Captain’s Guide: Starship Battles in Star Trek Timelines

With nearly two dozen in-game starships and continuous improvements to Starship Battles underway, today’s STAR TREK TIMELINES Captain’s Guide is an overview of Starship Battles: the basics on how to play, building and upgrading starships, battle rewards, and tips for earning three-star scores on the highest difficulties.

A numbers game

The Starship Battle system revolves around three core stats: Attack, Accuracy and Evasion. Your starship has base values for each of these stats, as does your opponent. You can find your current starship’s stats by selecting Menu > Build & Change Ship > the More Information (i) button on your ship’s tile:


The “Menu” button is the top-right square with three lines.


Next we select “Build & Change Ships”.


Select any of the (i) buttons to see more information about a starship, built or unbuilt.

Your starship’s Attack stat will determine its damage with each volley of weapons fire, including phasers, disruptors and torpedo yield. A high Attack stat will equal a high weapons fire.

Accuracy regulates how often your weapons actually hit the enemy target. Your chance to hit a target will be impacted by the enemy starship’s Evasion. However, the same rule applies to your starship’s Evasion. For instance, if your Evasion is nine and your enemy’s Accuracy is four, a majority of their attacks will miss you.

Crew to Battle Stations!

Your ship can only take you so far; the critical difference in any starship battle is what crew you have at your disposal.

Every crew member in Star Trek Timelines has a unique action that provides a temporary boost to one of your starship’s three core stats: Attack, Accuracy or Evasion. It’s up to you as Captain to size-up your ship versus your opponent’s and then select crew able to give you the edge.

You select crew by slotting them into Battle Stations. With your starting vessel, a Constellation-class ship, you’ll only have two Battle Stations, but other ships will have more. Generally speaking, starships with more stars will have more Battle Stations.


As a starter ship, the Constellation-class has a solid set of battle actions: two for Evasion and one Accuracy.


The Constellation-class has two battle stations, making it a decent starting vessel.


By comparison, the Enterprise-D has more varied Battle Actions: One each of Attack, Evasion and Accuracy.


The Enterprise-D also has a third Battle Station, giving the captain more flexibility.

You’ll need to assign your crew to Battle Stations before entering a Starship Battle. Notice the skill icons on each of the Battle Station slots.

Crew members benefit you during a Starship Battle in two ways: 1) actively, through the aforementioned special action that provides a temporary boost to one of your three core stats, and 2) passively, through a perpetual boost that exists as long as they are slotted into a Battle Station.

While you can assign a crew member who does not possess the associated skill to a slot, you will only receive the second benefit if you match a crew member with a certain skill to the Battle Station slot with that same skill.

Once you are happy with your Battle Station assignments, it’s time to declare RED ALERT and head into battle!


Shields up! Red Alert!

During the battle

During a Starship Battle, your entire crew is focused on the task at hand. Accordingly, you don’t need to worry about raising shields, piloting your ship, targeting the enemy, or when to fire your phaser banks. As you can see if you sit back and watch a Starship Battle, your crew knows what to do.

However, most battles cannot be won on autopilot; you have to be ready in the Captain’s chair to issue specific tactical commands. The actions you can take during battle appear at the bottom of your screen. There are two types of actions: 1) actions specific to your ship, and 2) actions specific to the crew members you assigned to Battle Stations.


While the Enterprise-D has good battle actions, our current crew definitely more powerful.

Each action has a warm-up before you can use it and a cooldown before you can use it again. Your fingers must be ready to use an action as soon as it has finished it’s warm up--seconds can be the difference between victory and defeat!

But don’t get too twitchy: if you have two actions that provide a boost to the same stat, trying to use them both at once will result in the one with the bigger boost being used while the lesser one will be canceled out, meaning you just wasted the opportunity to use the second one until BOTH cooldown/warm up again!


The Enterprise-D has used one of its battle actions, boosting its Attack total to eight.


Empress Sato provides a 13 Attack boost, which overrides the Enterprise-D’s current Attack battle action. What a waste!

So remember, when you have two available abilities that provide a boost to the same stat -- whether it’s Attack, Accuracy, or Evasion -- it’s better to use them one after the other. This will give you options throughout the battle, no matter what the enemy throws at you.

The victor and the spoils

Whenever you win a Starship Battle your rewards can include credits, crew equipment, components to build equipment, Captain XP (experience points) and crew XP. As always, the higher the mastery and the more stars you earn, the better your rewards. One thing to note, however, is that crew XP will not be given if you use the Warp-1 or Warp-Max buttons.


Success! We earned crew XP, credits, Captain XP, some equipment components, and starship schematics!


We’re a little bit closer to building our Jem’Hadar Fighter.

Tips on mastering Starship Battles

Currently, all mastery of Starship Battles are based on time. The faster you win a starship battle, the more stars you receive. If you are moving your fingers as fast as you can and just can’t seem to win in the necessary amount of seconds, however, there are a few other ways to speed things up:

  • Build a new, more powerful starship
  • Upgrade your current starship
  • Level and Fuse crew assigned to Battle Stations

Building new starships requires you first have the necessary amount of ship schematics. You can earn schematics by succeeding at Away Missions and Starship Battles. Additionally, Faction Centers sometimes sell schematics, and they can also be found in the Time Portal.


If Picard wants his own U.S.S. Voyager, he’ll need to get 150 more schematics.

Upgrading an available starship also requires ship schematics. In addition to already having built the starship you wish to upgrade, each unique starship also requires a certain number of schematics before you can upgrade to its next level.


Picard has enough U.S.S. Enterprise-D schematics to upgrade his starship!

Leveling your preferred crew to assign to Battle Stations can improve your  starship’s Accuracy and Evasion, provided that crew member is slotted into a Battle Station with an associated skill.) Fusing your duplicate characters to their maximums stars will increase their overall starship ability growth trend -- so instead of your character’s damage ability going up by one point after leveling-up several times, it could go up by two or three points.

Qapla’ Captains!

Thanks for reading this Captain’s Guide on the current version of Starship Battles. For even more advice and insight be sure to join the growing community of TIMELINES captains and player fleets. You can transmit feedback or questions using social channels:

And, as always, thanks for reading!

Looking for even more information about STAR TREK TIMELINES? Try the official Ensign's Guide, the Star Trek Timelines subreddit, and the Star Trek Timelines Wiki.