The question is do you chase the meta or do you follow the Rule of Cool? I believe that chasing broken combinations and "gotcha" rules suck the fun right out of the game. When I was big into Battletech I knew a man that would tweek every mech to make custom variants that were super-optimized. I was a few years younger and new to thenl game. I tended to play as-written (3025-3055 era). He.swept my off the board every single game. Still, I always went for the Rule of Cool, and still do.
Yeah this is why I don't like STAW comp anymore. I wanna bring that big Borg Cube, but it can't "earn" and its worth so many points that I'm basically handing 48-80 points over to a player by just putting it on the board. Much cheaper units can be given upgrades to make them far more stronger than the Borg Cube, but none for them will ever look that good. And I still like to run them, (just not in COMP) because nothing beats the feeling of giving someone the opportunity to fight a cube. Its like, I know I'm gonna lose, its almost like I stop being a player and more of become a GM and try to give them a good fight. Because when they destroy a cube with their bird of pray, that's their tabletop glory, their time to shine. Okay sometimes I've run them in comp games just to screw with people. My typical comp strategy is to come up with a new, or rarely used strategy, so that my opponent is left in confusion for 1-3 rounds and hopefully that buys me enough time to win. So the cube might be on the board, but it will probably be the distraction. Or in some cases a very big self destruct bomb.
I work on a Star Trek video game mod (Star Trek Armada 2: Tactical Maneuvers and the Borg are so hard to balance, since they can escape with 1hp and regenerate to full at no cost, or they can just die and the player lost all the resources they spent. Eventually I came up with a design where the Borg Vinculum (the core of the ship) is bought first and recovered when the ship dies; it's effectively a cap that you pay to increase. This way rebuilding a destroyed Borg vessel costs less than adding more to the fleet. The Cube is the most extreme case where the technology and Vinculum to build one are 2/3 the cost, so if the actual Cube dies it costs only 1/3 to rebuild it. The idea is to give others the opportunity to destroy a Cube without instantly ending the game.
The question is do you chase the meta or do you follow the Rule of Cool?
I believe that chasing broken combinations and "gotcha" rules suck the fun right out of the game.
When I was big into Battletech I knew a man that would tweek every mech to make custom variants that were super-optimized. I was a few years younger and new to thenl game. I tended to play as-written (3025-3055 era). He.swept my off the board every single game.
Still, I always went for the Rule of Cool, and still do.
Yeah this is why I don't like STAW comp anymore. I wanna bring that big Borg Cube, but it can't "earn" and its worth so many points that I'm basically handing 48-80 points over to a player by just putting it on the board. Much cheaper units can be given upgrades to make them far more stronger than the Borg Cube, but none for them will ever look that good.
And I still like to run them, (just not in COMP) because nothing beats the feeling of giving someone the opportunity to fight a cube. Its like, I know I'm gonna lose, its almost like I stop being a player and more of become a GM and try to give them a good fight. Because when they destroy a cube with their bird of pray, that's their tabletop glory, their time to shine.
Okay sometimes I've run them in comp games just to screw with people. My typical comp strategy is to come up with a new, or rarely used strategy, so that my opponent is left in confusion for 1-3 rounds and hopefully that buys me enough time to win. So the cube might be on the board, but it will probably be the distraction. Or in some cases a very big self destruct bomb.
I work on a Star Trek video game mod (Star Trek Armada 2: Tactical Maneuvers and the Borg are so hard to balance, since they can escape with 1hp and regenerate to full at no cost, or they can just die and the player lost all the resources they spent.
Eventually I came up with a design where the Borg Vinculum (the core of the ship) is bought first and recovered when the ship dies; it's effectively a cap that you pay to increase. This way rebuilding a destroyed Borg vessel costs less than adding more to the fleet. The Cube is the most extreme case where the technology and Vinculum to build one are 2/3 the cost, so if the actual Cube dies it costs only 1/3 to rebuild it. The idea is to give others the opportunity to destroy a Cube without instantly ending the game.