Gaming Review:- Star Trek Attack Wing OP "The Collective" - Month 3, plus overall thoughts.

Ahhhh, after nearly four months since it started (Feels longer) The final step in the "Collective" campaign is upon me/us.

As per the usual format for STAW OP events, the days play consists of 3 rounds.
This month, the battle is themed around the Battle of Sector 001, as featured in "Star Trek: First Contact", as well as the other Battle for Sector 001 that featured in "Best of Both Worlds - Part 2" (nice going WizKids, way to show you understand the source material).


The Fleet Build.

According to the scenario pack, the "90+30" fleet build should be the done thing, however, due to some sort of complete fuck up by the UK distributor of STAW products, there were no bricks of random booster packs left, so therefore for this event we went with a simple "120 point fleet" build.

Once again, I played my tried and tested Federation "torpedo spam" fleet.

The Scenario.

Following on from Month #2, the Cube has managed to reach Earth, and the allied fleets of both players meet it as it makes its final attack run on the home of the United Federation of Planets.

In a similar play style to Month #2, players are expected to work together to stop the Cube from leaving the play area by battering it for as much damage as it they possibly can before either both players fleets get junked, or before time runs out.
However, in a twist to last months immobile "pillbox" Cube, this months Cube moves and can deliver devastating attacks on both players fleets, however, this time round the Cube can be destroyed, simply by inflicting 25 damage points on it.
The Game does not end there though, because when that final point of damage is scored, the Cube shoots out a hidden Sphere, which moves in a straight line as fast as it can towards the farthest table edge, and also, should this Sphere exit the play area before the players manage to inflict 15 damage to it, both players automatically lose the game.

One final point...as both the Cube AND the Sphere take damage, they become even more difficult to destroy, as their evade number increases by 2 for each 5 damage they take.

The scenario winner is decided by who inflicted the final point of damage to both the cube and the sphere.

Opinion.

The 3 rounds i played were as follows:-

Federation & Independent/Borg/Klingon Mashup (Loss by Campaign points - See later)
Federation & Borg/Dominion/Romulan Mashup (Loss by Tiebreaker - See later)
Federation & Federation (Win)




Final place - 4th (of 7)
Overall place in campaign - 5th (of 9)

Ok, first and foremost I will say this...Mashups should not be allowed...it makes no sense in the Star Trek universe to have Admiral Kirk supporting Khan in a Borg Soong type ship backed up by Kronos One, Or captain Picard in charge of a Borg scout ship whilst Weyoun and some romulans back him up in a Borg tactical Cube.
A "second edition" rulebook really needs to get STAW back on track as a miniatures game that has a Star Trek feel to it, instead of an exersize in "Mix & Match".
Some of the combos I saw today were quite intriguing and very well thought out, but it made the game feel less "Star Trek" and more "Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition". (As in, it was combinations of overpowered mix & match "wargear", which were never intended to be used together, that decided the game, rather than skill and good tactics)

That said, the game itself was quite enjoyable. At various points during all three games did the action become somewhat intense as the Cube began to resist damage, and then the frantic chase and attacking that followed once it ejected the Sphere.
It was good that finally a game in this campaign seemed to properly encourage teamwork. Month #2 did this to some degree but not as much as this month, as both players had to actively co-ordinate their fleets to ensure that maximum damage got done once the Cube/Sphere started moving.

One of the first things that became apparent was that there really was no need whatsoever to do the usual "secret" movement, being as both players were working together, it made no sense at all to hide your fleet manoeuvres from each other, in addition, although it was well within everyones power to use crew/equipment to disable/stun your opponents ships, this would have been completely detrimental on the whole, the thought of doing so never even entered my mind when I built my fleet, and seemingly everyone else was thinking along the same lines, good.

The fatal flaw in this scenario did not come from the gameplay restrictions, but instead from the victory point award system....

Game #1 was a total military victory for me, as I destroyed the cube, however, in the end I lost, because even though I destroyed the Cube, inflicted heavy damage on the Sphere and ended the game with my fleet completely intact, I lost because I had a lower campaign score against an opponent who had placed in the top 2 for the previous 2 months....Thats bollocks!, especially as he had lost one ship from his fleet.



Game #2 ended in a draw, I destroyed the Cube (again) and my opponent destroyed the Sphere, with both of us having not lost any ships and both of us tied for campaign points, we ended up settling the match via rolling for "Battlestations"...I got 1, they got 2....That is no way to decide a tournament game, may as well have just saved time and rolled for battlestations at the start and saved ourselves the bother of playing.


Game #3 was a decisive victory for me, as I destroyed both the Cube and the Sphere.

It would have been a much better idea to have tracked which player had inflicted the most damage on the Cube/Sphere and then used that as a reference for deciding win/draw/loss, rather than by external campaign points or via random chance, as far as I am concerned, I won all 3 games fair and square, but once again due to STAW grey area rules, I was cheated, although not as badly as I was during month #1.


Overall Thoughts on "The Collective".

Not good I'm afraid, with 2 out of 3 "chapters" being horrendously unbalanced, coupled with rules problems stemming from the fact that the basic rulebook included in the box game set is in sore need of updating, as newer ships/cards are "tacking on" new game rules which don't fully mesh with the "standard" rules, and then finally a points based campaign system which is totally unforgiving, "The Collective" was a good idea but very very poorly executed.

Final score - 4/10

The follow up campaign, called "Resistance is Futile" makes up the remaining 3 months of the 6 month "Borg" themed Storyline/Sales promotion.
I have as yet to decide if I am going to bother with it.

Gaming Review:- Star Trek Attack Wing OP "The Collective" - Month 2

So, after a few hiccups concerning getting the wrong OP kit sent, thus delaying the event for 2 weeks...finally, just as most places are running month #3 do we get round to doing month #2.

Again, as is the standard format for STAW organised play events, this is a three round tournament based on the infamous "Battle of Wolf-359", as shown in the ST:TNG episode "Best of both Worlds (parts 1&2)" and mentioned numerous times throughout TNG, DS9 and Voyager, as well as the Star Trek movies.


The Fleet Build.

As per the previous month, the fleet points available for this month are the same, 90 points of whatever you want, plus 30 points to be constructed from whatever you find in your random booster pack.
The booster pack ships are identical to last month , with all the major factions being represented in some way, except for the Borg themselves.

The Scenario

Unlike Month #1, this scenario is designed as a co-op type game, as players cannot attack each other, but may attack a single Borg cube, which spends the entire game stationary on one side of the play area, while both players ships deploy on the opposite edge.
Before deployment, both players deploy 3 "debris" tokens (although I spent all day calling them scrap tokens) anywhere on the board so long as they are not within range 1 of the cube or the edge of the deployment area. Players then deploy their ships in ascending command value order.

The objective of this scenario is to inflict as much damage by any means to the Cube (the cube itself cannot be destroyed or affected by any adverse game effects), whilst at the same time ensuring your own ships do not get blown up when the Borg decide to swat you down like flies.
Play continues as normal, however at the end of each turn, the Cube will make a series of attacks, which increase in severity as the number of ships on the board decrease until one hour has passed, or all ships in play are destroyed, whichever happens first.

The scenario winner is decided by which player has inflicted the most damage after the game ends.

Opinion

As the tournament is a co-op scenario, the normal 1v1 type play does not apply, so in the course of three rounds I played the following:-

Round 1 - Federation (me) & "Rogue" Borg/Klingon
Round 2 - Federation & Federation/Romulan
Round 3 - Federation & "Rogue" Borg/Maquis

Final placing - 3rd.

I was quite lucky that my blind booster contained another Sabre class ship, this allowed me to play a "pure" Federation fleet and thus get priority for movement and combat, although it is a shame that the Sabre class ship has numerous flaws in its game impact, such as only having a forward fire arc, and the "vanilla" ship not benefiting from the USS Yeagers awesome ability to continuously fire its photon torpedoes without having to disable them. As this ship is meant to fill the niche in the Federation fleet for a "missile cruiser" it seems odd that Wizkids would hamstring it by requiring you to spend your ships action for the turn on either attaining the target lock you need to fire, or reactivating your torpedoes...an errata for this ship is sorely needed.

Anyways, this months scenario was much more enjoyable, being as that it was not hideously unbalanced in favour of grey area exploiting combos, made worse by having items and crew members nicked off your ships.
The name of the game this month was to bring as much firepower to bear as possible, which anyone can do without the need for owning an extensive number of prize/rare ships and prize/promo crew and equipment cards.

I was rather surprised not to see some Klingon fleets, being as they can usually be counted on to carry some big guns, but alas it seemed that their place had been taken by the Borg tactical cube, with its high firepower and ability to shrug off damage, but at a high cost the Borg players tended to only field a single well equipped cube or a cheap cube with backup from a sphere.

Final Thoughts

A much better scenario all round that allowed for a decent and less frustrating level of play.
The prize for winning (the USS Raven) is a little lackluster but has some decent equipment cards.
The participation freebie in the form of the fleet captain resource is pretty sweet, and certainly has numerous possibilities open to its use.

Gaming Review:- Star Trek Attack Wing OP "The Collective" - Month 1

So, finally got round to playing the Star Trek Attack Wing Organised Play event "The Collective - Month 1", somewhat later than what everybody else has.

In what is a 3 part organised play event, similar to last years "Dominion War" event, which I missed due to not playing the game at the time, the idea, other than to sell the recently released Borg related products, is that the Borg have suddenly appeared in the Star Trek Universe and are up to all sorts of shennanigans etc.

The Fleet Build

Each player constructs a fleet up to 90 squadron points, within the limitations of the ships/personnel selected. In addition, players each receive a "blind" boost pack, containing one of the following ships:-

• Federation Saber class ship /U.S.S Yeager
• Klingon D7 battle cruiser/IKS B'Moth
• Romulan Bird of Prey/IRW Vorta Vor
• Independent Maquis Raider/Gavroche
• Dominion Jem'Hadar Attack ship/ 3rd wing attack ship.

Players will then use the contents of this booster to make a unit to the value of 30 SP and use it as part of their fleet.


The Scenario

Players set up along opposite edges, facing each other, then the Borg cube token is placed in the middle of the play area. the turn proceeds as normal (players may NOT attack the Cube at any time, even if able) however at the end of the turn, three ships within range 2 of the cube run the risk of having upgrades "assimilated" by it.
During the turn, players may spend a ships action to add a "resist" token, which allows them to either ignore or choose the upgrade (crew member, weapon or item) which the Borg take, by rolling an attack dice and the outcome decided by what is rolled. Otherwise, upgrades are taken by means of "random" selection (it is left up to players to decide how this is done, personally, I put my upgrade cards in deck protectors, shuffled them and then allowed my opponent to choose a face down card, I found this worked better than the "roll a dice" method that some people were using).
Once a ship has exhausted all of its available upgrades, the Captain card is taken, and once that has gone, the Cube instead makes an attack on the captainless ship with 8 attack dice.

After the Cube has "assimilated", it then moves towards the players fleets, in a direction randomly determined based on whether there are any ships to move towards, or whether its movement would take it "off-board" (the cube will not move in a direction where there are no ships, and cannot move in a direction which will end with its movement taking it out of the play area).

The game ends when one or both players have no ships remaining on the board.

Opinion

As per tournament dictats, I played 3 games over the course of the day:-

Round 1 - Federation (me) V Dominion/Klingon (loss)
Round 2 - Federation (me) V Borg/Dominion (win)
Round 3 - Federation (me) V Federation/Klingon (loss)

Final placing - 6th.

Although the idea must have seemed like a cool one when the scenario was being devised, basically as a homage to the TNG episode "Q Who", it quickly becomes apparent that this scenario has several extremely big flaws.

1. The cube is either irrelevant to play, or dominates play.


The inability of players to attack or incapacitate the Cube whenever it comes near them seriously hampers the objective of basically annihilating each other. Although players may "resist" their upgrades being taken, the effectiveness of the ability to resist is negligible.
The Cubes random movement can also end with a Cube "following" a player around the board, rather unfairly picking on them, especially so when it crashes into ships as its movement makes it land on top of them and forces them to take damage.

2. The 30 point ships are basically worthless.
The best tactic I worked out (I tried 3 different strategies over the course of the day) was to use the 30 point ship as a lure, splitting it off from the "main" fleet so that when the Cube made its "random" movement, there was a chance it would go off in the direction of that ship and not attack the main fleet. Of course, this opened up the possibility that your main fleet would be at a disadvantage due to being one ship down, however with the attack values of the smaller ships being quite low, they were little more than fire support anyway.
When building the 30 point "special" fleet you were pretty much limited to choosing either the "named" captain and maybe one or two upgrades, or choosing the "unnamed captain" and upgrades that would compliment each other. the definite winner of the "Blind Booster" ship category goes to the Klingon ship, which when taken as unnamed with the named captain, allowed for a ship that had a decent level of firepower, a cloaking device and a named captain that allowed you to disable enemy crew members.

3. "Prize" items offer horrendously unbalanced advantages for this scenario.
The ability to boost firepower and take free actions makes or breaks this scenario, and being as that most of these boosts come courtesy of tournament prize items, if you don't have them, or don't have the money to purchase them from Ebay, you're fucked.
To be honest, this is something that seems to be a common problem in any STAW game, as the "general" release ships and cards, as well as participation freebies, offer very little by way of advantage over "Prize" items, to the point at which sometimes it basically boils down to "if you weren't playing this game 18 months ago, its not worth bothering with organised play".

Overall Thoughts
The 90 point fleet restriction, plus having limited access to being able to buy stuff, really hampered my ability to make a coherent and competitive fleet, especially against prize item using opponents. Although I was quite pleased that I got the Saber class ship as my blind, the point and build restriction on that meant that I couldn't use it to its full potential as a torpedo boat.
The added frustration of the invincible Cube interfering with play and not being able to do much about it pretty much meant that I was fucked before I had even bothered rolling any dice, so in essence, the game boiled down to "whoever has spent the most money wins".
The participation freebie is quite good though, with the counter attack dice allowing you to substitute one defence dice for it, and possibly inflict damage on your opponent when they attack you.
In short though, this scenario sucked, and wasn't the slightest bit enjoyable to participate in whatsoever.