There were many reasons why the Borg were so good for so long -the high
PWV at 360 degrees, the best manoeuvre dials in the game, their high hull and
shields- but perhaps the most significant of their advantages could actually be
seen as a disadvantage –their low agility.
“Hold on Dave; that makes no
sense, why would you want them to have low evade?!” I hear you cry. The
answer is perhaps one of the less spoken about truths of ST:AW – Defence sucks.
A single green evade dice has 3 evade side, 3 blanks and 2 Battle Stations. A
37.5% chance of rolling an ‘evade’ compared to a 50% chance of rolling a hit
(or crit) on an attack dice. Added to this simple statistical fact is a
cavalcade of additional unfortunate facts that make defence a much more costly
investment to get right than attacking.
Let’s take federation as an example (since it is by far and away the
easiest faction to min-max in fleet pure), 5 attack dice with both TL and BS is
easy done - Prometheus, Captain Spock, job done…Picard, Sovereign as an
alternative, or additional ship with the same benefits - even when paying for
the extra captain and the costly 5 PWV space-frame, you can still manage it on
a budget (32 points). Dominion can do it even cheaper (Keldon and Dukat – 29
Points), even Klingons manage similar (Kargan, Vor’cha and Drex – 34). Target
Lock re-rolls and BS conversions are about 94% efficiency, meaning that more
often than not, you’ll be hitting with 5 out of 5 shots.
Defence, by comparison, is much more expensive, to get up to 5 dice you
are having to either cloak (and that comes with it a whole heap of issues that
I’ll go into another time) or rely on upgrades. No ship currently available in
the game has an agility value higher than 3 – and even then they are invariably
low hull/shield ships like the NX-01, Bajoran Interceptor or RIS Vo (combined
hit points of 3, 3 and 4 respectively). The most survivable 3 evade ship in the
game at the moment is the Prototype 01/Romulan Drone ship, and even then it has
only 6 hit points. So to get up to 5 (or better 6) defence dice you are
spending points that you could have spent elsewhere – unless you are a cloaker.
So how does one boost their defensive abilities? The first way is to
increase the volume of the dice being rolled and (bearing in mind my earlier
post on the need for a 4/4, or as close to it, split on hull and shields) often
the ships that you are using as a base aren’t going to have a defence that is
that high. Let’s take the Cardassian Galor class as a base, since the 3 named
versions (Trager, Reklar and Kraxon) have 4 hull and 4 shields, you are looking
for a way to increase the number of dice that you are rolling on defence. The
most obvious choice in faction is Amat’Igan, who gives you an extra defence
dice and helps you to protect other, potentially more important, crew. Shove
Amat’Igan onto your ship and you have reached a mighty 2 green dice. That, as
should be obvious by now, isn’t going to really make any difference, and the
second (and expensive) option to boost defence using an upgrade is Cloaking
Device, which lowers your shields thus reducing your durability to 4. There is
another option in faction though – Tetryon Emissions. There are massive issues
with this (it is an action/disable and takes a valuable tech slot) but putting
it onto your Named Galor will boost your evade, along with Amat’Igan to 5.
There is also Sar, a Breen Captain who, in faction, will increase that total up
to the all-important 6. The Dominion faction fleet captain resource will add 2
to your CS (bringing Sar up to a *mighty* 4) and allow you to take Tetryon
Emissions as a free action each turn (you can use your ship’s action to
re-enable it each turn if needs be). So there you have it, a 4-6-4-4 ship; and
all for 38 points. That’s 9 points more than Dukat’s 5 attack dice with TL and
BS from earlier – and it is nowhere near as worth the points.
Perhaps more than attacking, defence relies upon quality rather than
numbers. Let’s take that last ship and then change the captain from Sar to Gul
Evek. Gul Evek’s (passive) ability is to re-roll blank defence dice each time.
This takes the 6 dice that Sar’s ship had, reduces them by 1 and allows
re-rolls. This means that on those 5 dice you are likely to have around 2 blank
dice, when re-rolled, they are more likely to produce an extra evade result
rather than the extra dice without a re-roll. Sar’s ship averages 2.25 evade
results (for sake of ease let’s call that 2) whereas Evek’s ship, with the re-rolls,
averages 2.625 evade results (again, for ease, let’s call that 3). Fewer dice
with better quality results in better results.
Taking this paradigm a little further, let’s imagine that instead of
tetryon emissions and Dominion Fleet captain, you take the ship action of the
Reklar. This allows you to roll one additional defence dice and to place a BS
token beside the ship. With Evek as captain and Amat’igan on board, this ship
only rolls 3 dice, rather than the 6 that Sar’s ship in the above example was
rolling. The difference here, is that you get a BS conversion on one of the
occasions that you defend. This averages out at 2.8 evades a turn. Sar’s ship
was 38 points, the Reklar with Gul Evek and Amat’Igan is 31 points. You save 6
points and get a better return in terms of defence, and you can still use your
resource elsewhere. The problem that this version creates, is that it can only
spend the BS token once, and once it has gone, the ship’s evade drops down to
an average of 1.55.
So perhaps the Reklar isn’t the answer, but BS conversions certainly
seem to help. Another thing that helps with defence is any ability that helps
to cancel opposing attack dice. This can range from cancelling an entire attack
(Feedback Pulse, Varel and Conditional Surrender) to reducing the effectiveness
of an attack without cancelling it entirely (Improved Deflector Screens, the
ship ability of the Trager or Bellerophon). Abilities like this are key to
surviving in ST:AW. A single, automatically cancelled Red Dice is the statistical
equivalent of 3 extra Green Dice (and so is an evade token too, although it can
only be used once). The Trager, for Dominion, has an ability whereby it can
cancel one hit or Crit result by disabling a shield. This does reduce the 4/4
shield/hull approach from its optimum value, but is essentially the same as
having rolled an extra 3 Green Dice once a turn. Even with only Amat’Igan and
Evek on it, taking an ‘evade’ action, the Trager averages out at 2.25 evade
results if it is only defending against one attack a turn.
The truth is, throughout this little thought experiment, nothing really
offers a concrete answer to the problem of defence. Even when stacking as many
dice as possible, with conversion and cancellation, you are going to struggle
to come out unscathed from a 4 dice attack with quality, since most of the time
this will mean that you are suffering 4 points of damage. That’s why the 4/4
standard is so important; the defence just helps you to survive even longer.
That is unless you consider the Federation, who do defence better than
anyone.
U.S.S. Defiant 2
Jean-Luc Picard (Enterprise E) +1
Cheat Death
Independent Fleet Captain (Klingon)
Elizabeth Shelby Re-Roll
(Re-rolls and +1 vs. Borg)
Hikaru Sulu +2, 1 BS Conversion
William T. Riker (Hood) +1,
1 BS Conversion (+2, 2 BS Conversion w/DA Captain)
Multi Adaptive Shields +1
(Defence vs. Mines)
Specialized Shields Re-Roll
Systems Upgrade
This ship rolls a mighty 7 green dice, with 2 BS Conversions and a
minimum of 2 Re-rolls. The efficiency that this provides means that you are
averaging out at around 6(!) successful Evade dice per turn against non-borg,
and 7 vs. the Big Bad Borg themselves (although not so big or bad at the
moment, I’ll post about that later). That’s worth the investment of points
itself, since the ship comes out at 50 points with all of those upgrades on it.
Add in Cheat Death, for when it all goes wrong, and systems upgrade for a
reasonable 3/5 damage balance and you have an extremely survivable ship, that
causes almost no damage to you opponent!
Therein lies the crux of the problem: Any ship with reasonable defence
upgrades, within the 50 Point limit, will struggle to also maintain a
reasonable damage output, especially if BS tokens are spent on defence rather
than offence. So how does one ‘solve’ the problem of defence? It’s a relatively
straight forward answer – The best defence is a good offence.
The best way of ensuring the lengthy survival of your own ships is to
kill your opponent’s ships before he gets chance to fire back. With federation
this is easy (I’ll take Picard 9, Kirk 9 and fighters please) and with Dominion
it is also relatively easy done (Dukat + Madred, Weyoun 8 and Fleet Captain) it’s
also becoming easier for Klingons (Old Kor and Martok). Manouevre into
position, fire your 4+ dice of modified goodness onto an enemy ship and then
don’t worry about defence since you have destroyed the enemy ship.
So this bring me back
to the start of this (now particularly long) diatribe – the Borg. The Borg have
high primary weapon value, high hull and shields (in some case doubling the 4/4
balance) and no agility. This means that the Borg’s ship cost is not paying 2
extra points for an ultimately superfluous stat. Before the Borg errata, Borg
were the absolute masters at manoeuvring into a position where they would
suffer no return fire and could make the most of their high PWV (admittedly
Borg do not, in fleet pure play at least, benefit from both TL and BS, so that
6 dice primary attack is only likely to average out at 4.5 hits assuming a
Target Lock). With the Borg Queen and Locutus, the Borg have access to two high
CS captains, meaning that they can also do the tactic described above,
manoeuvre into position, concentrate fire and avoid return fire.
So to summarise my
main points about defence here I’ll say the following:
1.
Defence is
an expensive stat to boost,
2.
Efficiency
is almost always better than extra green dice,
3.
A good
offence is the best defence,
4.
High hull
and shields are better than high agility.
As always comments are
most welcome, and I’m sure that there are dodgy maths in there somewhere,
I’m still not Picard,
D
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