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Number
[04] four |
Aefvadh! I've been seeing a lot of requests for dilemma combos.
So today, instead of a card review, let's have a little change of pace
with
DILEMMA STRATEGY, PART 1
Dilemmas can be classified into a few major types by their effects.
- Killers. May kill one, several, or all personnel; randomly, by
opponent's choice, or by your choice.
- Skill removers. Include dilemmas that directly drain skills, as well
as those that stop, disable, take captive, or otherwise prevent the use
of personnel without killing them (e.g., Love Interests).
- "Wall" dilemmas. Require some combination of skills and/or attributes
to get past.
- Ship damage and destruction.
- Point suckers. They drain your points and/or add to your opponent's
score.
- Miscellaneous. May delay mission attempts, cause you to lose cards,
or have other nuisance effects.
Most dilemmas are relatively ineffective if used alone, or without regard to
effective combinations. Some have little effect if faced by large, highly-skilled
Away Teams; the effects of others can be minimized by redshirting with
expendable personnel. Since the main purpose of dilemmas is to prevent
or delay your opponent from completing his missions, you need to combine
dilemmas in such a way that either approach carries risks.
One common strategy is to place killer and skill remover dilemmas first,
followed by wall dilemmas. (When I refer to placement order for dilemmas,
I am always referring to the order in which they will be encountered.
So "place first" means seed last.) One example would be Female's Love
Interest followed by Matriarchal Society; remove one female, hoping
there will not be two left to get past the Matriarchal Society. Unfortunately,
if your opponent did not have any females in the Away Team, the Female's
Love Interest card is completely wasted.
This strategy has other problems. Many of the killers and skill removers
are not very selective. Armus - Skin of Evil will always kill one personnel
(barring a well-manned Genetronic Replicator), but if that personnel
was a common, universal, expendable redshirt, and the personnel with
the skills to complete the mission are back on the ship waiting until
it's safe to beam down, you haven't accomplished much. And dilemmas
that kill a whole Away Team or a significant portion of it are more
or less wasted if encountered by a 1- or 2-person team.
A corollary to this strategy says that you should not place a
wall dilemma at a mission with similar requirements. Don't place Impassable
Door, for example, which requires Computer Skill to pass, at Sensitive
Search, which requires Computer Skill + CUNNING
greater than 28, because your opponent will be certain to have Computer
Skill present in order to do the mission. True, but will he want to
risk that Computer Skill against killer dilemmas, or will he try to
keep him safe on the ship? If you require him to bring in his Computer
Skill in order to get past the Impassable Door, you may be able to eliminate
him before completing the mission.
So...use the reverse strategy. Simply place a wall dilemma first, to
ensure a minimum of 2 or 3 personnel present, preferably valuable ones,
to be killed or disabled by one or more followup dilemmas.
For example, place Matriarchal Society first, and Female's Love Interest
second. If the initial Away Team does not include two females, you have
stalled your opponent for a while; just how long depends on how many
females are in his deck. Once he gets past Matriarchal Society, he loses
one female. Guaranteed. (With the remotely possible exception that this
is the *only* planet mission on the spaceline.) For a finely-tuned Federation
deck with a minimum of highly-skilled bridge crew for personnel, the
loss of Beverly Crusher or Picard, or one of the Tasha Yars, can be
a perfect setup for a final killer requiring MEDICAL
+ SECURITY, like Barclay's Protomorphosis Disease
or Microvirus. Against Klingons, you may take out a critical MEDICAL
(Vekma or Kahlest) or Kurak with her important Astrophysics. And against
Romulans, you may get the even more critical Major Rakal (the Rommies'
best bet for Empathy and Tal Shiar), Sela (Diplomacy), or Taris (MEDICAL).
Follow up with any killers requiring MEDICAL or
Empathy to overcome.
There are lots of Planet wall dilemmas to choose from for your setup.
Malfunctioning Door, Hidden Entrance, Hologram Ruse, and Alien Parasites
are all virtually certain to get 4 or more personnel into place for
the killers. Alien Labyrinth, Impassable Door, Matriarchal Society,
Security Precautions, Portal Guard, Wind Dancer, and Zaldan may net
you only one or two, but they're likely to be a higher quality one or
two than your average redshirt team. What's that--you didn't know Alien
Parasites was a wall dilemma? Look again. No "discard dilemma." If the
Away Team has the Integrity, it also has a minimum of 4 personnel; if
it doesn't, you get to play around with the team, and then the dilemma
still doesn't go away.
For Space-only wall dilemmas we have only one, both rare and relatively
weak: Ancient Computer. But it is still likely to get some of your opponent's
better personnel into position for the killers. In addition, you have
a few Planet/Space dilemmas to choose from: Outpost Raid (if not at
an outpost), Android Nightmares, Empathic Echo, and Thought Fire, all
relatively weak as wall dilemmas, and my personal favorite, Shaka, When
the Walls Fell.
My next review will look more closely at Shaka, and the best ways to
follow it up, including relative effectiveness against the three affiliations.
Jolan tru,
Major Rakal
Tal Shiar
By: Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal (majorrakal@decipher.com)
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