Borg Global Experience

posted on June 15th, 2009, 9:08 pm

I'm not sure if something is planned for the Borg and experience yet, but perhaps a global experience system could be implemented for them. Obviously they would level up at much much slower rates. Now for the levels I'm going to make rough suggestions which would obviously have to be balanced so my guesses would be 700 global XP to gain rank 2, 1500 to gain rank 3, 2500 to gain rank 4 and 4500 to gain rank 5. So to get rank2 your going to have to destroy about 9 sabres 7 monsoons and 4 intrepids. those xps don't include the ranks before them so to gain rank 5 you actually need 9200 global experience points all together.

I'd like to see this in game it fits in with the borg adapting to the situation but I am worried about the borg becoming too powerful late game.

I think this might fit in well with an alteration to the borg mixed tech system like the one Darthashur talks about here: More Ideas on Borg Mixed Tech

posted on June 15th, 2009, 11:09 pm

Hmm. The thing is there would be no way to rank down again, so it would be a major advantage whenever you ranked up.

How about a global "collective bonus" based on the number of ships you have? In the "real" star trek universe this may speed up response time and/or improve decision making within the collective.
This could be translated to the game as better weapon fire rates and improved regen.

Either those or other small incremental passive abilities. Possible based either on the number of drones you have on ships at that point in the game, or number of collective connections on each ship.

posted on June 16th, 2009, 1:18 am

Hmm. The thing is there would be no way to rank down again, so it would be a major advantage whenever you ranked up.

Make it so that the loss of a borg ship leads to a loss of borg exp, that way killing lots of enemy ships with little casualties gains you global exp, and losing lots of ships loses you exp.

posted on June 16th, 2009, 1:50 am

Make it so that the loss of a borg ship leads to a loss of borg exp, that way killing lots of enemy ships with little casualties gains you global exp, and losing lots of ships loses you exp.

That would counteract the balance issue, but it is totally illogical, as any borg knows what all borg know, so you have to kill ALL Borg, anywhere to erase their memory. I´m totally against global experience, though i´d certainly like to see some sort of adaption that doesn´t involve: have a lot of big bad ships and just blow them to hell. 

posted on June 16th, 2009, 1:58 am

Or they could have the Borg vessels go into a state where they won't attack or move, but add debris from nearby ships to build themselves up, using the scraps to repair and improve the vessel. That way you could have a rank up system for the Borg that takes into account the fact that individual crews wouldn't gain experience and have a way to rank down the Borg.

posted on June 16th, 2009, 7:34 am

Or they get Expierience by Assimilating Crew from a Upranked enemy Ship  Assimilate the know how from the other Races 

posted on June 16th, 2009, 4:32 pm

Well the way I see it is that the Borg adapt by encountering (hence killing/assimilating) other races so the more ships you destroy/assimilate the more knowledge the Borg have. Perhaps if the amount of XP required for each level were increased it would decrease the problems by the Borg retaining ranks no matter when there ships are destroyed.

I was thinking that each rank should gain you small increments to offence, defence and system but also allow you to pick one class of vessel to gain a special ability.

So now once a fed ship reaches rank 4/5 they gain an ability but the Borg would be able to pick one ship class to gain an ability (in addition to the global increase of ship offence, defence and system values) for each level they gain.

posted on June 16th, 2009, 4:54 pm

Or they get Expierience by Assimilating Crew from a Upranked enemy Ship  Assimilate the know how from the other Races 

Like the show from TNG where the deflector weapon fails because Locutus (picard) knew it would happen.  Something similar to that would be awesome.

[Phoenix]

posted on June 16th, 2009, 5:21 pm

Last edited by Phoenix on June 16th, 2009, 5:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think that collective experience is a good idea but needs to be planned carefully to achieve effective results. I think that instead of ranking up, the experience should enable the unlocking of additional expansion slots for each ship. Experience should also be race specific so in effect the Borg would have separate experience levels for each race that is encountered.

As you gain experience, new upgrades should be unlocked based on who you're predominantly fighting, allowing you to further customize new ships as well as upgrade older ships as expansion slots are unlocked.

I think that this experience should be based on achieving certain objectives and not simply by destroying a ton of ships. You should have to assimilate certain ships in an enemy fleet to gain the relevant experience. So you could assimilate a Norway and get 75 exp, or a Sovereign to gain 150 exp giving you a total of 225 Federation exp but if you assimilate further ships of these classes then you cannot gain further exp. The exception would be if the enemy had researched a new technology refit. Let's say they research "Plasma Coil", then the Norway would be worth 100 exp instead of 75. If you had already assimilated older Norways then you'd get the extra 25 and no more but if it was the first to be assimilated then you'd get the full 100.

This would make the Borg Experience system dependent on the other races in game. So in other words, you can only adapt as much as you enemy develops. This seems in keeping with Borg philosophy as they are generally attracted to races that have something to offer them and only obtain new technology based on assimilating it from others.

Of course, the most obvious counter to the above is to only build one ship class and severely limit the exp that the Borg can harvest. In which case, I'd implement a counter-technology for the Borg that allows them to vastly improve their ships against a race that chooses repetitive spams. Once the spamming stops then the Borg will have a massive bonus against the particular ship that was spammed by the enemy, rendering it practically useless for the rest of the game. However, if no spam is detected then this particular bonus will never be gained. Call it a deterrent. If you don't spam, then you won't get scolded for it.


Example:
Borg vs Federation vs Romulan vs Klingon

To set the scene, let's say the Federation and Borg have had a number of major encounters with Klingons occasionally getting involved too. In this situation, the Borg are predominantly fighting the Federation so their "Federation" experience will goes up quicker. However, since they have also encountered some Klingon ships they will have accumulated some "Klingon" experience, just not as much.

By now, the Borg will have begun to adapt. Since they are more experienced against the Federation, we could say that they've unlocked two new expansion slots and 4 new technologies that are specifically tailored to fight the Federation. They also have experience against Klingons but only enough to unlock one expansion slot and 2 Klingon specific technologies. However, the Romulans may have stayed out of the fight and let them duke it out. As a result, the Borg have little to no experience against Romulans and so have no new expansion slots and no Romulan specific counter-technology. At least not let...

posted on June 16th, 2009, 6:00 pm

That would counteract the balance issue, but it is totally illogical, as any borg knows what all borg know, so you have to kill ALL Borg, anywhere to erase their memory. I´m totally against global experience, though i´d certainly like to see some sort of adaption that doesn´t involve: have a lot of big bad ships and just blow them to hell. 

Well that depends on how you see Experience I suppose. To me it seems like experience is knowledge that crew has that's not standard, and from that perspective losing borg ships shows that the knowledge they've assimilated is becoming common, so they no longer have experience beyond that of a normal drone. It's not loss of memory/experience, its the knowledge they assimilated and were using to gain an advantage becoming common knowledge/less effective against their enemies with time, sort of like how when the borg first encountered the enterprise its shields were meaningless, then later on the crew learned to block the borg with shields, the borg didn't lose the knowledge of how to bypass shields, the enemy gained the knowledge of blocking the borg. Although thinking about it I realize that a more realistic way to represent this sort of "Enemies adapting to the borg" concept would be to have the borg have a constant slow loss of exp, and gain exp for destroying/assimilating ships so you'd have to be constantly pushing your advantage or your opponents would learn from you and adapt to you.

On the other hand, though, I like Phoenix's idea better than that one, perhaps with some slight modifications.

Here's another idea, just to brainstorm. What if the borg gained a slight +atk or +def against ships which they had previously assimilated? Maybe like a +5% for each ship of that class you've assimilated to a max of +20% (4 ships). That would give ship spammers something to worry about (you're gonna give the borg that +20% against your ships fast, but people with diverse fleets would have less to worry about, thus giving the borg a form of global exp (in the form of bonuses against specific ship classes) and encouraging fleets of multiple ship classes. Don't know how you'd implement/represent something like that though.

posted on June 16th, 2009, 10:22 pm

Maybe they could add a a special station for the borg, which once built the station starts gaining race adaption points everytime the borg encounters and kills a enemy ship of a specific race. It would have 3 levels per race and everytime it leveled up with a race all your borg stations and ships gained 8%/16% up to a maximum 25% damage absorbion from that race.

Tho I also like the idea of a unit gaining additional module slots through gaining exp.