Snack, your avatar has been selected for the SKSOA (SudenKäpälän Seal Of Approval).
I hope to keep seeing more of you, if only because of
that.
Perhaps I'd first concentrate on the other deck(s), and see how far you come and what you need for them (which cards). Then you have a power level that you can try to match (down to), with the FED deck; and you have cards left and others, you don't. The FEDs will always have better personnel and fitting missions.
But of course, I understand that you may want to play with the FEDs first.
Just be mindful of the choice.
Last night I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about this puzzle.
I thought...
What if you make the best possible non-FED deck with the other cards... which might be a
treaty deck--
No! Wait! Just hear me out.
Treaty. Seed non-FED missions, beginning with all the
ones. (You'll be stuck with a 20 pts one, then... See if you can still make 100 pts efficiently). Seed
Betazoid Gift Box under your first mission -- with it, you get the treaty out.
This will mean doing one mission. Perhaps with the
, and thus emphasizing their dilemma penetrating skills (and number of personnel) more; in an ideal world, it'll be under a
mission and both your teams can solve it separately. Hmm, might not even be a bad idea. Perhaps under that easy 20 pts mission! (
Plunder site? No,
Relief mission.)
Then, perhaps, give the
Red Alert AND The
Traveler to the
. (My first idea was -- naturally -- to suggest you split 'em between the decks; but that was before the treaty idea.) That way, they have a better / other chance of getting out the Treaty; and also, better chance at either team (
or
) to amount to something.
Perhaps have one side concentrate on fighting -- that'll keep the FEDs occupied (they be runnin' or hiding, coz you did NOT stack all the best ships in the
deck), until you have your Treaty and can finally begin the game.
Then the game equalizes, and you can go for (secondary) missions.
The
might get Kivas Fajo. Also take care how to divide
Toff and
Res-Q.
Scans can also be important; give the
Full Planet to the Treaty deck, so they may get to their
and thus treaty, earlier.
Not sure whether to use other artifacts.
You can see how strong the Treaty deck is now, and you can adapt the
deck accordingly. You may want to
refrain from getting Red Alert and/ or Traveler out with the Gift Box if you haven't already; because it may mess up the balance... or not. You'll have to playtest that.
You can see which side to give the best
personnel -- a.o., our favourite rogue,
Roga Danar.
I think if you'd use
or
, separately, they'd have need for all the engineers they can get -- but together, they might be fine already. Again; TBD.
A
wholly different idea is to give
Horga'hn (I had to look up how to spell that) to the
, and have them get 2 turns... play 2 games in 1... (
vs.
, then
vs.
.) But that is a more
weird idea. It might even be combined with the first idea, but not sure what that would end up in.
The
deck is easy to shift up or down in power, due to their benefits. Personnel, ships and missions have a wide range of quality and effectiveness. Putting in more difficult missions might be an easy and quick way to change the power level; so many FED-only missions available.
To make the FEDs' lives really miserable, you could give them not FED-only missions, but stealable ones. They'll have to tread more carefully, then! That's perhaps the best plan to keep them on their toes -- you can experiment and see what you like best, to balance out the two sides.
Perhaps that's the game in the game, then. Making sure that both of you, with equal games with each deck, still win about 50% of the time... THEN you will have made perfectly balanced decks! Certainly worth another SKSOA.
In any case, these ideas will get you two decks that play totally differently from one another. You and your brother can take turns using them, and see who wins more often with either.
I'd also love to try these decks out via Lackey, one day (the program with which we play Trek online -- you may know it).
Edit:
Khitomer is
, whatever the card may say. The first prints only had one affiliation; that's a misprint.