Engineering (Advanced)

Engineers. They're not noticed when everything is working perfectly, but when things go wrong...

Reading The Situation
It's a common experience with less experienced crews (and even some experienced ones) that Engineering gets the least amount of direct input from the Captain or the rest of the crew, despite having a large amount of power. If your Captain is new, or if you feel like they aren't giving you full attention, fill in the gaps for them. If you're paying attention, you'll know when your ship is in battle or when it's out of danger, and you can make the appropriate changes to accommodate that.

Just be careful not to make any large changes. It's bad if you dropped shields to save on power, and suddenly a battle starts and the crew is wondering why the shield isn't holding.Another common mistake is you've dropped Warp power and when the Captain orders Warp 4 to save a station, and they don't get there in time since the engines weren't properly attended to.

Suggest changes on the fly. If you just came out of battle, remind the Captain you have the ability to make some changes to make things go smoother. Perhaps shields got a bit too low? Suggest boosting them. Was it hard for Helm to maneuver around the incoming ships and torpedoes? Suggest boosting them. Speak up during lulls in the action, or even during the action if things are going bad. After a while, the Captain will learn and you'll get more input to help out.

DamCon Control
You have the power to manually control DamCom instead of the computer. When DamCom is autonomous, it'll automatically dispatch teams to damaged nodes the instant it detects it. That may be fine at first, but when you lose a few good crewmen since they were in a node when it was shot at makes you resolve to save them if you can.

The most common way this is done is to move all DamCom teams into the internal areas of the ship, away from the outer hull that gets damaged first in battle. Remember, the ship doesn't take any damage until the shields are down, so if the rear shields are about to drop, it may work to move your teams to the front of the ship.

Also with manual control, you can choose what gets repaired first. Become familiar with the node layout on your ship so you can quickly dispatch teams to the right area!