Discuss all of your questions, concerns, comments and ideas about Second Edition.
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Second Edition Playtest Manager
By Faithful Reader (Ross Fertel)
 - Second Edition Playtest Manager
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#593511
It's Wednesday! We're more than halfway through the week. Since we are over the hump, let's look at a question!



This week, we look at everyone's favorite topic: Eighth Grade Math!

There are a bunch of personnel who are X at Y. There are Federation at Dominion missions, Deep Space Nine at Klingon missions, Starfleet at Delphic Expanse missions, etc.

It seems as though these are not uniformly successful. This week, talk about what makes a good X at Y? Is it just good mission selection? Are there not enough incentives for some? How far down the rabbit hole should we go with this? What is your experience with X at Y?
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Ambassador
 - Ambassador
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#593513
I like the idea of constraining crews within affiliations to certain storyline events. Maybe more than grouping by skills, because e.g. "treachery [Fed]" is potentially quite broad long-term.

sheep in wolf's clothing crew
delta Klingons
delphic starfleet

More themes like this would be nice, but it's also good to come back to existing X at Y groups with new cards.

If we ever did blocks this seems like a cool way of building a theme where people could be added without necessarily increasing power creep.
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By Danny (Daniel Giddings)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
2E British National Runner-Up 2021
#593515
If X is number of applicable personnel, then X has got to be >4: I think this is why that "Apocalypse Rising" ( [DS9] Infiltrators at [Kli] missions) haven't been embraced. There's only 4 of them, and they didn't get a ship, whereas Damaged Starfleet got 7 folk and a ship, and [DQ] Klingons have got 7 folk (and 4 honorary non-uniques) and a ship.

Mission selection plays a part too.

Trouble is, too much of either, and it starts getting a little 'pre-fabricated'.
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By monty42 (Benjamin Liebich)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
2E World Quarter-Finalist 2023
Chancellor
2E European Continental Runner-Up 2023
2E German National Champion 2022
#593550
I generally like sub-affiliation themes. However it appears to be quite difficult to get them right.

This ranges anywhere between full cheese Damaged Starfleet Lego to all over the place [Fed] at [Dom] missions.

On the one hand you got a deck that basically builds itself. Just throw in all the damaged folk, all the delphic missions and a few jobbers to fill some skill gaps and you get an extremely competitive deck. From a deck building perspective, this is extremely boring.

On the other hand you got a deck where most of the things don't really work well together and you have to add a lot of stuff just to make anything work. You've got a lot of cool individual abilities but you're hard pressed to forge those into a deck that's at least half way pulling in a cohesive direction. From a deck building perspective, this is extremely frustrating.

I think one of the reasons that the [DS9] Infiltrators at [Kli] missions don't see a lot of play is less down to their numbers but more to the fact that they've got two limiting factors to them. Not only do they significantly limit your mission selection but they're also built around a keyword (Infiltrator) that doesn't really get any support in their respective affiliation. From a deck building perspective, I have no clue what to do with them.

The fine line that design is walking however is, how much can you add to one of the lesser performing "teams", before they turn into another Damaged Starfleet?
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Regent
Community Contributor
#593553
monty42 wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 6:24 pm I generally like sub-affiliation themes. However it appears to be quite difficult to get them right.

This ranges anywhere between full cheese Damaged Starfleet Lego to all over the place [Fed] at [Dom] missions.

On the one hand you got a deck that basically builds itself. Just throw in all the damaged folk, all the delphic missions and a few jobbers to fill some skill gaps and you get an extremely competitive deck. From a deck building perspective, this is extremely boring.

On the other hand you got a deck where most of the things don't really work well together and you have to add a lot of stuff just to make anything work. You've got a lot of cool individual abilities but you're hard pressed to forge those into a deck that's at least half way pulling in a cohesive direction. From a deck building perspective, this is extremely frustrating.

I think one of the reasons that the [DS9] Infiltrators at [Kli] missions don't see a lot of play is less down to their numbers but more to the fact that they've got two limiting factors to them. Not only do they significantly limit your mission selection but they're also built around a keyword (Infiltrator) that doesn't really get any support in their respective affiliation. From a deck building perspective, I have no clue what to do with them.

The fine line that design is walking however is, how much can you add to one of the lesser performing "teams", before they turn into another Damaged Starfleet?
I would submit that KCA is the best designed headquarters for deckbuilders.

They have 2 Kiras, Odo, Bareil, 2 Garaks, and 2 Worfs as their on-color "mains" and then they have Captain Bashir and Smiley &co. if you want to play with Humans.

You can build a dead simple deck with it. 3x Kahmis, Brute Force, Rescue Prisoners, and the Alt requirements on Identify Temporal Disturbance make for one of the simplest solvers in the game.

But that's hardly all you can do with it! With the same basic personnel mix, you can run 2-mission win variants, Battle variants (Alliance Vor'Cha is one of my favorite ships in the whole game), capture variants... and each of those categories has more than one deck type you can build... all off of one HQ mission.

You're right that it's a fine line between interesting deck choices and broken combos, and sometimes the broken combos evolve over time into a Voltron deck (e.g., the impact of the previously-almost-never-used Audacious Assault on the power level of NeuNeuDominion), but in my view, the KCA model of providing a few basic building blocks (and maybe different versions of unique personnel to use as those building blocks) and leaving the rest a sandbox to be played in, rather than designing LEGO cards that go together in a certain way from jump, makes for a much more interesting deckbuilding and playing experience.

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