Testing for Peak Performance

I've been playing Star Trek: Attack wing for about 2 years now and have been attending Organised Play (OP) events for 9 months, starting with the "Arena" event. The venue that I attend most frequently runs  variety of house rules that mean I've experimented with a variety of builds over the past few months*.

During last month's event we were discussing the new changes to the Borg (for info see here) and the opinion was put forward that they may have been weakend too much (or "nerfed too hard" to use the common parlance), which I really don't think is the case. 

My issue with the Borg was that they were always the idiot-proof faction. They could move in any direction, shoot in any direction, and, if you can shoot them, then they can shoot you. The new rulings mean that even the Borg could accidentally fly off the board, that they can no longer side-step mines, and that now you can outmanoeuver them, by being able to shoot them without fear of retaliation.

Just to prove the point though, I agreed with the tournament organiser that, as the reigning OP winner, I would play Borg, with the new restrictions, at the next OP event in order to 'Stress Test' the new changes. This has led to my spending the last few weeks working out what is the best list with the new Borg changes with the new scenario. 

The next scenario is Peak Performance (rules to be found here), the main principal being that destroyed ships re-appear with one fewer shield and without any discarded upgrades (or stolen ones for that matter). This lead me to believe that perhaps the way to win would be to avoid using anything with too much of a reliance upon discard upgrades. That being said, and the house rules of my venue being what they are, I did think it might be fun to run one huge Borg Supercube.

List 1 - Lore's Supercube

Tactical Cube 138 [Tactical Cube] (46)

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

Lore [Soong] (4)

Vulcan High Command [D'Kyr] (5)

Borg Ablative Hull Armor [Tactical Cube] (7)

Borg Ablative Hull Armor [Tactical Cube] (7)

Goval [Soong] (1)

Crosis [Soong] (5)

One [Scout 255] (4)

Subspace Distortion [Soong] (6)

Feedback Pulse [Borg Sphere 4270] (8)

Borg Missile [Tactical Cube] (6)

Magnetometric Guided Charge [Scout Cube] (5)

Full Assault [Tactical Cube] (6)

Total (120)

Fleet total: 120

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This build was based on two assumptions: First, that even though vessels could return to the field of play, the majority of OP games get at least near to the one hour limit, so discards may not be as much of a disadvantage as perhaps initially seen. Second, the ability to survive for a long time would be better than necessarily relying upon a smaller ship that would be killed quicker. Enemies that wanted the points from the Cube would have to pay for them, and the longer they spent attacking the cube to cut through al of the ablative hull armour and feedback pulses, One, and Goval, the more chance the Cube itself would have to kill the enemy ships.

In play testing I found that the issue with the cube was not necessarily that it died too quickly -it didn't- but instead that it didn't kill opponent quickly enough -especially those opponents with high evade and hull (scimitars, fednaughts etcetera).

This lead me to prepare a second version of the list designed to kill things quickly whilst retaining the survivability of the first list.

List 2 -Queen and Locutus together again.

Queen Vessel Prime [Queen Vessel Prime] (42)

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

Borg Queen [Tactical Cube 001] (6)

Magnetometric Guided Charge [Scout Cube] (5)

Total (63)

Borg Tactical Cube [Tactical Cube] (44)

Locutus [Cube 112] (7)

Full Assault [Tactical Cube] (6)

Total (57)

Fleet total: 120

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This build has significantly less survivability than the Supercube, but there are two major benefits - 1. The high captain skill on both vessels and 2. the collective firepower is better (with the potential for a 5 dice Magnetometric Guided Charge). On playtesting I found this to be slightly more effective than the previous build, it was able to remove opponents more quickly, but the survivability was significantly lower, mainly due to the lack of any evade dice at all (I'm so used to using ships with high evade that the damage the ship took was worryingly high).

After some more thinking, and a look at the lists from the World Championships in Ohio, I came up with this third list (which will probably make hardcore faction purists cringe)

List 3 - Khan's hijack

Queen Vessel Prime [Queen Vessel Prime] (42)

Locutus [Cube 112] (7)

Adm Borg Queen [Queen Vessel Prime] (5)

Magnus Hansen [Queen Vessel Prime] (1)

Data [Tactical Cube 001] (4)

Magnetometric Guided Charge [Assimilated Vessel 64758] (5)

Total (64)

Scout 608 [Scout Cube] (24)

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

Khan Singh [GenKhan] (4)

Research Mission [U.S.S. Raven] (2)

Full Reverse [Alpha Hunter] (2)

Dispersion Field [Scout 255] (2)

Sakonna [Gavroche] (2)

Improved Deflector Screens [Gornarus] (4)

Proton beam [Scout 255] (2)

Ramming Attack [Val Jean] (1)

Magnetometric Guided Charge [Assimilated Vessel 64758] (3)

Total (56)

Fleet total: 120

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This list is based on the idea of avoiding enemy firing arcs in order to survive as long as possible. The Scout Cube provides excellent manoeuverability whilst the diamond can move twice a turn so long as it is in range 1 of the cube. The second thing that this list does better than any other is the captain skill. By taking Locutus and the Queen on the same ship and by having Khan as the second captain, both ships have a captain skill of 11 as long as no drone tokens are spent. Data is an annoying enough trick that will allow the QVP's named ability to function whilst also de-activating enemy captains. If push comes to shove, the Fleet Action could be used by the scout to activate data for no drone token cost, and if not, then Magnus Hansen allows data to be activated for no cost.  

I've had two playtest with this list, the first one resulted in my opponent only getting to fire once, after two other ships had been destroyed, and whilst the QVP died in the second game, the Scout survived both games relatively unscathed.

So it seems that is what I will be running at the next event, hopefully it will prove that Borg haven't been excessively nerfed by the new rulings and hopefully i'll win a shuttle. Then I can mess around with shuttle builds for the next month's event!

* Our venue follows loose Ship Pure restrictions: All of the upgrades assigned to a ship must match the ship's faction but Independent Flagships can be assigned to any ship in order to make it dual faction. In addition to that, certain ailities and upgrades that are designed to allow cross-factioning are allowed - for example Lore, Khan, Borg Alliance. Also, we have decided as a group not to rotate out the resources, since we have quite a lot of excess resources from previous months to provide for new players if needs be, and we do not follow the 3-ship 50 Point suggested tournament rules.