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Played RiF OP 2 last night. After getting my butt kicked again by Borg, this time by a Tactical Cube with Picard, Admiral Kirk, Borg Missile, Fire at Will, Full Assault, Independent Flagship Klingon, etc. etc., it just really made me wonder a couple things about Star Trek Attack Wing.

What does STAW have going for it?

1. An incredible Intellectual Property spanning over 40 years. Who hasn't heard of Star Trek?
2. Simple rules. The rules are really easy. The most complicated idea in the rule book is cloaking. Once you see it in action or play it a couple times, you get it.
3. Easy game play. You need a 3'x3' play area, and about an hour. Maybe 1+15 if you need to make a list.
4. Fleet customization. This is a dis-advantage as much as it is an advantage. This advantage depends greatly on your meta, where ship pure/fleet pure it's not that great of an advantage, but in a wide open format, it's great.
5. Fantastic prize support. Wow. When the prize kit goes for less then the cost of 1 ship, but provides free tokens, participation prizes... even the blind bricks are cheap as heck. If your game store charges $15 for an entrance fee, and you get a blind ship plus participation prizes, and a chance at a prize ship... if more than 4 people show up to play, the LGS is making money. Maybe not as much as a M:tG, but 10 people is $150, when they paid about $35 for the prize kit and a couple blind bricks of ships. Anyways, this is the hook for STAW. It's what got me into the game, and up until now, has been enough to keep me coming back.

After that, I can't really come up with a whole lot of positives, only a lot of negatives.

1. The models are pretty bad. I don't expect some kind of award winning paint job, but take a look at another game with pre-painted miniatures from a rival company and tell me that Wizkids couldn't do better.
2. Ship scale is WAY off. Like, it's so bad, it's... if it concerns you, then it concerns you greatly. I'm kinda "meh" about the scale thing, but it is an issue.
3. The point system on ships is whacked. Technical term there. Simply adding the stats of the ship up and multiplying them by 2 is NOT a good formula at all. It doesn't take into account the maneuver dial, any special actions or abilities on the ships, and fire arcs. This is the number one issue with the game. Certain ships are plainly way, way under cost and too good.
4. Poorly written cards/effects leading to rules ambiguity. Anytime I have to read a card two or three times, and still go "huh?" and go looking online for the "un"official ruling at Board Game Geek or the STAW Facebook group... probably doesn't need to be in the game. The worst offenders are when you start combing cards and get some really, really bad interactions.
5. Poor quality control on the printing of cards. Vulcan cards with Dominion faction symbols. Wrong ship silhouette on a card. there are some others, but it makes you wonder what else they have made a printing error on?
6. There WAS interaction between the rules developers and the player base, but that stopped rather abruptly some time ago. Since then, Wizkids has been pretty silent. However, there has recently been a revival from Wizkids with an "Official FAQ" and rules forum. This will be moved to an advantage as soon as Wizkids get's it up and running.
7. Customization of a fleet. Want Picard on a Klingon Bird of Prey with Dominion Breen Aid? Or how about that Romulan ship with Khan, Tribbles, a Vulcan Boarding party, and Energy Dissipator? Just for kicks, let's add Mr. Data and a Gorn Pilot. These are some absurd combo's. Unfortunitly, some people want to win at all costs, and so they bring the super powerful cards. Wizkids takes two steps forward reigning these combo's in by adding more cards into the game, but then takes three steps back by adding in more powerful cards with each expansion.
8. The Prize ships... if you want to be competitive, you need some of the cards that come from these prize ships. And you need some of these cards to win an OP. Otherwise, it's eBay or friends that give you stuff.
8.. And then there is the Elephant in the room. It's hard to believe that any game designer worth their salt could say the Borg were balanced. It's a combination of a few things- the point system not taking into account the best maneuver dials in the game, the 360 degree firing arc, and highest attack values in the game. The Borg have the best ships in the game, and they have some of the best weapon upgrades in the game. In an open build environment, they get combined with the best Captains in the game and the best crew upgrades in the game. What does this lead to? A stagnation of the game. Want to win? Play Borg. Even worse, they don't really need any specific "special" cards from OP events or Prize Ships. Just a few cards from the Starter Set, and some Borg ships. It's changed the Meta and not in a good way.

Compare STAW to other games that use the "Flight Path System" and you see some very startling contrasts. Want to see what a well balanced point system is like? Play X-Wing. Want more attack options? D&D Attack Wing. Want to see how important maneuvering can be? Play Wings of War. All these other games have issues. Not the same as STAW, but they do form barriers to the game. Wouldn't it be great if some company out there could take the best of all the above without the disadvantages and make a game out of it?

I can't really disagree with a thing here, to be honest.

I would add for the advantages, the scenarios really are interesting. They also let you spice things up a bit more too. It's pretty much the only downside of X-Wing in my opinion. It's always very much a case of 'Spaceships shooting each other in an asteroid field.'

Meanwhile, with say, Star Trek, I still have the ambition of playing a big multi person team game on a 6' by 3' and having 2 of the COP-1 Borg Cubes on the field randomly assimilating / shooting nearby ships at the end of the turn.

Or you have some battle for Deep Space 9. Or you make a Dominion War game. The story opportunities for themed Star Trek games seem much stronger.

X-Wing on the other hand. Even the epic games with the Huge Ships are still very much, blow other people up. Also, the only other 'themed' game you seem to see is the 'Trench Run.'

Well I am guessing that you guys are not using the new suggested OP format. Even if that cube was his rebel fleet, just with what you have mentioned, itmcomes to 84 pts. Try switching over to the new format the borg are not push overs in it, but they are much easier to handle when they don't have the best captain along with 40 points of upgrades/resources. Or if there are enough people who are tired of it, just ban them out right. Wizkids wants TOs tomrun these events whatever way it takes to get people in and buying stuff. That is why there is a place for house rules in the event system and there are no "official" OP rules just suggested. Talk to your TO and group, if you guys don't like it change it

The main reason why I play STAW is because I have a fairly regular casual gaming group that plays it at my FLGS. And up until recently, that group consisted of me and another person. And I must admit, I haven't even seen all of TNG yet; I'm watching them as they come out on Blu-ray (I did see all of the original series on Blu-ray though).

I agree, X-Wing is a better game overall but the main thing that STAW has over it is the use of scenarios. If it wasn't for those, I probably would get bored pretty quickly.

Good points about the scenarios! Or, actually Missions. They add a lot to the game, if you can find people that want to play them.

@Mr. S. Baldrick, no, we are not using the "suggested tournament format", and I doubt, thanks to all the Borg players in my Meta, that we ever will. It's hard to give up your easy win button, know what I mean?

This isn't a STAW vs. Game X thread (no pun intended). It was more an attempt to reconcile my current feelings towards the game in general.

@ Tamwulf

Just play conditional surrender or weyoun varel, those destroy borg so hard its not funny, and there are quite a few builds out there that will drive off your borg players, because it'll be hard for them to win anything when they cant attack you for the entirety of a game

Vakruz wrote:
@ Tamwulf

Just play conditional surrender or weyoun varel, those destroy borg so hard its not funny, and there are quite a few builds out there that will drive off your borg players, because it'll be hard for them to win anything when they cant attack you for the entirety of a game

Not gonna get into that, because I tried that and still lost. If you don't think there is a way around the Conditional Surrender and Weyoun/Veral, you're wrong.

While the Borg are a very large problem in STAW, I listed 8 other "issues" with STAW. A couple of them are within player control (#1, #7 and #8), the others are all up to Wizkids to fix.

I like the list of what it has going for it, with the inclusion of scenarios.

Honestly, my group plays for casual competitive fun. We all have made some gentleman's agreements and it really helps balance the game out.

1) Faction pure. All of the ships in the fleet we play are of the same faction unless the ships don't have a fully fleshed-out faction (Species 8472, Bajoran, etc.)

2) Always play a scenario. We just found out that the "brawl in the stars" wasn't as fun. Since every ship comes with a scenario, and it's not hard to make up your own, we have almost limitless choices.

3) No one plays borg unless it's a scenario. Then it's a 3 vs 1 game with three different factions trying to stop the borg (equal points per side). Those games are awesome. The borg are really scary, but much better off without super-picard flying the ship).

Honestly, the problems that you list is why I avoid OP events. But hey, our group has an awesome time and loves playing. Some of us even repaint our ships!

 kungfujon wrote:
Honestly, the problems that you list is why I avoid OP events. But hey, our group has an awesome time and loves playing. Some of us even repaint our ships!

^^ This.

I don't even bother with OP events because I have a strong feeling that I'll be absolutely disgusted with the game and drop it immediately. Actually, reading up on STAW on various forums gets me all disgusted until I remember that the people I play with are not WAAC players and they are actually fun to play with.

Play faction pure, it fixes 99% of the issues I see complained about online. Never had a massively one sided game while playing this way.

We always allow one independent ship per fleet so that they get some play time.

Could the models be better - emperor yes they could, but I've seen some fantastic repaints, and it's star trek, there are loads of other models you could use to play with. Heck if I got around to making / painting them could have an epic game in 1:1400 feds vs Klingons from my collection.

THE BORG, so much rage against them. I get that their 360 attacks are powerful but in faction pure there totally beatable, in fact in four OP event encounters I've never lost to them, and I'll admit I'm only an average player.

Outside of OP events this game is awesome, play for fun, learn to enjoy it.

I'll go out on a limb and say there's something about competitive Trek that brings out the worst in people. Trek.ccg was notorious. Just now , we're lucky. We have a very good TO and a friendly meta.

@ tamereth I like you, you seem pretty level headed. But I have found I enjoy this game so much more playing faction pure, it really does bring out alot more to the game

Wizkids has blown their own games up since they started - though I didn't get into MageKnight, I got caught up in Mechwarrior (where Swordsworn creamed all the other factions and artillery & armor piercing broke the game) and Pirates (where Sack Captains ruled the seas).

I've learned to be very wary of Wizkids; they'll jump at a chance to suck away your money regardless what it does to the game and it's pay-to-win prize support. About a year down the road, there'll be a v2.0 of Attack Wing and it will invalidate all your old stuff and it'll drive off all the experienced players and kill the game. I've seen it with all of their previous games and I don't expect STAW will be any different. Heck, look how quick they dumped the clix version of ST just to jump on the attack wing bandwagon.

-Tamwolf

Is there a reason your TO doesn't want to change to the new OP format? Or do the players not like it? I though you guys had an issue in the past with a Voyagernaught coming out of no where and wrecking the local meta. The new OP rules would curb that a lot.

It sounds like you're in a meta that emphasizes the game's flaws. My sympathies.

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:
-Tamwolf

Is there a reason your TO doesn't want to change to the new OP format? Or do the players not like it? I though you guys had an issue in the past with a Voyagernaught coming out of no where and wrecking the local meta. The new OP rules would curb that a lot.

Oh, yes that is true. The counter was for a few players to start playing Borg. Once they started winning, a couple others started playing Borg. Now, it's all about the Borg. The guy that currently runs the OP's loves the Borg. The other half of us that don't play Borg, well, we're expected to suck it up and learn to play, switch to Borg, or quit whining about it. Pretty cut throat meta, eh?

Ah well. It is what it is. I can't believe that I'm the only one experiencing this, or that my meta is the only one having these issues. Talked to a couple other guys in my meta that quit playing, sold all their stuff, and moved on to other games. I'm pretty sure I'll be following them soon.