Borg Adaption - revisted... again

posted on December 29th, 2009, 5:16 pm

Goooooood eeeeeeevening.  So, I know that we’ve all seen half a dozen of these threads at minimum within the last year, and I apologize, but I wanted to add my own take on this, although I do not know yet whether this idea is completely possible .

In the past, global experience for the Borg has been suggested as some sort of automatic thing, which permanently increases the strength of the Collective’s vessels. Likewise, other methods have suggested a button on each unit to make them receive less damage from a particular weapon.

However, we’ve all seen from the show that while the Borg may adapt the more times they encounter something, their opponents do as well – adapting to the adaptions. Likewise, it has been argued that drones do not gain experience and the Collective overall should not get stronger permanently, but the Collective still is able to focus its attention on specific units.

As a consequence, what I propose is some sort of global pool of experience: every time a Borg vessel kills another vessel (perhaps not including assimilation, as that already is a slight boon) it gets added into the Borg global experience pool until a limit is reached whereby no more “experience” is gained. In turn, there would be a button, either fixed to the main GUI, or to one of the main base structure GUIs which would allow you to use this collective experience. The experience is not “used” for anything until this button is brought into play.

Essentially, this experience would come in the form of a castable weapon, where you would select either one or several of your vessels and click “the button”. Each ship selected would gain an increase in defensive value for perhaps a matter of seconds (maybe 20-45 seconds, I don’t know) representing a not-so-permanent adaption.

Every point of experience collected would represent perhaps an increase of one point of defensive value, meaning that if you killed 20 vessels, and the experience cap was, say, 15, the ship you selected would gain +15 defense for those number of seconds. In turn, if it is possible to select more than one vessel, then each one would receive a “splitted bonus”. Thus, if you selected 3 vessels each would get +5 defense.

posted on December 29th, 2009, 5:41 pm

that does sound good, but can it be done? i like the idea of focusing the collectives processing power. its been seen in star trek where the collective focuses on important things, like in endgame where they focused on adapting to voyagers new BFG 9000

posted on December 29th, 2009, 6:44 pm

The ability to "cast" additional defense is possible, but I am not yet certain how that can be combined with a global experience pool... or whether defense "splitting is possible" 

Hehe, BFG... more like BF Armor 

EDIT: oh wait, I "forgot" about the transphasic torps *facepalm*

posted on December 29th, 2009, 6:46 pm

you edited so fast the edit line didnt appear.

posted on December 29th, 2009, 7:27 pm

You can make it like the Remore's defensive special, that sends a wave in a short range to reduce damage by a percentage.  Sort of like a C&C global power.  That kind of thing would work well for the Borg, I think. 

posted on December 29th, 2009, 8:30 pm

I realy like this idea of borg adaption, but I was thinking that the most canon thing to do would be to (in order to put an end to spam) would be to make the borg "adapt" to torpedos after being bombarded with torpedoes, then the enemy would switch to beams, the borg would adapt to beams, then to pulses, the borg would then adapt to pulses, and then back to torpedoes and the borg would have to adapt to them again. They could only adapt to one thing at a time embracing variety in ship class and avoiding spam.   

posted on December 29th, 2009, 8:34 pm

As far as I know it can't work that way Funnystuff unless you physically choose what thing you want to do by having some sort of button on every ship that changes. I don't particularly like that method either, because the Borg did adapt to torpedoes and phasers at the same time quite easily, as in Best of Both Worlds and Q Who. That would also tend to screw over factions that have more reliance on one type of projectile (not many torpedoes in the Romulan arsenal... but plenty of beams and pulses... reverse in the Federation arsenal towards pulses, and then Klingons get all 3 in mass quantities).