Dilemmas:
- Gender Dilemmas
Gender dilemmas had not worked out for anyone, and really have lots of problems for a limited format like this. One of the biggest problems is that gender dilemmas typically ONLY care about gender.
Matriarchal Society ONLY wants female personnel, and so it only combos with dilemmas like
Female's Love Interest, which is ONLY effective at removing female personnel. Contrast this with one of my new additions,
Hanonian Land Eel, which was added to make STRENGTH more relevant, but also makes SECURITY and SCIENCE relevant. Another problem is that gender requirements max out at 2 female, but if "female" was a skill, it would be the most common skill in the cube, more so than even Treachery. So in order to make gender dilemmas more effective, I would need to intentionally reduce the number of female personnel in the cube, which leads me to the last problem with gender dilemmas: they can be a little awkward. If I had to tell players to make sure they had at least two females, I would feel like a Ferengi. I would rather tell them to make sure they had 2 SECURITY. That's not just a woke 2020's thing -- even by the standards of 90's Trek, from Janeway to B'Elanna, Kira and Dax, to all of the lady admirals in TNG and the confused guy in the skant, there was this idea in Star Trek that gender didn't matter, so it's odd to have gender matter a lot in a game about Star Trek. Gender dilemmas are at their best when they're really romance dilemmas, because it's hilarious to ship random characters together, but then we're back to the first problem where all existing romance dilemmas are basically just random selections that don't combo well with other dilemmas. Anyway, the Love Interests might return as Combo Dilemmas, because I do like the fact that they relocate personnel instead of just kill them, but Combo Dilemmas aren't really high on my list of things to try. So in the end, gender dilemmas are gone, and I don't really miss them.
- Honor OR Treachery
This theme I was actually sad to cut. I really want to include incentives for players to go deep on certain skills instead of getting a broad smattering of everything; that makes for more differentiation between decks. So for this, you would prefer having an Honor deck OR a Treachery deck, not half and half. Unfortunately, 3 dilemmas isn't enough, and it would have taken a lot of work to balance each affiliation properly. (Feds currently have 0 Treachery and just 1 more Honor than Romulans.)
+ Attributes
A lot of the piggyback cards were hand weapons, and hand weapons were mostly irrelevant. To fix that, I added a few decent STRENGTH dilemmas like Land Eel and
Dangerous Climb. Dogs of War and Second Star gave us a few attribute-drain dilemmas that also seemed like good fits. I considered adding some even harder attribute walls like
Ferengi Infestation and
Shuttle Crash, but decided against it, and games ended up being plenty long without them.
+ SECURITY
Since I was planning to make SECURITY a weakness for Feds, I needed to make it relevant for dilemmas. I didn't have a lot of suitable dilemmas to work with, so I'm not totally satisfied with how it worked out. This theme ended up a little space-heavy, when I really would want it to be planet-heavy to balance out the naturally space-heavy ENGINEER and Navigation themes.
Starter deck personnel:
My goal when I started this project was to have as small a starter deck as possible, so that decks would be defined as much as possible by the drafting process. I started with only treaties, outposts, and doorways. Compared to Magic, though, STCCG decks need a more sensitive balance of components: i.e. all the necessary skills for dilemmas plus your missions. I worried about players overlooking critical skills or getting bad packs and ending up with a deck that literally can't win against certain dilemmas. For that reason I wanted a safety net. I briefly considered
Soong-Type Android or
Suna/
Reflection Therapy, but felt those would become auto-includes. Instead, I assembled a set of underwhelming non-aligned personnel that covered every necessary skill exactly once.
I was very pleased at how this worked out. Players used only a few of these personnel, and which ones varied from player to player. If a few starter personnel can help prevent a draft disaster, increase the viability of single-affiliation decks, and increase the pool of dilemmas I'm willing to consider (dilemmas being the hardest part of this whole project), then that's a total win.
I also added an NA ship,
Mercenary Ship, to the starter deck for similar reasons. I am worried now that it might actually be too good for it to just be a safety-net card. I had also considered
Zibalian Transport or
Rigelian Freighter, but was feeling generous at the time.
Affiliation Skill Weaknesses:
The plan was to differentiate affiliations by defining a weak skill for each affiliation. Weak means both low quantity and low quality. Both are necessary so that for example a Klingon/Fed deck would prefer Klingon SECURITY over inferior Fed SECURITY, and would pass the few Fed SECURITY along to any mono-Fed player who would need it. Affiliations would have 6 of their weak skill and 9-12 of most other necessary skills, so I did need to tweak the personnel in all three affiliations.
Federation's obvious weakness would be SECURITY. OFFICER was too common among the main characters of each affiliation, and I didn't want to cut any back. SCIENCE was lacking in enough dilemmas to be an actual weakness. That left MEDICAL and ENGINEER, which could go either way, but I decided that Romulans had better and more memorable ENGINEERs, so ENGINEER would be the Klingon's weakness.
Did this actually work out in any noticeable way? I don't know! I didn't get to actually draft it this time. If you played this back in January, let me know.
Misc:
I previously said I would cut the
Shades of Gray, but I left them in for now. Part of that was lack of time to find a replacement, but it was also worth another shot now that I had increased the number of seed slots.
Close Call was cut for being too difficult, and
Spaceborn Entity was cut because I'm phasing out Self-controlled dilemmas. I'll probably cut
Borg Ship soon.
I'm a Doctor, not a Bricklayer was added because drafting it changes the value of subsequent Geology personnel, and one of the hallmarks of a good draft format is that the value of cards changes from draft to draft. It's also nice as additional counterplay against
Horta.
Experience Bij! is the new card I was most excited to add.
Dead End and
Edo Probe don't work in Warp Speed, so it was great to get a similar effect that does work.