Faction Identity: The Borg

I’ve decided to do a few posts detailing what I think each faction’s identity is: Their strengths, weaknesses and anything that sets them apart from the other factions in fleet pure play. If you do a lot of mixed faction play, the series should also let you work out what the weaknesses of each faction are so that you can mix in appropriate cards to counter these weaknesses and help you to identify the things that the cards this faction has that will help you in other factions.

I thought I’d start off with the Borg because they are by far and away the most controversial faction in ST:AW. The Borg broke onto the scene with the release of Sphere 4270 in Wave 4 and then cut a bloody swathe through the game until they were re-defined by Wizkids following the US Nationals. Most of the complaints made about the game in those 18 months were actually complaints about the Borg. Some argue that since the Wizkids announcement they have become crippled and weak, but that argument seems to have been blown out of the water by their performance at the World Championship, where their ships appeared in both the 1^st and 3^rd placed lists.

“The Borg are a pseudo-species of cybernetic beings, or cyborgs, from the Delta Quadrant. No single individual truly existed within the Borg Collective (with the possible sole exception of the Borg Queen), as all Borg were linked into a hive mind. Their ultimate goal was the attainment of 'perfection' through the forcible assimilation of diverse sentient species, technologies, and knowledge. As a result, the Borg were among the most powerful and feared entities in the galaxy, without really being a true species at all.”

Borg Ships:

The Borg currently have access to 6 distinct generic ships of their own design as well as 4 assimilated vessels, all together they have 12 different names ships, that can roughly be split into three categories: Heavy Hitters, Secondary attackers and Oddballs.

The Heavy Hitters (Tactical Cube, Sphere, Octahedron and Cube) all benefit from very high attack, hull and shields but have no agility. Like all native Borg ships they have orthogonal movement but all must move first and then spin, which makes their apparent manoeuvrability a little predictable. Their primary weapon value also benefits from an innate 360 arc, although they can only fire to range two, meaning that they can be outmanoeuvred. As I’ve said in previous posts, the low agility is nothing to worry about, as they can weather quite a lot of damage before things get worrisome: the sphere (weakest of the heavy hitters) has 6 shields and 7 hull and is therefore easily capable of surviving a good quality attack from a higher CS ship and return fire. The movement, whilst still predictable, is still amongst the best in the game, and no other faction (thus far) has the ability to reverse away from combat as a white manoeuvre. The other drawback that these ships have is cost: The generic sphere comes in at 38 points whilst the named cube is a whopping 82 SP – you aren’t going to be able to rely on many upgrades to help you, especially in the 50/3 format. The action bars for these ships are Scan (S), Target Lock (TL) and Regenerate (R), allowing some efficiency but missing the all-important battle stations (BS) action, as well as the almost universal evade (E).

The Secondary Attacker for the Borg is the scout cube, with a base stat-line of 3-3-2-3. Normally a ship like this would be considered a support ship but the Borg don’t have all that many abilities in faction that help to support other ships (there are some) and the Heavy Hitters don’t really need that much help. The Scout Cube’s manoeuvre dial is great, orthogonal but not quite as quick as the heavy hitters, with red 4 straights. The two named scouts excel in additional defence, with Scout 205 adding an extra evade dice and scout 608 being able to manoeuvre out of arc seemingly at will. Scout cubes are also significantly cheaper than the Heavy Hitters (22 SP for the Generic) which means that you’ll almost certainly see them in a Borg pure fleet in the 50/3 format. I think scout cubes are best used when equipped with Magnetometric Guided Charges and used to harass enemy ships as they try to engage the heavy hitters. Any attack made against the scout when another target is available means that the Heavy Hitters survive a little longer – just beware the player who engages and destroys your scout cube (s) to then retreat and play for time.

The Borg oddball ships would be considered normal in most other fleets, and consist of the Type 03, B’rel, Galor and Galaxy class assimilated vessels. What makes these ships odd-ball is that they have standard straight/bank/turn manoeuvre dials and standard range 3 forward arcs, a stark contrast to the Orthogonal dials and range 2 360 arcs of the other ships in the fleet. The Type 03 retains the high Primary Weapon Value (PWV), Hull and Shields of the Heavy Hitters, but is significantly less manoeuvrable, with only red 3 turns. It’s probably the least seen of the native Borg ships in OPs and doesn’t necessarily do anything better than other ships in the fleet. Its action bar is TL-S-R-E, so the evade is added compared to the heavy hitters, but still no BS. It is also pretty costly, with the generic coming in at 36 points. I really think that all of the other ships possess an advantage over the Type 03, although I did use on to help take out an OP event a few months ago (admittedly not in the 50/3 suggested format).

The assimilated ships are slightly tougher versions of their non-assimilated counterparts. All of them benefit from 1 extra shield, whilst the B’rel, Galor and D’Deridex all have +1 to their PWV (NB: The Galaxy class is a mirror galaxy class, hence the mirror faction version of the non-assimilated ship also has 5 PWV, unlike the Federation version of the Non-assimilated ship that runs with a 4 dice PWV). None of these assimilated vessels have a BS action, regardless of whether or not their non-assimilated version does, the Galor and Galaxy both have Regenerate, but neither of the others do. These ships function the same way as their non-assimilated versions with the added benefit of access to Borg faction upgrades (including Borg type upgrades). The stand out amongst these 4 is the B’rel, since its usually squishy 3 hull cloaking can be boosted by the addition of Borg Ablative Hull Armour.

So to sum up Borg ships, they don’t have a great variety and their archetypal ship has orthogonal, if a bit predictable, movement and high PWV attacks. There is no in-faction way to get battle stations, so you may be rolling 6 7 or even 8 red dice, but you can only get, at most, a 75% average efficiency by using target lock (which isn’t always an option against cloaked ships). When you do roll well, you can one shot even the toughest ships and no matter how low your CS, you are likely to be firing back since your hull will take a lot of damage.

Captains:

Borg Captains have a unique mechanic whereby their abilities are not actions, but cost drone tokens to perform. The number of Drone Tokens are also used to determine the skill level of the captain so as the game goes on, if Captain’s abilities are used, then Borg command skills drop. Also, a great number of Borg captains are generic, meaning that they can’t be the recipient of a promotion to fleet captain. Also, with 2 notable exceptions (Borg Queen and Locutus), Borg captains tend to be on the lower end of the CS scale – one of the most used captains, Tactical Drone 4270, is CS 4 to start with before any of his abilities are used.

So to sum up Borg Captains, they are low skill and that skill drops as the game goes on, meaning that you really want to deliver the killing blow as soon as possible.

Elite Talents:

Not much to say here, they are expensive and situational and often discards. With the high cost of the spaceframes, you aren’t going to want to invest too heavily in Elite Talents, especially when you consider that as it stands, only 2 captains can even access ETs out of the box.

Crew:

Borg crew excel at ganking (the process of messing around with your opponent’s upgrades) with a fair number of action/discard crewmen who cause opponent’s upgrades to be discarded or disabled. One of the stand-outs here is Third of Five who discards to disable all of the opponent’s upgrades on an individual ship. Many of the crew the Borg have are dependent on drone tokens (e.g. Data) adding another stress onto a limited resource. Thankfully the second thing that Borg crew do is replenish drone tokens (e.g. Seven of Nine [why not Seventh of Nine?]) or reduce the drone cost (e.g. Magnus Hansen). Unlike other factions (federation) you should never build a fleet around lots of crew, you won’t be able to afford to in the 50/3 environment, but see crew as a way of aiding the ship in completing its mission.

Tech:

Bit of a mixed bag, the best Tech Upgrade is feedback pulse, but that is 8 SP and difficult to fit into most builds.

Weapons:

Borg are perhaps the best faction in the game at making weapons. Magnteometric Guided Charges are the best weapon available in the game at the moment and get around the issues of only firing 360 at range 2 (they go out to range 3) as does Full Assault. Borg Missile still has its uses, but isn’t as strong as it used to be and is expensive (6 sp), Proton Beam also has some uses (range 1, ignore shields) and Multi Kinetic Neutronic Mines are one of the best area control weapons available. Having said all of this, it’s unlikely you’ll want to spend points on weapons upgrades on the Heavy Hitters (maybe MGCs for range 3 on the way in, but after that? I’m unsure as to the value).

Borg:

These upgrades are fantastic, expensive and specifically limited to Borg. The things that stand out for me are Borg Ablative Hull Armour, particularly on the assimilated B’rel, Borg Assimilation Tubules, for a reusable stealing ability, and Viniculum, for a dual use healing/drone replenishment card. Since the 50/3 meta was introduced the Borg have struggled to take many of these ships on their heavy hitters, but they still have uses in fully unlimited play.

So to sum up, what is the faction identity of the Borg?

1.     Hit hard but with limited quality

2.     High hull and shields allow you to fire back

3.     Low and dropping Captain Skill

4.     Ganking Crew

5.     Expensive but good upgrades