Faction restrictions

I've been thinking over the last few days about the various different faction restrictions that venues and organisers have put onto OP events in order to try and balance the game, so I thought I'd a) try to classify them and b) give some thoughts on them too.

1) Mixed - no additional restrictions other than those provided in the STAW rule book 

This seems to be the go to version played by most people in the 'strategic community' and initially I didn't like this set of restrictions as they led to the Borg being overpoweringly good. I played one OP with these rules in place and was rushed and dropped by a Borg cube (something like this)

Tactical Cube 138 [Tactical Cube] (46)

Flagship: Independent (Klingon) [Flagship Resource] (10)

Lore [Soong] (4)

In'cha [I.K.S. Negh'var] (5)

Borg Ablative Hull Armor [Tactical Cube] (7)

Romulan Pilot [P.W.B. Aj'Rmr] (3)

Janice Rand [U.S.S. Excelsior] (3)

Maneuverability [Interceptor Five] (11)

Energy Dissipator [Gor Portas] (11)

Total (100)

Fleet total: 100

The cube ran straight over a planet, energy dissipated my most expensive ship and then killed it with its 8 dice primary weapon attack. Given that this was my first OP and my first game at an OP, I was brutally introduced to the possibilities of mixed play. I didn't like it.

I didn't like it because I wasn't interested in building my fleets in a mixed fashion because that wasn't the image I had of Star Trek. When my venue subsequently banned mixed faction play. I was happy. I'm not sure I still would be because I've seen the possibilities that mixed play opens up, but for new players, mixed faction play is brutal and often turns people away from the game.

2) Ship Pure - all upgrades, captains and Admirals must match the faction of the ship to which they are assigned.

This is what my venue plays at the moment and it has resulted in a lot more even op events. Over the last few months events have been won by A variety of builds, with no one faction dominating. I have noticed though, that many players will use all of the ships from the same faction, even though there is no need to do so. Which leads me to #3...

3. Faction Pure - all ships, captains, admirals and upgrades must be from the same faction.

I like faction pure because it strikes me as the most thematically appropriate version of STAW to play. It is really restrictive though: no independent captains, fleet captains or flagships unless it is an independent fleet. No penalty ignoring cards -Quark, Khan or Lore (two of my favourite captains right there). Also, there is no opportunity to run the iconic alliances of Klingon, bajoran, federation or vulcan. Perhaps there is a better way to capture the theme of Star Trek without breaking the game. 

4) penalty pure- no upgrade card may pay a penalty for being assigned to a ship, apart from this, anything goes.

Similar to ship pure, this version of play allows the cards that are designed to be played cross faction to be played cross faction. Kira can go on the defiant, T'pol can go on the D'Kyr, Quark can deploy romulan tech to a ferengi ship. I like this system a lot, but still think it needs some tweaking

5) Faction pure with asterisks

I guess this is my own invention, but it's my preferred version of play. Basically the idea is that you have all ships of the same faction, but then allow any cross faction card that have text that allows them to break faction restrictions and you allow OXP.

This way you get to have Lore on a hijacked federation ship, Kira on the defiant and Vanik using federation tech, without the soul crushing inevitability of the Picard-Dukat sphere dominating every event. 

So there are my thoughts. I'd be interested to hear what other people think of faction restrictions in the game at the moment.