Borg Economy

posted on December 12th, 2011, 1:57 pm

I've been watching a lot of Yandonman's recordings of FO to get a grip on strategy before I buy Armada II, I've noticed that Borg players don't produce as many ships as other species despite some of their ships being only slightly more expensive than other ships. Is there something I'm missing?

posted on December 12th, 2011, 2:01 pm

I've been watching a lot of Yandonman's recordings of FO to get a grip on strategy before I buy Armada II, I've noticed that Borg players don't produce as many ships as other species despite some of their ships being only slightly more expensive than other ships. Is there something I'm missing?

Not at all. Borg ships are very very very powerful. Their economy works in that their miners take in a lot more resources than other races', but of course the mining time is longer. They get big dumps of resources after a certain period of time from their miners. But enough to build their ships.

posted on December 12th, 2011, 2:23 pm

Collective Connections also hinders their numbers somewhat.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 5:44 am

The Borg are meant to play with fewer, more powerful ships.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 6:32 am

Actually, the guide shows the chassis costs but not the module costs, so when it's all said and done Borg ships are quite expensive.

There are two categories of Borg vessel: small and large.

Small ships like Scubes and Probes have incredibly high stats for their cost, compared to other races.  The tradeoff is that they cannot be repaired and don't get any specials until the lategame. (the power of transwarp drive is seriously underestimated)

Large ships, meaning the Sphere and bigger, have such a big chunk of hitpoints that they're very difficult to kill in a small skirmish.  They also have powerful regenerative abilities; even a full DPS sphere will recover its full hitpoints in less than 5 minutes.  This gives them a powerful "skirmish" threshold, to make up a name.

When you enter a fight and the enemy doesn't have enough firepower to match your threshold, that means you will not lose any ships this fight.  For example 15 ships might go against a sphere and kill it after 7-8 of them have died, but if only 10 ships are present they may still lose a few ships but not get the kill.  The ability to damage the enemy fleet without taking any losses is a HUGE part of Fleet Ops, not just for the Borg but for the cloaky races and even the Feds and Dominion.

Generally, Borg are balanced such that they build a few small ships to harass the enemy and gain map control quickly (Watch the Crisis vs Dragonfire games: when the borg player loses map control his spheres get sniped while building)  Once the first Sphere is out it functions as a dreadnought that cannot be killed and simply adds damage to whatever fight it joins.  Around this phase of the game, you usually see the Borg player's small-ship fleet get obliterated all at once but that's okay because the sphere takes its place.

The flip-side to this is that your first sphere is your ONLY major power that you use to both attack and defend.  You must be aware of the enemy's fleet size at all times, and not let your sphere go somewhere it can be killed.  In some cases this means retreating all the way back to your starbase which is pretty rough, which is why there are blue nebulas on Duel II.  They make it easier for Borg to retreat when they otherwise would lose everything all at once.  Purple nebulas are even stronger, which is why they're so dangerous to use when map-making.

Even though it sounds complicated, the Borg are an easy race to learn because they always have fewer ships to control than the other races.  There's less chaos to deal with.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 8:42 am

It is possible to build a mid-to-late-game fleet out of spamable small ships (transwarp, as mentioned, is a kicker), but a fleet of nothing but scubes is vulnerable to hard counters. Be sure to have something to fall back into.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 4:09 pm

The guide shows chassis costs as well as chassis + module costs.

There is only one small Borg ship (besides the Detector) and that is the Probe - all other ships are either medium sized or large.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 8:29 pm

When dealing with Borg, 'small' becomes a much more relative term. Technically, you are correct. Semantically, scubes are on the small end.

posted on December 16th, 2011, 10:23 pm

Borg ships are very very expensive, and they are not very very very powerful.

If you have high system value then you DONT have high offensive, if you have high offensive then you dont have high system value which makes regenerating harder since other races can use proxy yards repair and resume their attacks.

posted on December 2nd, 2013, 9:21 am

Hi noobs! I would like to ask how to start your economy properly when i am doing this build. i am going for a intercept dode, then regen scube for some micro tanking, then adaptor with adaptation and EM (if there are cloakers) or TORP (non cloakers) module. then i am researching nodes lvl 2... i am not sure how to set my miners. i usualy start with tritanium and then dilithium, but i was not able to balance my income, so it could happens that i dont have one of those resources, and lot of the other... any help would be great