Play testing for Q Continuum OP2

Upon reading the rules set for Q2 my first thought was that the ship with Q on board would be useless. Having read the clarifications on WORF (Wizkids online rules forum) I don’t necessarily think it is useless, but waiting a minimum of 4 turns for a ship to enter the fight could be a huge deal. So my first thoughts on Q2 were to make a list that had a high hull ship that could be the Q ship (NB: Old naval term for heavily armed merchant ships used as decoys) and whose offensive power I wouldn’t miss, so that I could do the rest of the fleet designed to kill my opponent. The q ship itself could still head for the moon and try to complete the mission whilst the rest of my fleet engages the enemy. Enter the Olympic Class…

Olympic Class [U.S.S. Pasteur] (20)
Mirror Universe Captain [I.S.S. Enterprise] (0)
Total (20)

I.S.S. Defiant [I.S.S. Defiant] (24)
Flagship: Independent (Romulan) [Flagship Resource] (10)
William T. Riker [U.S.S. Pasteur] (4)
Adm Worf [Regent's Flagship] (2)
Strafing Run [I.S.S. Defiant] (5)
Rebellion [I.S.S. Defiant] (5)
Elim Garak [Regent's Flagship] (3)
Jennifer Sisko [I.S.S. Defiant] (3)
Julian Bashir [I.S.S. Defiant] (2)
Improved Deflector Screens [Gornarus] (4)
Dorsal Weapons Array [Prakesh] (2)
Total (64)

I.S.S. Avenger [I.S.S. Avenger] (16)
Mr. Spock [I.S.S. Enterprise] (5)
Starfleet Intelligence [U.S.S. Pasteur] (3)
Alyssa Ogawa [U.S.S. Pasteur] (2)
Hikaru Sulu [I.S.S. Enterprise] (4)
Enhanced Hull Plating [I.S.S. Avenger] (4)
Plasma Cannons [I.S.S. Avenger] (2)
Total (36)

Fleet total: 120

The idea with this list was to have Q on the Olympic whilst the Defiant and the Avenger did their thing. The Defiant is flagged for +1 Attack, Defence and Shields, and gets access to Improved Deflector Screens (Since it is dual faction Mirror/Independent thanks to the flagship bonus). Riker’s battery ability makes the first few actions of a game worthwhile, and can mean that I’m attacking with 5 dice, BS and TL every turn, with an ability to cancel one hit or crit due to IDS and another due to the ship’s ability (at the cost of an auxiliary power token). With 3 evade basic, hopefully the now 3 hull 4 shield defiant will last long enough to hold onto those points, because 64 points is a huge investment in a potentially fragile ship.

Another fragile ship is the Avenger, which also has a multi-action captain in the form of Spock, whose ability each turn will grant the APT needed to trigger the ship’s ability (+2 attack dice), meaning that the ship will again fire with 4 dice, TL and BS.

The thing that worries me most about this list is that it is really quite fragile, and a few poor defence rolls, coupled with an opponent running high skill captains, could mean the end for the fleet in pretty short order. I do like the idea of running a Mirror Universe fleet for this event, but I don’t think this is quite the ticket.

Idea 2: Federation

Having read the clarifications on the Wizkids Online Rules Forum (WORF) I see that a ship’s secondary weapons are not negatively affected by Q. This got me thinking that a torpedo boat may be the right path to go down. Enter the Excelsior…

U.S.S. Excelsior [U.S.S. Excelsior] (26)

Mr. Spock [U.S.S. Enterprise (Refit)] (4)

Tuvok [U.S.S. Voyager] (4)

Dmitri Valtane [U.S.S. Excelsior] (2)

Lojur [U.S.S. Excelsior] (1)

William T. Riker [U.S.S. Enterprise-E] (4)

The Doctor [U.S.S. Voyager] (3)

Systems Upgrade [U.S.S. Hood] (2)

Quantum Torpedoes [U.S.S. Enterprise-E] (6)

Total (52)

Federation Attack Squadron [Fighter Squadron 6] (20)

Squad Leader [Fighter Squadron 6] (4)

Total (24)

U.S.S. Enterprise [U.S.S. Enterprise] (22)

Jonathan Archer [Enterprise NX-01] (3)

Fleet Captain: Independent (Klingon) [Fleet Captain Resource] (5)

Cheat Death [U.S.S. Enterprise] (0)

Nyota Uhura [U.S.S. Enterprise (Refit)] (2)

Phlox [Enterprise NX-01] (1)

Jack Crusher [U.S.S. Stargazer] (1)

Phil Wallace [U.S.S. Pegasus] (1)

Beverly Crusher [U.S.S. Enterprise-E] (2)

Pavel Chekov [U.S.S. Enterprise (Refit)] (2)

Eric Motz [U.S.S. Pegasus] (1)

Systems Upgrade [U.S.S. Hood] (2)

Type 8 Phaser Array [U.S.S. Hood] (2)

Total (44)

Fleet total: 120

This list relies upon a lot of crew and as such taking the Klingon Fleet captain seemed like a good idea. The Excelsior herself fires Quantum Torpedoes every turn with 1 extra dice thanks to Tuvok, BS as the ship’s action and a free scan thanks to the ability. Spock makes the Torpedoes lock on, and Lojur stops them from disabling. Valtane allows two re-rolls meaning that the final load out is 6 dice, bs conversions and 2 re-rolls for almost 90% accuracy. If any of those hits get through, I add another hit making it potentially 7 damage a turn.

The Enterprise uses Archer’s action to disable 2 crew (usually Motz and Wallace) to add +2 CS and +2 Attack. With Type 8 Phasers this makes it PWV 6 and CS 7, disable Uhura to add another 2 to the CS to all but guarantee that first strike at CS9. Chekov disables to give re-rolls and if the fleet is positioned correctly, then the fighter squadron can support the Enterprise with squad leader so that Archer’s action is free, allowing the ship to take BS too. At the beginning of the next turn, Phlox disables to take all of the disabled tokens from the crew, with Crusher disabling to stop that from happening, meaning that ever turn, all of those crew can be disabled over and over.

Fighters are fighters, but they give the extra action to Archer that helps the whole fleet to work, and two ships firing 6 dice a turn should do some damage, especially when the opposing fire coming back is potentially reduced due to Q.

Once Q is gone, both the Excelsior and Enterprise are free to engage at will, the only problem I forsee is an opponent using a cloaked fleet, where the Target Lock from Spock will be difficult to achieve in the first place.

So there are some ideas I’m working on at the moment, comments are welcome

I’m still not Picard.

D

Play Testing for Q Continuum 1 – Encounter at Farpoint

After my victory at the last OP event I decided that rather than stick with that fleet (however successful it was!) I would work on a whole new fleet for the first Q event. The scenario itself is somewhat crazy, so I thought I’d start by running down what the Q cards do and adding some of my own comments on the implications (apologies for picture quality).

1.       Honored Judge

I get the feeling that this might just be the card that people worry about the most. My first idea for this event’s fleet building was to run dominion fighters with Galor Class Phaser banks and Aft-Disruptor Wave Cannons – I could cover a large area of board space with a ship that wouldn’t be concerned about having its captain disabled, would fire with between 4 and 7 dice depending on tokens left and range, and would be consistently firing at a higher captain skill than that of its opponents. The problem of course was that the second line of text on honored judge says that if you have no captain disable a crew upgrade, and if you have no crew disable another upgrade. This would mean that if Honored Judge came up, it would rob me of one of the upgrades that I’d bought, and so what might ultimately be worthwhile doing was to run the fighters without any upgrades at all, particularly when one considers the potential effects of number 2…

2.       Very Advanced

If one were to deploy within range one of the board edge and this card is drawn on the first turn, then one has to perform a 6 straight manoeuvre to escape the area of effect. This means that no ship will be able to avoid the 2 disabled upgrades unless a) it has a 6 forward on its dial, or b) it has no upgrades. The fighters I spoke about above have only a 4 forward and if this card was drawn (let alone Honored Judge) then they would lose both of the upgrades. I think that if this card does come up and you have no 6 straight manoeuvre, then the best bet may be to accept that you are going to have cards disabled, and put yourself into a position to escape the area of effect next turn, rather that barrel forwards as fast as you can just to be alpha struck (striked?) by a Voyager/Enterprise-E/Scimitar that can escape the area of effect on turn one. As far as my fleet building went, this card was the death of Aft-Disruptor Wave/Galor Class Phaser Fighters.

3.       Incredible Power

This card actually encouraged me to still take fighters, even though I’d have to run them without any upgrades. Manoeuvring is severely limited by this card, with most ships only able to do a 1 forward or bank without avoiding (the chance) of taking damage. I think most players are conservative and fearful of damage enough that they won’t risk taking damage. Fighters therefore become all the more valuable, since in addition to straight and bank manoeuvres, they also possess 1 turns and the federation fighters have a 1 come about (that is white). Whilst I had been thinking that Dominion was the way to go for this event, the fantastic manoeuvrability that the Federation fighter offers, may just swing me towards favouring them. (NB: It always bothered me that the Federation fighters were never named “Peregrine Fighters” as they are in-universe).

4.       A Powerful Mind

This one is less of a spoiler than it might first appear. Yes, taking an APT can be the death of some ships, and certainly I would rather not take one, but taking one to perform an action bar action is not necessarily the end of the world- particularly when you can take upgrade actions, ship actions or captain actions (if the captain is enabled) without penalty. The key here might be that most ships can survive taking one APT a turn but few can survive taking two. Cards like Positron Beam, Brunt (not-FCA) and (the almost forgotten) Borg Missile become all the more powerful when they add an APT to a ship that already has an APT. It also means, conversely, that cards that give out APTs for some benefit (Such as Reinforced Hull Plating, the Tal’Kir’s named ability and Gul Macet) are less useful when you already have an APT. I’m looking quite hard at both the TOS Enterprise and the Tactical Prototype tech from the Prometheus expansion as means of being able to take actions despite the presence of an APT.

All of this discussion leads me towards two possible builds, with a third hovering in the back of my mind.

Build 1 – Dominion

Resource – Officer Cards

Trager [Assimilated Vessel 64758] (26)

Gul Dukat [Battle Cruiser] (5)

Breen Aide [Gor Portas] (2)

First Officer [Officer Resource] (3)

Aft Weapons Array [Reklar] (4)

Total (40)

Reklar [Reklar] (26)

Gul Lemec [Reklar] (3)

Adm Gul Madred [Reklar] (5)

Boheeka [Koranak] (2)

Aft Weapons Array [Reklar] (4)

Total (40)

Hideki Class Attack Squadron [1st Wave Attack Fighters] (20) Total (20)

Hideki Class Attack Squadron [1st Wave Attack Fighters] (20) Total (20)

Fleet total: 120

In play testing this fleet has been severely hamstrung by drawing Very Advanced on turn 1. If that doesn’t happen though, this fleet works well. If Honored Judge comes up, then neither the Trager nor the Reklar drop to 0 skill, as the First Officer Breen Aide and Admiral Madred take over. Reklar’s ability allows for a BS token to be dropped despite that action not being on the action bar, hence avoiding the APT and the Aft-Weapons array (fast becoming my favourite weapon upgrade) gives pretty good coverage at 4 Attack Dice.  The Trager is pretty survivable itself (I love the named ability) and the fighters just add to that ability. Whilst the number of moving parts here could go wrong pretty quickly, the upgrades are there to start with in order to deal with the scenario rather than ignore the worst that the scenario has to offer. It seems more skilful from my point of view to be able to take what the scenario throws at you and build around those potential drawbacks, than it does to build a fleet that doesn’t have to deal with the drawbacks. That is probably why I prefer this fleet to the next one…

Build 2 – Federation (sort of)

Resource – Federation Attack Fighters

U.S.S. Enterprise [U.S.S. Enterprise] (22) Federation Captain [U.S.S. Enterprise (Refit)] (0) Total (22)

Constitution Class [I.S.S. Enterprise] (20) Mirror Universe Captain [I.S.S. Enterprise] (0) Total (20)

Suurok Class [Ni'Var] (18) Vulcan Captain [Ni’Var] (0) Total (18)

Hideki Class Attack Squadron [1st Wave Attack Fighters] (20) Total (20)

Federation Attack Fighter [Federation Attack Fighter Resource] (20) Total (20)

Federation Attack Squadron [Fighter Squadron 6] (20) Total (20)

Fleet total: 120

Whilst the previous build was made to deal with the worst the scenario had to offer, this build is designed entirely to ignore the scenario. Three fighters, three cheap 4 hull ships, one of which, the prime universe Enterprise, can take actions regardless of the presence of APTs. The only interesting thing about this build is that I’ve tried to mix up the factions to avoid falling foul of Salatrel and Picard 8’s ability. Otherwise it is more or less just a case of flying into range two with the fighters and letting them do their thing. I’m worried it’ll be a little boring.

Build 3 - Evade-ager

U.S.S. Voyager [U.S.S. Voyager] (30)

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

Jean-Luc Picard [U.S.S. Enterprise-E] (5)

Admiral Maxwell Forrest [Enterprise NX-01] (3)

Computer Analysis [Sakharov] (4)

Tom Paris [U.S.S. Voyager] (4)

Hikaru Sulu [U.S.S. Enterprise] (3)

Pavel Chekov [U.S.S. Reliant] (3)

Ilia [U.S.S. Enterprise (Refit)] (4)

William T. Riker [U.S.S. Pegasus] (4)

Multi-adaptive Shields [U.S.S. Raven] (5)

Transphasic Torpedoes [U.S.S. Voyager] (10)

Transphasic Torpedoes [U.S.S. Voyager] (10)

Tactical Station [U.S.S. Stargazer] (4) Total (100)

Federation Attack Squadron [Fighter Squadron 6] (20) Total (20)

Fleet total: 119

This fleet is just mean, and takes full advantage of my venue’s lifting of the 50 point cap and resource retirement rules. Voyager is tough to take down, with Captain Skill 12 when Honored Judge is not in play and 7 when it is. Between the Transphasics and Tactical Station it puts out a heap of damage and does not really suffer from things being disabled thanks to Computer Analysis. The only weakness that immediately jumps out at me is that the ship’s ability 360 Primary Weapon gives an APT, and that might prove difficult to shake off if I also have one from A Powerful Mind. I think out of the three builds this one is by far and away the best, most competitive and most annoying. I’m not sure what I’ll run yet, but this is a distinct possibility.

As always, comments are welcome, so let me know what you think.

D

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

Generated by Space Dock for iOS

http://spacedockapp.org

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

Generated by Space Dock for iOS

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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

Generated by Space Dock for iOS

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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.