The Collective - First Contact (part 2)

On Monday night I was able to play in another Collective OP1 event at Sentry Box. I was quite surprised to see a large jump in numbers. In the past few months we've had four or maybe five attendees, but this time we had eight players. I'll take credit for one of them, other than myself. But anyway.

Independents With No Regard to Timelines (90pts)

- S'Gorn w/ Khan Sing & Invaluable Advice, Joachim, Polarized Hull Plating and Positron Beam
- Soong w/ Lore & Counter Attack, Bosus and Goval

I got another copy of the Dominion ship and built a named version with Gul Damar, First Strike and Seskal on it.

Sentry Box has always had full mixed faction fleets allowed, so there was a lot of faction mixing going on. My first match was against a Dominion attack ship, a fully loaded Breen Cruiser and the Romulan booster ship. I concentrated my fire on the Breen ship first to remove the energy dissipators from play. After that I was able to split my fire out between the other two ships. I destroyed the Dominion ship and was only one hull away from destroying the Romulan ship when time was called.

The second match was against a very odd fleet with a Species 8472 ship, a Gorn cruiser and the Klingon booster pack. I knew the Species ship was the big threat so I was intending to focus on that first. Before we were able to get into combat range it used quantum singularity to disappear off the board. With no other targets I focused fire with Khan and Gul Damar on the Klingons, while Lore attacked the Gorn to death.

When the Species ship dropped back into play it was able to hit all of my ships with an hugely mis-played Bio-Electric Interference. The card only removes all tokens except auxiliary power tokens, it doesn't ADD aux tokens as part of its use. However, after some slow manoeuvring to rid myself of the aux tokens I trapped the ship in the corner and destroyed it.

My final match was against Lewis; he and I again being the top two players. Lewis was playing a 90pt Borg cube (flagship, Alexander, Ablative Armor, Khan, Invaluable Advice, Once More Into the Breach, etc). Oh and there was a Federation booster there too.

Not expecting to survive very long I opted for the direct approach, heading in in hopes of doing as much damage as I could, as quickly as possible. I did make one sizeable mistake in the second round, forgetting to use Gul Damar's First Strike talent. I might not have made a huge difference, but I would have gotten a 3 or 4 die attack in before he died. I forgot though and he was destroyed that turn.

The event was fun, but once again getting decimated by a fully-loaded Borg ship has got me thinking. I won't get into a huge diatribe or anything, but I'm starting to question their balance. The other factions obviously seem to need to be able to mix factions in order to really get the best results. The Borg are very strong on their own, but seem to be over-the-top when you give them access to the likes of Picard, Spock and battle stations.