I then commented that I owned more Excelsiors than any other ship model, I went out of my way to acquire 3 Hoods and 3 Lakotas and I bought 2 Excelsiors back in wave 2 (which knowing what I know now I wouldn't advise, but that boat sailed long ago) and it triggered something in my head that I haven't done for a while: I wanted to build to fix the Excelsior-class's faults.
Unlike before, when I was building for my local OP venue, I'm now building for general play, so I'm planning to stick to the rules in general of no more than 50 points per ship, and I'm not so fixed on faction pure anymore - but I will try to keep in faction pure, since it's federation and they have all the options.
The standard Excelsior weighs in at 20 SP, with a slash line of 3/1/5/3 for the generic, with the extra shield for the named versions. 8 durability is pretty good, with a slight balance towards hull being useful in places where shield ignoring weapons are prevalent. The generic has 2 crew, 1 weapon and 1 tech, with the named ones adding either a crew or weapon, depending on which named one it is (The Cairo and Lakota offer 2 weapons, 2 crew, 1 tech, whilst the Excelsior, Hood and Enterprise B offer 3 crew, 1 weapon, 1 tech). All of the named Excelsiors cost 26 SP, which is a pretty hefty outlay for the extra slot, shield and named ability (more on these later).
One of the Excelsior class's big weaknesses is it's dial, with no come about and only red hard turns (2 and 3) this is a lumbering ship that isn't really particularly fast (a straight 4 being its fastest manoeuvre). I may have to take a look at ways of improving this later.
On the other side of the coin to its turning circle, are the fire arcs it enjoys. A 180 forward firing arc is excellent, but added to a 90 degree rear arc, this is a shop with 270 degree coverage, which is undeniably rare. The main competitors are the rare Constitution (Kelvin) class, which comes with much better dial (faster and with white hard 2 turns) and comparable slots, and the Miranda class, also featuring a better dial (white hard 2 and 3 turns) but much worse slots (the generic Miranda has only one weapon and one crew).
The constitution Kelvin (from here on generally referred to as a 'Kelvin' is undoubtedly a great ship, and the comparison with the excelsior favours the Kelvin in essentially every way since the Kelvin is faster, more manoeuvrable, tougher and has better guns. The two things going for the Excelsior-class are being as many as 8 points cheaper (but usually only 4 and sometimes 2 points more, when comparing the named Excelsior with the unnamed Kelvin) and crucially for me, availability, since I have lots of Excelsior class ships and not a single Kelvin (Aside: for someone getting into the game, acquiring a generic Excelsior via Alliance is much easier than acquiring the Kelvin faction pack at time of writing).
So for my purposes, a more meaningful comparison is with the lowly Miranda-class. The Miranda shares the 180 front arc and 90 secondary arc, and all of the manoeuvres are the same, although the 2 and 3 hard turns are white instead of read. The slashline on the Miranda is 2/2/3/2, so you gain a point of defence for a point of attack, lose 2 hull and a shield. The Miranda generic now clocks in at a very affordable 12 SP a full 8 points cheaper than the generic Excelsior, but it does lose 2 upgrade slots too, only coming with a weapon and crew slot.
Which brings me to the meat of this article, a challenge for myself, can I make the Excelsior-class a good competitive ship? Am I always going to want to take a Kelvin Constitution or a Miranda instead of the workhorse of the federation? I thought I'd try to see what I could do, within certain parameters.
1. Fix the problems the Excelsior-class has in terms of PWV and Manoeuvre dial.
2. Get the best dice efficiency possible
3. Avoid spending more than 50 points and try to avoid spending more than 22 points on upgrades for the unique versions, and 26 for the generic. (so a soft limit of 48 for a named Excelsior-class and 46 points for a generic Excelsior-class) since that is the potential points available to upgrade a Kelvin.
4. Try to keep faction pure if possible and penalty pure at minimum.
5. Compare my final Excelsior-class build with similar builds for a Kelvin and Miranda, to see what I'm losing out on.
So that's the challenge, build an Excelsior-class ship.
Step one: the ship
I dismissed using the Enterprise B out of hand simply because I don't own one and can't see getting one anytime soon. So I had to make a choice between the generic and Lakota, Excelsior, Hood and Cairo.
The Excelsior itself has a nice named ability, allowing a scan as a free action if no enemy ships are in range one. This has some nice synergy with cards like Valtane (from the same expansion) and Spock (from the wave 0 TOS Enterprise) but isn't something to rely on. The slots on the Excelsior are 3 crew, 1 tech and 1 weapon which is a little annoying, as I think I'll need more weapon slots than that.
The same reservation applies to the Hood, whose named ability is more conditional and less useful than the Excelsior, so she is out too.
The Cairo has a better slot allocation of 2 weapons, a tech and 2 crew, and it's named ability is somewhat interesting, allowing an extra defense die if there is a Auxiliary Power Token (APT) beside the ship. I can see this being useful on a ship geared towards stacking defence dice, but for me it doesn't synergise well with what I'm trying to do here.
The Lakota has a named ability that I think has real potential in that you can convert a hit to a crit for the cost of an APT. There is some potential for synergy here with the Attack Pattern Omega elite talent from the Defiant expansion, but that's quite niche (and a Warp Core Breach isn't the death sentence some treat it as).
The generic Exclesior is significantly cheaper (20 rather than 26) but only has 2 crew, 1 weapon and 1 tech. I feel like I can get the slots I need by using upgrades more cost effectively than I can by paying 6 points, but I might need to re-address that once I have played around with the upgrades I want. Certainly my starting point is using the Generic, and my back up choice is the Lakota.
Step 2: Fixing the dial
I feel like the biggest drawback here is the lack of white hard turns, so I'm looking for an upgrade that will mitigate this. One option is Admiral Forrest, whose fleet action allows a ship to perform an additional 1 straight bank or turn manoeuvre. Whilst I like this, if does cause some problems in terms of action economy if every-time I need to turn I have to spend an action to do it.
The other options seem to be either a) turn those red turns into white turns or b) find a way to get rid of the associated APT.
The Tech card Deuterium Tank for the USS Cairo prize ship is a 3SP upgrade that allows for a red manoeuvre to be treated as a white manoeuvre in exchange for a disable. There is an action efficiency issue with this since you'll end up having to re-enable it each time, since you never know when you might want to do another red manoeuvre. There are ways around this, notably by using the Emergency Medical Hologram, a 2SP Crew or Tech upgrade from the USS Equinox expansion. Whilst this delays rather than solves the problem, there are ways more ways of re-enabling crew than there are tech.
A different option to achieve the same result is taking Hikaru Sulu from the HMS Bounty Prize Pack (Spoilers: this is a truly excellent prize pack).
The other option is to go for a way to remove APTs after performing a red manoeuvre. Chekov from the Kelvin pack can ignore an APT for the cost of 3 time tokens, which is good for a number of reasons: firstly the time tokens mean that you maintain action economy if you can avoid needing to do a red manouvre for a couple of turns (not ideal but better) at only 2 SP it's a cheap card to achieve what I'm looking to achieve and he doesn't take away my tech slot. The only drawback here is that the Kelvin faction pack is somewhat difficult to come by, but if you are playing online it shouldn't be an issue.
There are two versions of Montgomery Scott that have a similar effect to Kelvin Chekov, the version from the Enterprise refit expansion, and the version from the HMS Bounty Prize pack. Both have a disable to remove an APT ability, with a secondary ability: Refit Scotty (5SP) can also as an action repair 2 hull, whilst Bounty Scotty (4SP) adds a slot (either weapon or tech). Given how I want to add extra slots to my Exclesior, Weapon-Adding-Bounty-Scotty seems like s really.good choice for the build I'm making. As such, he is my choice to avoid APT, hence improving my dial.
To mitigate the action cost of re-enabling Scotty, I had a look at upgrades like Doctors and anything that would allow me to either disable instead of A crew upgrade or put time tokens onto instead.of disabling. I again came across the HMS Bounty Prize pack, and its version of Captain Kirk. This Kirk has two pretty useful abilities, first he makes all federation crew -1SP and second allows you to replace a disable with 3 time-tokens. Immediately this makes Scotty a point cheaper and gives you the option of using time-tokens rather than a disable, which improves your action economy. Ideally with this Kirk you want to take as many federation crew as possible in order to save as many SP as you can. So this lead me into considering which other crew cards might help my build out, and which other crew cards might allow me to take more crew.
Ezri Dax is a Crew Upgrade that, for 2SP, reduces the amount of time tokens placed on crew upgrades by 1, and adds a crew slot. This, combined with Scotty and Kirk, makes it much easier to repeatedly take red manoeuvres without worrying about spending an action to reenable Scotty, and adds an extra crew slot.
So Kirk, Scotty and Ezri together means that the Excelsior is now as manoeuvrable as the Reliant (with a white 2 reverse into the deal!)
Step 3: Up-gunning the hull.
For what I have planned I really need 3 weapon slots. I have one generic and one from Scotty, so ideally I need a way of adding a third. One way I can do this in faction is using Arsenal, which takes a weapon slot and adds 2, and has a secondary ability that allows you to place time tokens on the arsenal card rather than on torpedoes. Another, is to go out of faction and take Sakonna, who adds a slot and decreases the cost of all weapons upgrades by 2SP. In order to keep penalty pure, I would also need to add the "Captured" upgrade to turn this from a Federation ship into a dual faction federation/independent ship. The option I decided on was Natasha Yar, from the Yesterday's Enterprise prize pack. Yar adds two weapon slots and has a secondary ability that adds quality. This is certainly a more expensive option than Sakonna, and it adds 2 weapon slots when I only really need one, but there is nice synergy here between Yar and Ezri, making Yar's ability a pretty good alternative to a target lock action (although admittedly only for 3 dice). It does also mean that by taking Yar I can use Scotty's extra slot as a tech slot. Also she benefits from Kirk's cost reduction ability, whilst Arsenal wouldn't.
So now I have my extra weapon slots, what am I going to fill them with? The Excelsior-class is in a nice place by virtue of the fact that its Primary Weapon Value is 3. This means that it can take Type-8 Phasers and also Upgraded Phasers (from the Hood and Lakota respectively) taking its main 180 forward arc gun to a mighty 5, and adding a little functionality when attacking Squadrons.
My third weapon slot is to make use of that 90 degree rear arc and to do that I've chosen the new Federation Photon Torpedoes from Alliance/the Starter Set/Federation. Ideally I would have preferred the time-token versions, but I don't expect to be using them that frequently, so the 2 point version, with blanks dice converted into Battlestations, are a good choice here.
Step 4: Efficiency
The ship already has a bit of efficiency from Tasha Yar and the blank to BS conversions on the Torpedoes, and having used a generic excelsior-class rather than a named version, I can't take the Elite Talent "Legacy of the Name" that would give a free Battle-stations action each turn. I also lack the crew slot that, if I had, i'd be using to take Seven of Nine from the Delta Flyer expansion (which maybe is an argument for taking arsenal over Natasha Yar after all). I do have two open tech slots, and after asking around, I came to Metaphasic Sweep. It is a discard, but as with the rear arc torpedoes, I don't think I'll need a free action Target Lock all that often, and being able to use it on a cloaked ship is that extra bit of utility that will serve this ship well. As it stands also, there is no "obvious" action that the ship needs to do each round so using the ship's action to Battle-stations each round won't be too onerous.
Step Five: Finishing Touches
I have two slots left to use on this ship, a tech slot and an Elite Talent slot. I feel like I've done all I wanted, fixing the dial, and making the ship attack better, so what's left is just minor tweaks and improvements. I don't really want to spend all that many points.
My choice of Elite Talent was Calculating (from Alliance), just to boost the Captain Skill to 10 if needed. Situational, but cheap at one point.
My choice of Tech Upgrade ended up being Improved hull plating, from Alliance. This was just to make the ship a little harder to kill, for just 2 SP.
The Final Build:
Federation Starship (Excelsior Class) [20]
- James T. Kirk 8 (Captain) (H.M.S. Bounty) [5]
- - Calculating (Alliance) [1]
- Metaphasic Sweep (Federation 'Boldly Go') [1]
- Photon Torpedoes (Alliance, 2017 Starter Set, Federation 'Boldly Go') [2]
- Montgomery Scott (H.M.S. Bounty) [3]
- - Improved Hull Plating (Alliance) [2]
- Ezri Dax (Federation 'Boldly Go') [1]
- - Natasha Yar (U.S.S. Enterprise-D) [3]
- - - Type 8 Phaser Array (U.S.S. Hood) [2]
- - - Upgraded Phasers (U.S.S. Lakota) [3]
Ship Total: 43 SP
Fleet Total: 43 SP
So I've managed to keep it Faction Pure, and under 46 Pts. I feel like a comparison to a Miranda class is unnecessary, since the Miranda couldn't get up to a PWV of 5 as easily as this version. A comparison with the Kelvin is valid though. I've spent a minimum of 2 points to get to the same PWV as a Kelvin, and I've spent 4 points on improving the dial - not including the cost of the captain (and the 2 points he saves me). A generic Kelvin come in at 24 Points, and my Excelsior, with just Type 8 Phasers and Scotty, would weigh in at 26, with Ezri an extra 2 on top of this. It's a hard sell to me to take 3 slots, a captain slot and 2 SP over what a Kelvin gives you as standard, and the Kelvin is still faster.
But I have quite enjoyed the process of building a good Excelsior-Class ship, and I think the next time I do an in real life dials and dice STAW event, there is a high likelihood that this ship, which I've dubbed the USS Bounty, will feature in my fleet.
It is unlikely Picard will...Because I'm not Picard.
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