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By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
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1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#554810
Armus wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 9:24 pm I think this goes too far. Why should you get to see who I have on my Outpost vs. Ship vs. Planet, etc. so you can come over and kill whoever is annoying you the most with ease?

Open discard piles? Sure. Open everything? Hell no. :thumbsdown:
Well, to be clear on my point of view:

Open discard piles/ Q's Tent (to the owner) is something I would actively change is I were given the power to do so. (And again, thankfully I'm not.)


Open other things is something I would change if I was designing the game from the ground up, but probably not change in the current game because of inertia.

In favor of open personnel on facilities / non-cloaked ships.

1. Moves some of the skill of gameplay away from. "whose's got a better memory" to strategic/tactical decisions.

2. Gives a minor benefit to cloaked ships.

3. Makes more sense in Universe. (Seriously, both sides always seemed to have a good idea of who was where unless there were actual stealth measures being taken. Even the Borg, the opposite of spy intelligence knew that Picard was the Captain of the Enterprise D, etc.)

4. Brings in more in norm with other games. (Making it easier to teach people.)

5. Yes, it would make it easier to target certain personnel. That can be a good thing in that it: (A) Promotes Interaction, (B) might add more meta game pressure to diversify personnel instead of having ones that are really annoying. If a ship, event, facility, or anything else that plays on table is hindering me, I don't have to play a sub-game of memory or shells before I can interact with the permanent.



What I *would* do at a minimum is make it where if an opponent gets to see anything about a personnel for any reason, they get to see the whole personnel.
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#554816
jadziadax8 wrote: Tue Jun 01, 2021 12:33 pm Is that girl at a Black Bear Diner? I ate at the Beaverton, OR location once...
That is me searching "I'm watching you gif" and picking the cute option. :D
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Moderator
#554820
BCSWowbagger wrote: Tue Jun 01, 2021 1:49 am Heh heh, persona swaps shouldn't exist at all. That's one of my die-in-a-fire rules. Lots of the First Contact rules supplemental was great! But not all of it.
I guess that's a second thing Second Edition does better than First Edition (after splitting up the [1E-AU] icon into [Pa] , [Fut] and [AU] , that is).
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Retired Moderator
#554825
AllenGould wrote: Tue Jun 01, 2021 1:06 pm
jadziadax8 wrote: Tue Jun 01, 2021 12:33 pm Is that girl at a Black Bear Diner? I ate at the Beaverton, OR location once...
That is me searching "I'm watching you gif" and picking the cute option. :D
I'm a big fan of
Image
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By geraldkw
 - Beta Quadrant
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#557458
Dual Personnel rules. They should just be one big personnel, they count as one personnel any time something cares about number of personnel and they count as "both" any time there is a question about which something they are (such as species). Persona swaps just don't work and yes they count as both personnel being in play for Uniqueness.
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By Ospero
 - Alpha Quadrant
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#557493
Honestly, if I could go back in time and kick the designers until they got it in their head that what they were doing was a bad idea for *one thing only*?

Borg. All of it. Everything about that affiliation is a gargantuan NPE for me. It's one of the main things that keep me from returning to the game (aside from all the "finished by turn 4" malarkey). Make them work like everyone else, with a few goodies thrown in, but also a few weaknesses, like all other affiliations have and what (from what I can tell) 2E Borg do.
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By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
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1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#557533
Ospero wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:07 pm Honestly, if I could go back in time and kick the designers until they got it in their head that what they were doing was a bad idea for *one thing only*?

Borg. All of it. Everything about that affiliation is a gargantuan NPE for me. It's one of the main things that keep me from returning to the game (aside from all the "finished by turn 4" malarkey). Make them work like everyone else, with a few goodies thrown in, but also a few weaknesses, like all other affiliations have and what (from what I can tell) 2E Borg do.

That's funny to me (and I am not trying to say you are wrong at all), because the way the Borg play in 2E is one of the reasons I had little interest in that.

I played 1E since Premere, but the revamp of the game in FC especially including the Borg is what made me love the game and be willing to travel 2+ hours each way for tournaments. In 2E they felt like just another affiliation, with a different colored template when in 1 they felt as alien as they were n the show.


Again, I am not saying you were/are wrong to feel that way, and it's good to hear people say things like that, because diving people off is not something the game can afford.
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By Ospero
 - Alpha Quadrant
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#558412
boromirofborg wrote: Wed Jul 07, 2021 1:43 pm
Ospero wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:07 pm Honestly, if I could go back in time and kick the designers until they got it in their head that what they were doing was a bad idea for *one thing only*?

Borg. All of it. Everything about that affiliation is a gargantuan NPE for me. It's one of the main things that keep me from returning to the game (aside from all the "finished by turn 4" malarkey). Make them work like everyone else, with a few goodies thrown in, but also a few weaknesses, like all other affiliations have and what (from what I can tell) 2E Borg do.

That's funny to me (and I am not trying to say you are wrong at all), because the way the Borg play in 2E is one of the reasons I had little interest in that.

I played 1E since Premere, but the revamp of the game in FC especially including the Borg is what made me love the game and be willing to travel 2+ hours each way for tournaments. In 2E they felt like just another affiliation, with a different colored template when in 1 they felt as alien as they were n the show.


Again, I am not saying you were/are wrong to feel that way, and it's good to hear people say things like that, because diving people off is not something the game can afford.
I support the idea of Borg feeling and playing differently. Not so much the execution, which added a metric ton of additional work to both gameplay and card design (you have to evaluate every dilemma for how it plays differently against scouting rather than mission attempts, for one).

But in all honesty, getting me back into the game would involve massively shifting how it plays at the moment anyway (as well as conjuring up enough 1E players in my area for regular games, which is an entirely different issue), so my perspective is probably not the most relevant.
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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Community Contributor
#560584
DarkSabre wrote: Sat May 22, 2021 10:47 pm The change to the Borg Rules when The Borg set was released.
Honestly, same.

The changes, for those playing along at home, were these:

Borg SHIELDS now block opponent's personnel (previously, opponent could beam aboard Borg ships as an order, because their SHIELDS didn't block anyone)

Borg can now send down any number of Borg to scout a planet (previously, they could only beam down one per turn).

Borg can NEVER use hand weapons, even if stolen (honestly, this one doesn't make a big difference).

Assimilated Borg drones now retain most of their features (likes icons, lore, restriction boxes, etc.) instead of having it conceptually erased.

I get why these changes were made. Borg were hideously complex and the single-scouting rule in particular made for some very odd dilemma interactions Decipher had to account for. Ever wonder why Borg ignore Mission Fatigue? It's not because of flavor; it's because of how it sporks with the Borg single scouts on planets. Decipher found the rules it could delete to bring Borg back closer to the rest of the game. From a rules perspective, it was The Right Thing To Do, and I'd do it again in their shoes.

But, in doing so, it killed some very neat pieces of Borg flavor, ways that forced Borg to play differently from every other affiliation-- and it made Borg quite a lot more powerful than they had been before.

Oh, well. Maybe someone can figure out a good way to put those rules on cards, then figure out an incentive to get Borg players to actually include those cards.

Not sure why I missed that post my first time reading the thread.

EDIT TO ADD: Okay, final grand totes, lemme know if I missed any, are as follows:

Discard pile not public information / even owner can't look through (10)
Owner can't look through Q's Tent (8)
Owner can't look through opponent's crews/away teams (4-6, depending on whether it was limited to planet surfaces and/or mission attempts)
Owner can't look through all side decks (2-3?)
Guramba (2)
Artifact seed limit (one per mission) (1)
"any" and "related" (1)
Borg simplifications when The Borg came out (1)
Sherman's Planet not 23rd Century (1)
Ability to move each ship more than once on a turn (1)
Only points that count toward winning count for differential (1)
Lack of unplanned inter-quadrant travel (1)
Phase cloak (1)
No guarantee of equal turns (1)
Dilemma resolution (1)
Gender (1)
Persona swap limited to start of turn (1)
Persona swap existing (1)
Dual-personnel rules (1)
The entire Borg affiliation rules scaffolding (1)
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#560588
BCSWowbagger wrote: Wed Aug 25, 2021 10:24 pm Borg can now send down any number of Borg to scout a planet (previously, they could only beam down one per turn).
Small correction - you could only send one Borg down at a time. Once they were stopped, you could send down another in the same turn. They wouldn't combine into a single team until next turn.

And that change (plus the "no beaming") was to make Borg playable again. The scouting was because DS9 and later added entirely too many good dilemmas in the "unless <stats one drone doesn't have>, kill one personnel" template (which meant Borg could never pass them and forced an Adapt), and the beaming was because you could lock down a cube in space by just driving by and beaming over Officer Bob to pick a fight. (At least now you have to throw an entire ship at them.)
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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#560590
AllenGould wrote: Wed Aug 25, 2021 11:42 pmand the beaming was because you could lock down a cube in space by just driving by and beaming over Officer Bob to pick a fight. (At least now you have to throw an entire ship at them.)
Ooo, didn't even think of that one.

The line between unplayable Borg and meta-dominant Borg is always narrower than it looks at first.
Small correction - you could only send one Borg down at a time. Once they were stopped, you could send down another in the same turn. They wouldn't combine into a single team until next turn.
Got this wrong! Thank you much. I never actually played under these rules, so have no actual memories of them -- just read about them years later.

(MY friends and I bought some packs of First Contact but never played Borg because we were waiting to open up some Borg-affiliation missions -- because Decipher didn't put the Borg rules in the booster packs! We saw the objectives but didn't know what "scouting" was and we figured it would be explained by some other card! Oh, Decipher...)
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Moderator
#560593
My apologies if this has been changed, but another rule that might go away has to do with switching affiliations for multi-affiliation cards.

As I currently understand the rules, if I have Sisters of Duras on the I.K.S. Cha'Joh, both in [1E-Rom] mode, then to switch them to [Kli] mode, I'd have to beam the Sisters off the ship (say to the planet the ship is orbiting, or a [NA] or [Neu] facility at the mission, or what have you), switch the Sisters' affiliation, switch the ship's affiliation, then beam the Sisters back aboard.

Maybe there's another interaction that I'm missing, but is there any real gameplay value in forcing this method instead of just allowing swaps to be done simultaneously?
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By Professor Scott (Mathew McCalpin)
 - Delta Quadrant
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Trailblazer
1E Cardassia Regional Champion 2023
#560602
nobthehobbit wrote: Thu Aug 26, 2021 3:07 am My apologies if this has been changed, but another rule that might go away has to do with switching affiliations for multi-affiliation cards.

As I currently understand the rules, if I have Sisters of Duras on the I.K.S. Cha'Joh, both in [1E-Rom] mode, then to switch them to [Kli] mode, I'd have to beam the Sisters off the ship (say to the planet the ship is orbiting, or a [NA] or [Neu] facility at the mission, or what have you), switch the Sisters' affiliation, switch the ship's affiliation, then beam the Sisters back aboard.

Maybe there's another interaction that I'm missing, but is there any real gameplay value in forcing this method instead of just allowing swaps to be done simultaneously?
:thumbsup: This!
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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Community Contributor
#560605
^ That rule(ing) is still on the books.

My impression is that the rule is not there for its own sake, but for the sake of the rest of the timing rules. Switching affiliations is an action -- specifically, an order -- and you can't execute two actions simultaneously under our current timing rules.

I can imagine that someone asked Decipher, "Hey, can I switch these two sets of affiliation simultaneously?" and Decipher thought, "Well, we COULD allow this and only this action to happen differently from all other actions in the game for this incredibly obscure reason... or we COULD keep the timing rules consistent and tell the two Cha'Joh + Duras players who are playing both affiliations but without a treaty to suck it up."

They (eventually) opted for the latter.

Weirdly, this pretty obscure ruling on this pretty obscure issue became a somewhat prominent (albeit largely pointless) part of the dual-affiliation rules, something people actually know-- perhaps because it illustrates a useful point about actions and how affiliation-switching is an action, but perhaps just because of random meme drift. It's very weird how some rules and terms get stuck in prominent places in players' minds (like house arrest) -- so much so that the Rulebook has a sidebar saying, "Don't Worry About House Arrest"!--while other rules and terms are just completely memory-holed (like stalled ships).

Or, just possibly, this ruling sticks out in players' minds because it was reversed. It was originally ruled (on 19 October 1998) that you could simultaneously switch the affiliations. This is pretty typical Decipher 1998: make the card work even if it injures the general rules of the game. Decipher reversed that ruling on 29 January 2001, which was pretty typical of Decipher 2001: holy crap we broke our game with all these rules exceptions, let's try and clean this up.

On the other hand, Decipher reversed its old ruling about Edo Probe reseeding under the mission on 28 October 2002, put it in Glossary 1.8, and yet somehow none of the top players in the world noticed until the mid-2010s, at which point it constituted a crisis. So I'm back to random meme drift.
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