralizer and stasis field let you temporarily take foes out of the fight
• Tachyon harmonic and tricorder scan let you drain shields or reduce the damage resistance of foes.

Equipment: There’s a good variety of weapon types to pick from, and there’s nor right or wrong answer. That said, some weapons have a chance to expose foes on hit, which massively boosts the damage of weapons that can exploit – so consider bringing a mixture of expose and exploit weaponry. Energy type is also a matter of personal preference – but it’s worth noting that Borg cannot adapt to kinetic or physical damage, so you might consider the craftable TR-1168 rifle.

There’s a whole variety of armours to pick from as well, each with a set of resistances or skill boosts. There’s varying mission rewards options that do strange things or have a set bonus, but to start with, it’s hard to go wrong with polyalloy weave armour, since it offers high resistance to just about everything.

There’s also devices – usually consumable items for a short burst of damage or healing. Pick what you like, but it’s worth making sure everyone has a Frequency Remodulator (you can make these for free in the replicator tab of your inventory) when fighting Borg

Example: Here’s a simple, cheap setup if you just want something that’ll work in most situations.

• Engineering: Chroniton mine barrier/shield recharge/shield generator fabrication/medical generator fabrication, personal shield, polyalloy weave armour, pulsewave assault. This set-up makes an area of shield and health regeneration, while the mines and pulsewave do terrible things to anyone that gets close.
• Science: Medical tricorder/tricorder scan/vascular regenerator/nanite health monitor, personal shield, polyalloy weave armour, wide-beam pistol. Focused on keeping the team standing, this set-up provides a variety of healing effects, the ability to cleanse some debuffs and the ability to reduce the damage resistance of foes..
• Tactical: Photon grenade/battle strategies/suppressing fire/overwatch, personal shield, polyalloy weave armour, split-beam rifle. A somewhat support oriented set-up that buffs friendly damage resistance and suppresses enemies, using grenades and the secondary fire of the split beam rifle to spread the effect and exploiting any exposes.
• Tactical: Photon grenade/battle strategies/fire on my mark/plasma grenade, personal shield, polyalloy weave armour, high density beam rifle. This set up applies a hefty damage resistance penalty to a single target and can fire lethal high-density beams to seal the deal, while dropping grenades on grouped enemies.

The engineering and science crew keep the team standing and apply exposed using their weaponry while the tactical crew hand out buffs and debuffs as they exploit exposed enemies for a large damage bonus. Note that all the weapons chosen here have an area of effect component – a quality of life thing when dealing with hordes of weak enemies.