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(Look for) the Bare Necessities
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Biggs and Truthi breakdown the most basic concepts of Star Trek: Into the Unknown, focusing on the phases of the game and how to read ship and officer cards.
Transcript
Introduction and Hosts
Star Trek Game Basics
00:00:38
Biggs
Hello and welcome back to the Unknown Podcast. I'm your emergency medical hologram Biggs,
Game Phases and Card Anatomy
00:00:45
Biggs
and joining me once again is Captain Truthiness.
00:00:50
Christopher Fritz
Hey, Biggs, how you doing?
00:00:52
Biggs
I'm doing okay, doing okay. What are we talking about today?
00:00:56
Christopher Fritz
Okay, so we got a, well, we first off, let's play off our clip that'll show off exactly what we're doing. We are,
00:01:14
Biggs
But what does that mean?
00:01:14
Christopher Fritz
so we're talking So we're talking the absolute
Game Testing Insights
00:01:18
Christopher Fritz
bare bones of Star Trek into the own unknown tonight. So we're going to concentrate on three things to just kind of help your foundational understanding of the game. First, we're going to talk about the phases of the game. um Then we're going to talk about basically what I like to call the anatomy of cards. um So the biggest one will be ships.
00:01:39
Christopher Fritz
And this kind of hurts that we're a podcast here because we can't really do the visuals to go along with it. But ah we'll talk through the the ship cards and then we'll also talk through the officer cards as those are kind of the the fundamental building blocks of the game.
00:01:53
Christopher Fritz
um
00:01:53
Biggs
if you're If you're not one of our truck driving fans, pull out the internet, pull up the cards and follow along as we go.
00:02:03
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, and I'll do my best to to to kind of narrate how I'm doing it and say, all right, we're going to go start here and go clockwise. Yay. um And we're also going to do this kind of almost like a Q and&A.
00:02:11
Biggs
Yay.
00:02:15
Christopher Fritz
I've
Priority Phase Explained
00:02:17
Christopher Fritz
been fortunate enough to be involved in some of the testing for some of the the one of the coming waves. um And Biggs is coming at this a little fresher than I am. So I'm going to be doing a lot of the talking.
00:02:26
Biggs
i played he I played the demo back in like May.
00:02:30
Christopher Fritz
You did. Yeah, and you totally have played since, right?
00:02:35
Biggs
um never maybe
00:02:38
Christopher Fritz
yes So we're going to approach this is I'm going to be doing a lot of the talking. Biggs is going to ask a lot of clarifying questions um so that we can kind of keep this on pace and on agenda and try and help you get the most amount of information we can. All right, you ready to dive in?
00:02:53
Biggs
Ready and waiting.
00:02:56
Christopher Fritz
OK, so the basic level of the game has ah five phases. So the ah first phase is kind of the biggest and most important one. That's the priority phase. That's where the bulk of the game happens. And if you've ever played any alternate activation games, this is an alternating activation game.
00:03:16
Christopher Fritz
um the The difference here is that there's no bidding system for who takes the first first action or the first priority action of a turn. um That changes
Priority vs Standby Phases
00:03:29
Christopher Fritz
every turn. So first you start the game, roll off with three of the blue dice, whoever gets the most results gets priority for the first turn. And then on the second turn, priority flips against the other player and flips back and forth.
00:03:42
Christopher Fritz
as such. So you're going to actually, if you've, again, run the alternate activation games, you're pretty much, if you want to, you are pretty well guaranteed to get kind of a last first and it's going to alternate between players. Does that make sense?
00:03:57
Biggs
Makes sense to me. And from what I remember, that works in turn with the standby phase. So you're not getting the last first at like the end of the round into the next round. It's actually more of a last first between the phases.
00:04:17
Christopher Fritz
Well, no, it's actually between rounds, actually, is what I was talking about. But you actually bring up an excellent point when we get to the priority and standby phase. So before we get into that, though, what's let's talk through the priority phase. Um, so this is going to be a common problem, uh, for you getting spun up on into the unknown is understanding the symbology. So the, one of the big symbols you got to start to learn is this little, I'm going to call it waggy finger in the diamond. And that is the priority order. Basically it's, I think it's supposed to reflect pointing at somebody and telling them to do something.
00:04:51
Biggs
Make it sell.
00:04:52
Christopher Fritz
Make it so, there we go. That's the that's the Star Trek line, absolutely. um So everything in this game is based off of, or I'm sorry, everything in the priority phase is based off of officer actions. So what you do is you choose a unit
Standby Phase Details
00:05:06
Christopher Fritz
and that and by unit, the game means pick an officer. um they have to be The card has to be readied. And what you do is you just flip the card and do an action at a station on a ship.
00:05:20
Christopher Fritz
or in the case of teams, which we'll get to way down the road, you basically order the team to do something or order the ship to do something. um You commit the officer, flip it over, resolve the action, and you alternate back and forth like this. And the phase ends ah when no player ah has any readied officer or has passed. So you can, as soon as you are have done as many priority orders as you feel like you should do for a turn, you just pass,
00:05:49
Christopher Fritz
and your opponent just kind of goes until they're done. um So there are some limits when you...
00:05:53
Biggs
and you And you don't necessarily want to have all of your officers do something in a given turn because then they won't all refresh for the next turn.
00:05:54
Christopher Fritz
Go ahead.
00:06:04
Christopher Fritz
Right. Yep, and that's when we get into the ready phase. So that's um that's one of the last ones. but um So once you're done in the priority phase and everybody's passed or there's just for whatever reason, you've you've spent everything and there's no more to do, you move into the standby phase. um So this has kind of two steps within it. And the first is a ship activation. So um you now get to do A, action with ah with each of your ships. um So this is,
00:06:40
Christopher Fritz
symbolized on ship cards and other parts of the game as kind of ah like a hand up stop inside the diamond. So again, learning the symbology. You got any good ones for to help you remember that one? I don't really.
00:06:56
Biggs
symbolism to quote ah to quote an old movie.
00:07:03
Christopher Fritz
The key difference here is that a lot of actions cost some form of energy or skill um to do. ah So priority phases, the officers can basically use their skills to i basically save some energy. So say an action call you know you have a good If you have an action that requires some good command value, you have a good command officer, you're not going to be required to spend much ship energy to do that action. Standby phase is paid exclusively through ship energy, so it can be more expensive to wait for the standby phase.
00:07:42
Christopher Fritz
but It's also like it's once, you know, pretty much most things are not moving a whole lot once you get to the standby phase. So if you've maneuver yourself into a good position and you are just ready to unload with a weapon system or something, standby shooting can be really effective because targets are just not going to go anywhere.
Hazard Resolution and Energy Management
00:08:02
Biggs
Or alternatively, sometimes you just really need to move a second time.
00:08:08
Christopher Fritz
Exactly. Because there's only one action in the entire game that you can't do multiple times in a turn. and that's shooting. So if you find yourself in a very disadvantageous position and you're you're ready to, you know you know, somebody's bearing down on you, ready to unload, spend that energy, warp out impulse power or whatever you gotta do, get out of that bad spot or with a standby action.
00:08:32
Christopher Fritz
So once each ship is given a standby order, or they can pass on that as well, same idea, then you can move projectiles. So torpedoes and any other projectiles that are on the the table, I'm sure they're going to come of out with more. There's probes as well. This is when they move. um They must be given a standby action.
00:08:54
Christopher Fritz
as part of this phase. And if that's all part of their ship card or their card, we'll get to those at one point. But needless to say, these are the two biggest phases of the game. There's priority where your officers are doing actions and standby when your ships are doing their single action. Make sense?
00:09:12
Biggs
Makes sense to me, but I know that from from running the demos, this was one of the hardest bits to wrap the head around. It's like, no, yeah get you get one more. You get one more go, but none of your officers are doing it.
00:09:33
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, and that's because once you get in the flow of the priority phase, just learning to understand the distinction between the priority and standby can be a little bit little bit jarring at first, I think, because the game overall does an excellent job making you feel like you're commanding a crew. um So the standby action is a little odd.
00:09:52
Biggs
Mm hmm. Think of think of standby as. um Think of standby as like your commander telling the crew to do something.
00:10:06
Christopher Fritz
I feel like it's almost like a rerun.
00:10:06
Biggs
But none of the or like maybe the crew is doing it instinctually.
00:10:12
Christopher Fritz
Actually, that's probably an even better way to go. I was gonna say maybe it's like an emergency action, but no, I think you're i think he hit right on the money there with the crew because your officers are just single persons. There's a dial on the ship that signifies the health of the crew. So I think that's actually an excellent way to put it is the standby phase is the crew taking you know their they' you know routine actions.
00:10:35
Christopher Fritz
Okay, so the next one after that is the hazard phase. This can go pretty quick. um If there's any hazard effects on the board, that's when you resolve them. um So like you go in order, you resolve the effects from damage cards. So um if your ship is damaged to a certain point, you you know resolve those. Then you resolve anything from anomalies, and then you resolve any kind of hat hazards from mission special rules. And there's quite a few mission special rules. so It can take some time, but usually the hazard phase is pretty quick.
00:11:06
Christopher Fritz
um
00:11:06
Biggs
So in other words, read your scenario and read your cards to know if you're even doing
Dynamic Scenarios and Replayability
00:11:16
Biggs
anything in the hazard phase.
00:11:18
Christopher Fritz
And there's because of how the flow of the game works with the complications, and again, we're trying to keep this pretty simple, and we'll get into the anatomy of a scenario and complications, there's going to be a point where basically middle of the game everything changes and it is going to be completely understandable for both of you to just be like, okay, now what do we do? um And that's going to probably slow you down a bit for your first few games. However, I will tell you, you know, once you really starting into the flow of it,
00:11:47
Christopher Fritz
It makes the game so wonderfully replayable that not every game is going to be the same.
Ready Phase and Strategic Planning
00:11:55
Christopher Fritz
Like, you know, I love Star Wars Armada, but man, I can only play, you know, contested outpost so many freaking times. And no, i'll I'm I could play it in my sleep. You know, just I know exactly how I need to deploy exactly how I need to play it. um One of the wonderful parts about it is the unknown is the scenario is going to change on the fly and you're going to have to adapt.
00:12:19
Biggs
All right, well, let's move on to the ready phase. Tell me about that.
00:12:23
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, so this is a very important part. It's also going to go pretty quickly. So first thing, you're going to remove any peril to any peril tokens um by you can spend advantage tokens ah to basically remove peril tokens. um And then the biggest thing ready officers so you only get to ready three that means if you have three period in the entire in the entirety yes three period so you uh very very canned and well played japigs a plus acting um
00:12:48
Biggs
three per ship? Oh no.
00:13:03
Christopher Fritz
ah So you get to ready three officers. There are some mechanisms on ships to ready more officers by spending energy. um But the core of it, you only get to so ready three officers. So you that's why you need to start thinking about how you're going to ration your officers to do the things that you need them to do on the right turns. There are going to be turns where you want to spend a ton of officers and that's kind of a big crux of the game is when's the right time to commit your maximum effort.
00:13:36
Biggs
So, you know, one one game might be the Jordy LaForge episode and you're refreshing him every single turn and doing something with him every single turn. And one game the next game it might be Jordy pops in at the last minute to save the day and otherwise doesn't do anything for the rest of the game.
00:13:59
Christopher Fritz
i god I never thought of it that way, but that is absolutely perfect way to describe it. And it it's kind of just gets back to just how great they've done the theme in this, in this game. It's like, it feels like a Trek episode
Hails Phase and Strategy
00:14:10
Christopher Fritz
and you're absolutely right.
00:14:11
Christopher Fritz
Like sometimes I can feel like, hey, it's Worf's turn to be the star of the episode. So he's going to go gangbusters and Jordy's just in the back. Like, yeah, he's definitely doing things in engineering, but he doesn't need to be on the screen.
00:14:24
Biggs
what What is he doing? Yeah, that's fine.
00:14:26
Christopher Fritz
It's fine. Everything's fine. We'll get him when you need him. Okay, um next part of the the ready phase is relocating officers. So you have different parts of your ship that you need to allocate crew. You can't just you know ready ah or you can't just commit an officer at a station where they're were they just, you know, aren't. So every every single ah ship has four sections. um So one is the bridge. This is where the majority of stations are. So you have tactical instruments, helm, and cabin chair again, we'll get into this. um You also have a med bay, a cargo bay. Don't sleep on the cargo bay.
00:15:07
Christopher Fritz
Trust me on this one. We'll get to it eventually, but don't sleep on the cargo bay um and engineering. So to take an action at those stations within those sections, you have to be in that section. So you can't just, you know, a one turn, you're just sitting up in the instruments and then, oh, hey, I need somebody down in the cargo bay right now. um Nope, sorry. You got to wait until the ready phase to get them down into the cargo bay.
00:15:32
Christopher Fritz
um So yeah, just this is a more important thing than you would expect.
00:15:36
Biggs
ooh
00:15:39
Biggs
Sounds important, and we'll go over what those sections do pretty soon, but let's move on to the hails phase.
00:15:49
Christopher Fritz
Oh, hold on. Before that, you do final thing in the ready phases. You literally just do anything that says ready.
00:15:55
Biggs
Ah right.
00:15:55
Christopher Fritz
So there's a bunch there's a bunch of car parts on there. like For example, we'll get to the engineering section. It says ready gain energy equal to your crew energy value and the highest ah engineering officer.
00:16:08
Christopher Fritz
Again, we'll have to explain more of that later. um But that's the final part of the ready.
00:16:12
Biggs
energy is important
00:16:14
Christopher Fritz
Energy is probably the single most important thing. But again, we'll get there. um So then the hail phase, and we we're going to dedicate probably at least a good chunk of an episode just to this phase, um because hails hails are not terribly intuitive, um but they get really important.
00:16:30
Biggs
it's
00:16:35
Christopher Fritz
ah in as you go down the game. They can let you do a lot of really cool things. um The Dominion really loves to just, they have their taunt more or less that basically lets them say, ah, you know what? We're down, we're gonna hail you and we're just gonna open fire.
00:16:51
Christopher Fritz
And priority is actually a really big part of the hail phase, believe it or not. But yeah, that's that's for another episode. like yeah Hails are a very complicated thing. If you don't use them in your first few games, don't feel bad about it. It's not a big deal. um Going through the learning missions, you're probably not even gonna, I don't think the learning missions even have hails in them, to do they?
00:17:11
Biggs
ah the um If I'm remembering correctly, when they the initial learning mission in the preview kit did not. And then when they and then when they released the second like print and play, it did include hails. But again, it was very complicated. and um na I don't know how
Priority Player Change
00:17:40
Biggs
many people actually bothered to print it out and go back to their FLGS and pick up the preview kit and play another demo game.
00:17:52
Biggs
So let's just assume nobody knows anything about hails because I sure as heck don't.
00:17:58
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, it's this little odd token bidding system that favors the person with priority um by and large. um And you can do a lot of really important things, like some of the objectives include hails, um some of the some of the mission,
00:18:14
Christopher Fritz
oh my God, I'm blanking on what they're called now. um be thee The, oh geez.
00:18:18
Biggs
The twists.
00:18:19
Christopher Fritz
No, I'm talking about the the directives, sorry.
00:18:22
Biggs
Okay.
00:18:22
Christopher Fritz
ah The directives, diplomacy in particular tends to trigger off of your, manage and trigger off of hails. um But again, that is something I think we need a whole episode on, at least you know to talk about it and get you through.
00:18:35
Biggs
And don't worry, we'll get to it.
00:18:37
Christopher Fritz
We absolutely will get to it. I think that's like episode six or something we have planned. um So don't be afraid of it. It really isn't as complicated as it looks, but don't also don't worry about it too much right off the gate.
00:18:49
Christopher Fritz
So that is all of our fates.
00:18:52
Biggs
Okay, so that brings...
00:18:58
Christopher Fritz
You know, I couldn't help it. We just gotta keep using this. Sorry, so where are we on to next?
00:19:07
Biggs
ah Looks like we're going to talk about how the priority player changes.
Ship Card Elements
00:19:15
Christopher Fritz
Oh yeah, that's just simple, ah flip it.
00:19:18
Biggs
right at the Right at the end of the hill phase.
00:19:20
Christopher Fritz
Yep, just flip it.
00:19:20
Biggs
Boom. New priority player.
00:19:22
Christopher Fritz
Yep, new priority player. Boom, done.
00:19:24
Biggs
And start over again. From the top.
00:19:25
Christopher Fritz
That's why I forgot about it. Yeah, okay. All right, so now we're done the papers.
00:19:29
Biggs
Okay. Truthiness. From the top.
00:19:32
Christopher Fritz
Oh.
00:19:42
Christopher Fritz
And this is where we lost our first viewer.
00:19:42
Biggs
It gets funnier every time.
00:19:47
Biggs
yeah Okay, so that brings us to learning about the ship cards, because we can't we can't do priority actions, we can't do standby actions. um Heck, we can't even do the resolve ready abilities if we don't know what the heck the ship card is all about. So.
00:20:05
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, so it's um I'm actually going to ad hoc this because I realize I've got the plan here a little out of order, so sorry for screwing with you, Bakes. um So ah we are going to first talk about the two dials um because they are packing a ton, ton of information into these three, these, these you know,
00:20:14
Biggs
No worries.
00:20:31
Christopher Fritz
eight little sections that are on either side of the card or the ship card. um So I'm going to start on the right side with the right dial. It has a nice little blue energy bolt, a red arrow forward, a orange, that's I think a torpedo.
00:20:48
Christopher Fritz
um a green instrument thing and then a purple ah shield icon around what is like an enterprise class ship. So this is the alert dial. This is basically certain set certain values for your ship based on the alert status for the ship. And you're always going to start any mission on a a green alert. um That is the lowest level of readiness. um It generally has um
00:21:18
Christopher Fritz
hey We'll get to that in a second, but this is the alert dial. um so We'll start with what these values are first. um so Starting on the that little blue energy our electric bolt icon and moving to the right from there, ah that is your recharge value. um and That comes into big-time play with your engineering and energy overall. um Again, energy is possibly the most important resource for all of your ships. um That little that little i dial at the very top of the card, that is your reserve energy dial. um And if that gets down to zero, you're going to have a bad day. everything in this game is based or Most of the combat in this game, movement, everything is often based on that value right there. You'll see little blue lightning bolts, um kind of the darker blue, all over this ship card.
00:22:15
Christopher Fritz
That is the what you have to spend to do those things. So warp. Hey look, um we'll we use the de defined as an example and I'll keep referring back to the defiant ship card just because that's what I have up.
00:22:28
Christopher Fritz
and easiest to to go over. um That dark blue energy icon is all over this card. You need an energy to to take damage on shields. That's not on the card. That's just in the basic rules. um You need to spend an energy to refresh an officer in the cargo bay. You need energy to fire weapons, and you need to spend eight energy to for every single weapon you fire.
00:22:53
Christopher Fritz
ah It's a lot. It is the most important thing. And that recharge rate is how much you're going to get back at the end of any return. So that recharge value, you want to be you you want to try and keep that high.
00:23:07
Christopher Fritz
Next one over from that is the impulse power. this So this is the speed um at which you can travel at impulse um and then the ah and then the turn radius. um My brother absolutely, positively hates this symbol. Do you have any idea why, Binks?
00:23:28
Biggs
ah It is very small and hard to read.
00:23:33
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My brother is is farsighted and he basically Just but man, he had to put this thing right up.
00:23:42
Biggs
Like i i am I'm looking at it right now and I'm having a hard time seeing being able to see the difference between the two and the three
00:23:56
Christopher Fritz
Yep, I believe
Ship Movement and Energy
00:23:57
Christopher Fritz
it.
00:23:57
Biggs
ah when I am not even fully extended with my arm.
00:24:02
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, so the big number at the the top of the symbol, like um let's take the the first screen alert for the Defiant, the big 10 there, that's the impulse speed. So that's the number of inches you get to move. And then you have the little three with the arrow inside the red circle. um That's the number of turns off of center you can make.
00:24:24
Christopher Fritz
um either direction. So ah like for example, you go on green alert, the defined is really maneuverable and pretty quick on green alerts. um As you start to get into the yellow alerts, it starts to slow down and can't maneuver as much. um And red alert, same thing. It starts to become less fast and less maneuverable um as it shifts more energy to other parts of it.
00:24:44
Christopher Fritz
um
00:24:44
Biggs
Hey, Captain Truthiness, I'm an Armada player, so I want to set it to a specific click. So I can only do like no clicks, one clicks, two clicks, and three clicks, right?
00:24:58
Christopher Fritz
but That's about the sum of it. Yeah. You also don't have to use them all at once either. So when you're moving a ship, you can do one click to the left, move it a few inches, put the the tool back in on the other side and turn it in the opposite direction. It's a kind of wiggle around things. This is a much more free-form movement game than if you're coming from Star Wars or Mada since the two of us came from that community.
00:25:23
Christopher Fritz
This is a much more freeform movement system than the very constricting movement state of that game.
00:25:29
Biggs
But wait, but wait, can we like, go halfway in between the, ah like if I don't want to do a full click, let's say, can I go like halfway between the 0 and the 1?
00:25:42
Christopher Fritz
in I think, yes, if I'm remembering correctly, this is just the maximum amount you can do. I can't remember that one off top of my head.
00:25:52
Biggs
the i I was there was a leading question. I'm pretty sure you can.
00:25:56
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, yeah, I thought so, too. Hey, what we're going to say it's been a little bit. um And then you also don't have to move that full value. So if you've got a movement of 10, you don't have to move at all. You can move an inch, whatever.
00:26:08
Christopher Fritz
There's no minimums.
00:26:10
Biggs
And you can even you can even come about where you just kind of spin in place.
00:26:13
Christopher Fritz
Yep. Yep, yep, and there's some lateral movements as well. So really all this impulse power thing is doing is telling you how many turns you can do or how much turning you can do and the the speeds you can go at.
00:26:25
Christopher Fritz
You got any other questions there, Biggs?
00:26:27
Biggs
and No, no, I've, I've been, ah I've asked my Weasley questions already.
00:26:28
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, I appreciate your leading questions.
00:26:34
Christopher Fritz
All right, so the next one over there from from there is the weapons power. So you're going to see this mostly in the tactical station on the Defiant or on any shipguard, not just the Defiant. So this is kind of like bonus energy. um So whereas a lot of other stations require just from reserve energy, the reserve energy dial,
00:26:55
Christopher Fritz
um Weapons get to have kind of a free value based on the the the weapons power you have available at your alert value. And again, you're going to see a similar trend to um like some of the other ah things like shields and recharge.
00:27:13
Christopher Fritz
you don't get a lot of it on green alert. Like you get zero on the first green alert and one on the second for the defiant. And then as you're starting to get the yellow and red alert, you get three and four and five ah weapons power. And you know you get to roll. And basically how it works is you get to roll more dice, the more energy you spend. So if you've got a lot of available weapons power, you're gonna get to roll a lot more dice. It's pretty much that simple.
00:27:38
Biggs
Very cool.
00:27:39
Christopher Fritz
Yeah. So, and then the next one is instrument power. um And it's been a hot minute since I've had to use this too much. but This mainly comes in with sensors, comms, so that's like hails, objectives.
00:27:53
Christopher Fritz
um It's not the most important stat, um but it can be quite helpful from time to time.
00:27:59
Biggs
And it depends on how far... So looking at looking at the ship cards from the the preview kit, it looks like you start with some sensors all surrounding your ship.
00:28:17
Christopher Fritz
And then you have some bonuses to certain directions.
00:28:17
Biggs
But there's but then you have yeah and then you have the bonuses to certain directions that start out like further defined. It starts out from a frontal cone at four inches plus whatever your sensor ah whatever your sensor's score is.
00:28:34
Biggs
So ah the higher that number is, the farther you can reach.
00:28:35
Christopher Fritz
You got it. You got it.
00:28:41
Christopher Fritz
Okay so then we have yeah and that's and this kind of goes reverse of weapons power where you have more instrument power on the lower alert so if you you know need to do some scanning generally you're going to want to be you know you'll get it a little better off at you know lower alerts um i the defiance is kind of the biggest one um constellation class actually is pretty good at science-y stuff. It's just kind of one of those lovely support ships. um It's not the most important stat, but it it matters when it matters.
00:29:13
Christopher Fritz
So the final one we have is are the shields, which I think is probably one of the more intuitive symbols on in this game. I think everyone who has done any kind of Star Trek has seen that shield symbol in some kind of media, be it movies or TV shows or games or whatever. I look at that and I say, yep, that shields.
00:29:34
Biggs
Heck, it looks like the shield symbol from the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series.
00:29:35
Christopher Fritz
yeah
00:29:42
Christopher Fritz
Shoot, it looks like the shield.
00:29:42
Biggs
like
00:29:43
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, that's that true. But
Hull Functions and Survival Stats
00:29:45
Christopher Fritz
I think I recognize that one from like, yeah.
00:29:45
Biggs
hey like Anybody can look at that and go, oh yeah, those are shields.
00:29:49
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, yeah. So shields, how they work in this game are a little odd.
00:29:54
Biggs
Counterintuitive.
00:29:56
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, it's it's they're a little different than you would think. they just um So what shields allow you to do is spend up to the shield value in energy to cancel incoming damage. So the shields themselves don't necessarily help you all the time. In fact, sometimes if you are um if you're low on energy and you're um Our alert dial is high enough. You can find yourself without energy real fast because but it's also not optional. You don't get to just you know say, oh, no, I'm just not going to spin my shields. No, you got shot at. Your shields are going to work.
00:30:38
Christopher Fritz
Sorry, the energy's gone. um So i've I've had more than one occasion where you know I've i ah have had my ship opened up on, and I was counting on that reserve energy to let me move off in the standby phase, and I find myself suddenly not able to do so.
00:30:55
Christopher Fritz
um So that said, you also can take a lot of damage real fast if you're caught with your pants down and your shield's low.
00:30:56
Biggs
Oh no!
00:31:05
Christopher Fritz
ah Because man, I think I was playing ah Paul Tomoshevsky at the demo at Adapticon and he just kept his defiant on, you know, green alerts doing objective stuff. And my Gemadar Fighter just pulls up behind him and just goes to town. I think I knocked like... I think I knocked it down to like one or two hull and just one attack pass because he had basically no shields up.
00:31:29
Biggs
Oh, right.
00:31:32
Christopher Fritz
So... um Alright, so that's that dial. And actually, before I get over to the other L I promised to talk about, I should probably talk about that hull dial that's in the dead middle of the shit of the um the ship card.
00:31:44
Christopher Fritz
um yeah so This kind of works in a step function. um So if you do a bunch of damage, you actually don't go past a step. So say you do four damage to a fully healthy Defiant, and you have four damage through the shields, you don't actually reduce the dial all the way down to two.
00:32:04
Christopher Fritz
you actually stop it in the defiance case at the four. So when that dial changes from that white kind of symbol to a yellow kind of a little more cracked symbol, that's the step. um And then there's various symbols along here as well. um um Oh man, I'm suddenly blanking on what the little what the little, uh, one of these little symbols is, um, it's the little, uh, God, almost like target lock symbol there.
00:32:34
Biggs
the crosshair The crosshair is that you have to draw a critical damage card.
00:32:35
Christopher Fritz
Yeah.
00:32:40
Christopher Fritz
What's the skull then?
00:32:41
Biggs
And the skull is you lose crew.
00:32:44
Christopher Fritz
right okay thank you thank you that's what i was blanking on all right cool yeah so yeah first that first target lock type symbol is the the face up card um so if you get to that part of your uh of your your hall dial congratulations you're drawing one of the critical cards the critical pools are pretty small um There's an additional way to get criticals. I'll get to that in a second as well. um And then as Bigs thankfully got me back on track here, um the skull dial affects your crew dial, which we'll get to in in a little bit. um So you go step by step. So you go six down to four for the defiant and then four down to two.
00:33:24
Christopher Fritz
and then two down to zero. And there's actually two zero dials for any ship. There's disabled, so the ship stays on the board. It just can't really do much of anything. And then there's just straight up blowed up. um And different there are some victory conditions where you know you want to disable, some that want to destroy. um you can And if you get a repair crew on a ship, you could theoretically get a ship up from disabled and start repairing some hull. It's not.
00:33:54
Christopher Fritz
particularly easy, but it is feasible. So there really is incentive for you know either ah disabling or destroying a ship. Make sense?
00:34:02
Biggs
Makes sense to me.
00:34:04
Christopher Fritz
OK, I'm going to move to the left of that thing and talk about these little symbols in the dead center. um So you have ah you have three very important stats here.
00:34:15
Christopher Fritz
So first on the left there is the evasion stat. um This is ah how much damage you have to do to the ship to get it to stick. You're actually going to find most things in this game are actually only Evasion 1. Like the stat like is non-existent and irrelevant for the bulk of ships out there. However, the Defiant and the Gymadar Fighter are both Evasion 2. So in order to do any damage to the Defiant, you have to do at least two damage. If you only do one, they don't even care. It just misses. Just straight up.
00:34:50
Christopher Fritz
um And there'll be more things coming with different evasion stats right now. The Defiant and the Gemmarara Fighter are the only things that this stat really matters on. um So if you forget what it is when using some of the other ships, completely understandable.
00:35:03
Biggs
So where's my where's my defense dice, my defense tokens?
00:35:07
Christopher Fritz
Nope, you don't get those.
00:35:09
Biggs
You just have to sit there and take it.
00:35:11
Christopher Fritz
Sit there and take it. That's what the shields are for. but so So the second one here is the Resilience stat. ah This is how many damage you need to take to your hull or how much damage you need to take to take a critical. um And it's not just damage. you actually have to have um There are critical icons on the attack dice, and you have to score that many of the critical results to force a card. Those icons can be used as damage or towards criticals, not both.
00:35:42
Christopher Fritz
um So the Defiant, as you can see, is an extremely resilient ship. You're not going to critical the Defiant, barring an act of God outside of its hull dial.
00:35:56
Christopher Fritz
Resilience for rolling four criticals when most attack pulls are about four till maybe a little more with some officer stuff.
00:36:07
Christopher Fritz
um It's just...
00:36:09
Biggs
at that point you don't even At that point, you're probably not even going to want to use them for a cart.
00:36:11
Christopher Fritz
What's the point? Just do four damage for damage. Just do four damage instead.
00:36:14
Biggs
and
00:36:15
Christopher Fritz
Just don't worry about the critical. And then the final thing there is your warp value. So this is you know differentiated from your impulse. Warp moves are just straight. Straight line, it's double this number in inches.
00:36:29
Christopher Fritz
So the defiant would move 18 inches in a straight up to
Crew Status and Ship Effectiveness
00:36:33
Christopher Fritz
18 inches in a straight line when at warp.
00:36:37
Biggs
And that's the only way to...
00:36:37
Christopher Fritz
Make sense?
00:36:39
Biggs
Warp is the only way to leave systems and go into systems.
00:36:41
Christopher Fritz
Yes, which we'll get into another in another episode. OK, so moving all the way to the left to the promised crew status dial. um So there are three stats here. um The red one is Command. The yellowish one, goldish, gold. Gold's probably the better term for it. ah That is Ops. And then blue is Science. ah So this is basically reflecting the health of your crew.
00:37:08
Christopher Fritz
um And this can actually not just go down, but it can actually go up. There are parts of the the game that can help you inspire your crew. So Picard, in particular, is excellent at this. um it basically allows If your crew is inspired, it gets to increase its value.
00:37:25
Christopher Fritz
beyond the starting value. um Now, that the other catch here is that, um but and when we talk about inspiring, it'll make a bit more sense, but if your crew is reduced, um inspiring does something different.
00:37:40
Christopher Fritz
um So basically, you have to get back up to that full crew value before you can start getting inspired above it. um But there are also other ways
00:37:47
Biggs
The full crew value being represented by the star.
00:37:51
Christopher Fritz
Yes, and there's actions that let you heal the crew. um And yeah, you really don't want to get down to um to low crew because that's another way to get yourself disabled. And it is perfectly feasible to beam teams onto ships and just start raiding the crew and take over the ship that way rather than actually shooting it. I call it the pirate party bus, but that's another episode.
00:38:18
Christopher Fritz
um so This is a very, very important dial um because it allows you to do various different tests. so There are a lot of tests and actions. ah We'll use the Defiant here as an example for like evasive maneuvers. You are testing against your your ops value plus navigation of any officer associated with the action to remove a sensor lock from the ship.
00:38:42
Christopher Fritz
um So that means, you know, basically you have to you get to roll as many dice as you have ops value. So say we're at the starting value that are dying and you want to do evasive maneuvers. You pick up four blue dice, roll them, and you have to equal or beat a two, ah two positive results.
00:39:00
Christopher Fritz
in order to be successful at that test. And that is all over the game. um It'll tell you you need to test your command value, your oscillate, or your science value. And how that works with the test is you get that number of dice equal to what's on your crew dial. So the Defiant starts with three command, four ops, two science. And that's how many dice it would get to roll against those kind of tests.
00:39:23
Christopher Fritz
Makes sense so far?
00:39:23
Biggs
All right, makes sense so far.
00:39:23
Christopher Fritz
I keep saying that.
00:39:25
Biggs
um One thing that I would note is that um navigation and ops might not always go together when you see a when you see a test.
00:39:35
Christopher Fritz
and
00:39:39
Biggs
You might have a test that wants you to roll tactical and navigation or ops and something else.
00:39:39
Christopher Fritz
Yeah.
00:39:46
Christopher Fritz
yeah
00:39:49
Christopher Fritz
Yeah.
00:39:49
Biggs
um
00:39:49
Christopher Fritz
And those are those are all officer keywords, which we'll get to next. that's our That's our final thing for this episode is going through the anatomy of an officer card.
00:39:55
Biggs
So pay attention to what it's actually asking you to do because the the the crew and the officers don't necessarily correspond to the things that they
00:40:05
Christopher Fritz
Yeah.
00:40:16
Biggs
That you've seen them correspond to in the past everything's everything's new and different Every episode is different
00:40:26
Christopher Fritz
Okay, so
Ship Stations and Strategic Roles
00:40:27
Christopher Fritz
we've talked about reserve energy. We've talked about the alert dial, the crew status, um the center stats, the hull dial. Now let's actually talk about the stations. So first we'll talk about the bridge. it has It is the nervous system of any ship and it has four stations no matter what the ship. And that's actually a consistent thing across the game. Every single ship has the same stations. So first is the captain's chair. um And there are a few common things that you will always see in the captain's chair. One is call alert.
00:40:59
Christopher Fritz
And one is go to warp. Warp will cost different things for different ships. um Call alert, I think I've seen be the exact same thing um no matter what. So call alert as a standby action is simply there's no cost. You adjust your alert by one. This is actually probably my favorite thing to do with standby actions because it costs absolutely nothing to do. You just change your dial. You go up, you go down, by one. That's it. If you do it as a priority action,
00:41:27
Christopher Fritz
you get to do it up to two levels. So if you say you start at um and level two green for the Defiant um with a standby action, you can go to yellow Earth. With a priority action, you can go all the way up to red alert one. um And keep in mind the Defiant has two red alerts.
00:41:44
Biggs
ah Does adjusting the dial by one mean that you go from any green to any yellow or any yellow to any red, or does it have to be specifically spinning one notch?
00:41:55
Christopher Fritz
No, it is, it is, it is sequential. So it is the next step on the dial. So if you're a green alert one, you can go to green, green alert two. And that's how you have to scroll. That's how you have to go through the alert dial.
00:42:10
Christopher Fritz
All right, and then the helm, again, has some common things. You're always gonna find your impulse power um ability here. And again, that's variable, but if you wanna move, this is the station that does it. So stand by action. How these little symbols work is basically you can either pay them with an officer and we'll get into what all these various little, you know the phaser symbol and the tricorder symbol mean, because these are part of officer cards.
00:42:37
Christopher Fritz
um So you can either commit an officer to do a priority action at that station by simply flipping the card over. And if they had the requisite skills, it doesn't cost any energy. If you do as a standby action,
00:42:50
Christopher Fritz
Take the define as an example. It requires, um let me make sure I remembering the names of these correctly. um It is a security and a technical ability.
00:43:02
Christopher Fritz
um If the officer has that, you would pay just that and you're done. Otherwise, you're paying two energy, one for each um symbol there ah to to do it. That make sense?
00:43:14
Biggs
Makes sense to me.
00:43:16
Christopher Fritz
Okay, cool. um
00:43:17
Biggs
So so to be clear, um any officer could sit in the helm and do impulse as a priority action, or even no officer doing it as a standby action.
00:43:30
Christopher Fritz
Yes.
00:43:33
Christopher Fritz
Yes. And I think I should note.
00:43:34
Biggs
But if you're gonna commit somebody, you probably wanna commit someone who's going to be able to do it without costing that extra energy.
00:43:43
Christopher Fritz
Right. And that's something i I forgot to mention is that if an officer has, say, only one of the requisite skills to do it, you can then spend an energy to make up for that second one. so you Or if you're really desperate, you can commit an officer who has no business being at the helm and you would still spend two energy. The difference being that you get to do it in the priority phase as opposed to the standby phase.
00:44:07
Biggs
right.
00:44:07
Christopher Fritz
All right, and then so next up, going going clockwise from the helm, we have instruments. So we're kind of in the lower right of the card at this point. um This is kind of a pretty much a nothing station by and large. It just tells you how to do um you know what's your what your and your sensors values are. But there's always a sensor lockability here.
00:44:31
Christopher Fritz
um so This is pretty much one of the few ways to get re-rolls in the game. um Personally, I don't generally tend to find I use this action a whole lot. um It's kind of a nice thing for when, say, um there's two levels to to Hostilities. So you have Aggressive Axe and Hostile Axe.
00:44:53
Christopher Fritz
So a sensor lock is an aggressive act. It's kind of just before things start shooting, like teams can skirmish a little bit um and capture things. Hostile acts are just the straight up, you're shooting big guns at each other. um So sensor locks, if you're already at the point of you know aggressive ah directives,
00:45:15
Christopher Fritz
you can kind of use the sensor lock to start hedging your bets. Because officers are so valuable, I don't find myself doing this action too often. um But there are other people who very much swear by it in testing. um So every ship is going to have kind of that sensor lockability at this instrument stage.
00:45:33
Biggs
And they're ah there are a lot of actions that are objective-based, scenario-based that will use the instrument panel to do those actions with sensors or with comms.
00:45:43
Christopher Fritz
Mm-hmm.
00:45:47
Christopher Fritz
Yes, that's true. Yeah, yeah that's true. um yeah Objectives very much will be tailored around this specific station, and and a lot of them in general will be tailored to a specific station, be it engineering, be it instruments. um Sometimes I think I've seen Helm, I've definitely seen Captain's Chair. um And then sometimes they just don't specify a station and you know you just got a guy that you want to shove at a station, instruments is open, let's do it.
00:46:14
Christopher Fritz
yeah All right, and then moving to the left ah from that is the all-important tactical station. This is where things go boom-boom.
00:46:21
Biggs
Everyone's favorite station.
00:46:23
Christopher Fritz
Everybody's favorite station, things go boom-boom. um So there's a lot to break down here, and the Defiant is probably one of the more complicated ones to to talk about.
Med Bay and Cargo Bay Importance
00:46:32
Christopher Fritz
um so this you get to perform, when it says one or more attacks, what it means by that is use one or more of these weapons. um And the card tells you how many weapons there are all over the ship. And the Defiant, as befits Star Trek's, or Starfleet's only real escort in this game right now, it is loaded to the teeth. um So you have phaser meters, one to the front, one to the rear,
00:47:03
Christopher Fritz
and one that can shoot her all around the ship. So you take a fire action, or fire weapons action, you then perform as much energy as you want to dump into any of these weapons. um So you can fire a phaser out the front, phaser out the rear, and one phaser in any direction if you want to just dump that much energy into phasers.
00:47:24
Christopher Fritz
It gives you the range here, um how many shots you can take are ah with a with that ah little firing the weapons energy symbol. um And for every energy you spend, you roll one die. So you can basically, with each phaser emitter, roll up to three blue dies.
00:47:43
Christopher Fritz
We're going to get a little ourselves here, but it's fairly important to note. um This interacts with the ordinance trait on officers, and it's very unique in the way it interacts. You add a black dye for each of those, um each ordinance skill for an officer.
00:48:00
Christopher Fritz
So say somebody had ordinance two, you would roll
00:48:01
Biggs
Thank you.
00:48:04
Christopher Fritz
For one attack, you would roll three blue, say it's the phasers, you roll three blue and two black for the two organs. You only get to do this for one attack during the action, but it's a really good way to massively pump up the damage um on a given attack.
00:48:23
Biggs
Fire your torpedo tubes after you use your ordnance attack.
00:48:31
Christopher Fritz
So yeah, sorry, you the ordinance does not work with the torpedoes at all. um The torpedoes, because they impact at a different time in that in the standby phase, you've you've already gotten past the priority action. um So you don't get to add the black dice from the the ordinance ah the officer's ordinance value to a torpedo action. um The good news is that torpedoes can hit really hard um if you aim them well.
00:48:58
Christopher Fritz
um and they cost very low amounts of energy. So if you just want to dump a lot of torpedoes into something that you find stationary, um it's it's an excellent way to dump a lot of damage without a whole lot of energy spent.
00:49:13
Biggs
and All right, moving to the left.
00:49:14
Christopher Fritz
Okay. Yeah, so now we're into the medical care. um Every ship has got this, I think, at the minimum. um And this is where you can help increase your crew dial. So you can basically do this as a priority action. You can even do this as a standby action. And it actually doesn't cost you anything um for the ship, energy-wise at least. And what you're doing is you're testing your science value um plus biology, which is again another skill keyword for officers. um And you can heal personnel. What heal means is you can
00:49:55
Christopher Fritz
Basically, you officer has multiple um ah health ah health, like say he has two health, you give him a health back. It is much better used on the crew dial, however. So if you're below that starting value, medical care can help you bring that that value back up to the starting value and kind of start getting inspiring into the game.
00:50:16
Christopher Fritz
And it's it's ah defiant, for example. It's not an easy test to pass. You only get to roll two dice um before any kind of officer modifiers. And you got to get successes on both of those two blue dice. And the blue dice are a little fickle.
00:50:34
Christopher Fritz
So that's really kind of the long shore of the med bay. There's not a whole lot going on here. It is kind of nice for standby value and getting your stuff back up there. um But and that's pretty much it. There's another fun one. I think it's with the Gemhar battleship, if I remember correctly. Yeah. Oh, I'll get to that at some point. that's The med bay has one of my favorite abilities of all time for the Gemhar battle cruiser.
00:50:58
Biggs
Mmm, can't wait.
00:51:00
Christopher Fritz
Catch yourself, white baby. Got to get that white powder.
00:51:05
Christopher Fritz
Okay, um and then finally into the cargo bay, seemingly the most innocuous useless compartment on any ship. Trust me when I say this this station, but believe it or not, can be the difference between you being completely and totally overrun by a boarding party and you surviving a boarding action. Do not sleep on the cargo bay.
00:51:33
Biggs
Okay.
00:51:34
Christopher Fritz
OK, so there's two things here that every ship can do. One, it's form a team. And we'll we'll have to do another episode on this um later on down the road. But teams are a very integral part of the game that I kind of i think Veers in the Armada community, he equated the use of teams almost to like the use of squadrons in Armada. It's not something that you will recognize the power of until it slaps you in the face real hard. um So teams are very vital. um how you you know And you can do it as either a ready action or a priority action. So you can always ready a team, whenever or organize a team
00:52:18
Christopher Fritz
in any turn. It doesn't even cost you a standby action. It just happens in the ready phase if you want it to. um To do it, you have to lower your crew dial. So there is this weird interaction where you actually um can heal your crew from forming a team. But it's just one of the, we we even joked about this with Rick Gurns a little bit. like this is a little weird like yeah I know there's really no way around it but just you know it's fine it works move on but this is if the reason I talk about the cargo base to being so important is the only way to repel borders in the form of a team is with your own teams so if you let
00:53:01
Christopher Fritz
a enemy team into your cargo bay, you are completely and totally screwed because you cannot form your own team now because they have overtaken that compartment. Congratulations. Nobody is going to have a good time there.
00:53:18
Biggs
oh no.
00:53:19
Christopher Fritz
Yeah. So the cargo bay also gives you another way to ready an officer in addition to the base three for the for just the game mechanics. It's going to cost you an energy, um but it's not going to cost you an action. So it's a nice um it's a nice thing to do when
Engineering and Strategic Gameplay
00:53:35
Christopher Fritz
you you know it's the end phase. um you're starting to um you're You're getting into the ready phase. You get to relocate officers. And then you get to ready that officer immediately.
00:53:46
Christopher Fritz
You're probably going to one then, you know, move him next turn and get them into a right position. But it's not bad, you know, somebody that you don't need right away that just did an important action for you, move them to the cargo bay, spend that one energy, get them ready. And then the next turn, you can kind of get them back into place. So you'll lose them for about a turn, but you'll get them back beyond what's normal ah for the refresh.
00:54:11
Biggs
Okay.
00:54:12
Christopher Fritz
All right, and then finally, the all-important engineering station. And this is, once again, got two actions that are common to every single ship in the game. um So one, the all-important energy recharge in the ready phase. You get to recharge the amount of energy ah on your reserve dial equal to that recharge rate in your alert dial plus the highest technical skill value that is at that station. um So it is perfectly acceptable to take a highly technical ah officer and just sit them in the cargo bay and never do an action because it will keep your ship going.
00:54:58
Christopher Fritz
it is it is
00:55:00
Biggs
Geordi LaForge not appearing in this episode.
00:55:03
Christopher Fritz
Yes, Jordy LaForge is in engineering, doing his job, don't need to see him on screen to know that he is incredibly important. That's what this is. ah it's You can, especially on some of the bigger ships that are kind of the center point of your fleet, like I don't think I'd ever fly an Enterprise or a Galaxy class without somebody in engineering. I think the Defiance can get away with it um just because of speed and just the amount they can get out of some of the other parts Like they can kind of stay on Yolera and be okay, especially since their weapons value or weapons energy is so high, but like some of the you important.
00:55:41
Biggs
and And you can very efficiently do the impulse action or the warp action.
00:55:46
Christopher Fritz
Yeah. Yeah. And again, shields depend on energy. You stay alive by having a good engineer and engineering. Um, and then the other action is transport.
00:55:59
Christopher Fritz
um So this is this can only be done on green and and yellow alert, um but this is a you get to do this as a standby action. You can't do it as a priority action, but you probably don't need to waste the officer on this unless you absolutely got to get a team there, ah because this actually doesn't cost you any energy. You just simply transport personnel within center's range.
00:56:21
Christopher Fritz
Yay, you get to move people around. um And this is very important when it comes to objectives. This is how you you know you want to start doing some boarding fun. This is how you do it.
00:56:32
Christopher Fritz
um So very important station. ah Not that all of them aren't important in their own ways, well, except for you instruments, not you. I love you, you, you, not you, you.
00:56:46
Christopher Fritz
Sorry, I went full meme there. All right, anything else?
00:56:49
Biggs
what are What are we if not memes?
00:56:49
Christopher Fritz
but Yeah, right. Any other parts of the ship card you want to talk about?
00:56:54
Biggs
ah Yeah, what's that little ah what's that little green thing on the um on the ship dial that we didn't talk about that turns later on into a yellow thing?
00:57:12
Christopher Fritz
in thing that turns later
00:57:13
Biggs
it's ah you know If you're on green alert, it's it's it's a green thing.
00:57:18
Christopher Fritz
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, who's talking about?
00:57:18
Biggs
And then if you spin it up to like yellow alert, it turns to an orange thing.
00:57:21
Christopher Fritz
So, yeah, so that is your ordinance style. So what that does is tells you what kind of ordinance you can launch. um So if you are on green alert, for example, if you, yeah um you're not, you're launching probes.
00:57:38
Christopher Fritz
um If you are on yellow alert, when it turns to like orange, it tells you the kind of ordinance you can launch. um It tells you you can launch torpedoes. So that's basically what that is, is you've ah you've gone from probes to torpedoes. um So you gotta be at least on yellow alert to launch torpedoes.
00:57:55
Biggs
and Okay, that answers that question.
00:57:57
Christopher Fritz
There you go.
00:57:58
Biggs
I think we can i think we can move on to something else.
00:58:01
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, cause let's see, we've gone through the four part of the ship and we've definitely gone and gone through the...
00:58:13
Christopher Fritz
Okay, we're good. Like you said, what are we if we're not memes?
00:58:18
Biggs
Exactly.
00:58:19
Christopher Fritz
Okay, and then we're gonna finish up tonight talking about the anatomy of an officer card. um So very important to understand, ah oh dear God, what just happened there?
00:58:32
Biggs
ah Was that noise being
Officer Card Details and Gameplay
00:58:34
Christopher Fritz
Oh yes, so much noise.
00:58:34
Biggs
made by me?
00:58:35
Biggs
up Sorry, i i am i'm pulling I'm pulling stuff out of the preview kit so that I can look at them.
00:58:36
Christopher Fritz
I'm not cutting this. yeah
00:58:42
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, there you go. Get it out, get it out now.
00:58:46
Biggs
Looking at the looking at my officer cards.
00:58:48
Christopher Fritz
Excellent. All right, so you've got two sides to this. The giant block of tech side is known as the readied side. This is you the side that shows that your officer is ready and raring to go. So the first thing you're going to see, obviously, is the name. um And the little pip indicates that they're unique. If you've gone from a model, you're recognizing this.
00:59:11
Christopher Fritz
um The upper right-hand corner is their health value. And then moving down into the text, like you I'm looking at Ben Sisko, for example, you have a little like little person kind of it symbol ah inside, what is that, a laptop?
00:59:25
Christopher Fritz
I don't know. um This is the ah the social thing. um So Sisko, for example,
00:59:30
Biggs
A guy on the views screen.
00:59:31
Christopher Fritz
Exactly. um So like culture two, diplomacy one, discipline two, mysticism one. Like these things, they're literally all it really does is if there's an action that mentions these, what you get to do is if this officer is leading it, you get to add the black dice of that value to that test. So say you're testing discipline um with Ben Sisko. You would take whatever the crew value is of that test,
01:00:00
Christopher Fritz
So let's say it's a command test, um and it's on the Defiant at the starting value. You get three blue dice for the three command value from the crew style, and you get two black dice from Cisco's discipline. And there's there's tons of these keywords floating around. That's literally all they do. If you match, it works.
01:00:22
Christopher Fritz
you're Don't worry about going and trying to find, well, what does discipline do otherwise? Why does that keyword mean? It means nothing except that you get black dice if you match the test.
01:00:33
Christopher Fritz
That's simple.
01:00:35
Biggs
Okay.
01:00:36
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, and then the highest value, and we'll get to this when we get to the committed SART, the highest value ah of all of those skills equals their
01:00:48
Christopher Fritz
ah their ah their skill level for that category. so if you have um If you go back to the crew dial and you are the the ship card um and you look at, say, the Defiance Warp, you'll see Social is one of those things. so Cisco has Social too, so he could basically pay up to two Social skill points to make something happen. um and Then moving into the next one,
01:01:16
Christopher Fritz
That is your security category. um Again, same kind of thing, exactly the same. You got an ordinance value. Yeah, you get to add a black dice to an attack. He has a skirmish value. um That actually is part of team action. So he gets to add a black dice when a team he he leads a team in a security action. um And then, again, same thing. The the words mean If they match, yay. so like Say he leads the the evasive maneuvers test for the Defiant. He gets to add one black dye to the evasive maneuvers test because he has navigation. And then because the highest value for that technical skill category is one, his technical skill is one.
01:02:02
Christopher Fritz
So that it becomes a lot more clear when you flip this thing over. um But before we get down there, um let's take ah you this is where any kind of the abilities come in. so inspiring This is where you'll see some some keywords ah that actually matter. ah So inspiring is one of them.
01:02:19
Christopher Fritz
um And like we'll take Cisco's for example, it's inspiring and then it's got that command symbol it bracketed. So that means that if he leads a test that involves command and he's successful, he inspires the crew. Yay. There's lots of little things like that.
01:02:37
Christopher Fritz
And then you'll also find any kind of, like, unique flavor text ah to the character. So, like, I think Miles O'Brien has a trait that, you know, makes him interact with transport, interestingly.
01:02:50
Christopher Fritz
um Like, I think Dax gets...
01:02:53
Biggs
You've got two wolves inside you. Sorry about the transporter malfunction.
01:02:59
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, and then Dax is like able to like pull pull on old memories. i like like This block of text in the bottom half of the readied side of the card is basically the unique flavor ah for the officer.
01:03:11
Christopher Fritz
and That makes sense. This is kind of the equivalent of what you see from like unique like Armada officer or upgrade cards.
01:03:12
Biggs
Okay.
01:03:22
Biggs
okay
01:03:23
Christopher Fritz
Okay, and then flip it over to the committed side. This is the side that's full art, has that nice dashing picture of a goatee and hare Ben Sisko, which I think that's like a very few select episodes of one season, if I'm remembering correctly.
01:03:35
Biggs
thank
01:03:39
Christopher Fritz
um So again, you got the name, ah but most importantly, you have on the right there, you also have a title. um So I have a feeling we're gonna start seeing different versions of named characters.
01:03:52
Christopher Fritz
So like we have Cisco here as a, I can't remember exactly what that,
01:03:57
Biggs
reluctant to emissary
01:03:58
Christopher Fritz
Yeah, reluctant emissary. So I'm guessing that's reflecting Cisco you know as he is fairly early on in season nine. I would not be surprised if we see another version of Cisco where it's the same name and therefore you can't use multiples of Cisco, but it has a different title to differentiate him. Again, if you played Armada, this is very, very much on brand for how how Mike and Max write their games.
01:04:24
Christopher Fritz
um You also then have on the upper right, again, the same hell thing. um The little faction symbol there, um just below the name, actually I skipped the rank. um Let me go back to the rank here. So the pips right below the name indicates Um, the, uh, the rank of the officer. Um, and basically if I'm remembering this correctly, the highest ranked officer in your fleet has to be the Commodore. So, you know, there are certain officers that, you know, have like, say, I think Picard outranks Cisco. So if you have Cisco and Picard in the same crew, uh, same crew, um, Picard has to be the Commodore, for example.
01:05:07
Biggs
Okay.
01:05:08
Christopher Fritz
And then below that is the faction symbol. So you can actually have multiple factions um and you'll see this with Worf where he is both Klingon and Federation means he can be used in either fleet um without having to pay anything. um He just basically gets to to tag back and forth and That's what that is. So below that is where I was talking about with the skill levels. So this is the much more simplified version of the opposite side for the skills.
01:05:38
Christopher Fritz
And this is just this is what you honestly want to reference when you're looking at the number or the types of skills to spend for the ships. So like Cisco's got two social, one security, one technical. So like say he's in the captain's chair on the Defiant, he has the requisite skills to go to warp using social, technical, and a single point of energy. If he didn't have one or both of those Brexit skills, he would be paying energy to make up for them. um Same for the impulse action. He has um the security value and the technical value to just do impulse without spending energy. So this is kind of the easy way to reference that is on this committed side of the card. And then below that are the the role icons. And we'll get into this. This is only this only matters in fleet building.
01:06:32
Christopher Fritz
um which is a whole other episode. There are certain roles you have to fill when you are creating um your crew, and this these symbols show you what you know what he can be, um which, again, that's a whole other episode.
01:06:47
Christopher Fritz
And then finally, the bottom left there is Sway.
01:06:48
Biggs
Fair enough.
01:06:51
Christopher Fritz
This is actually something that hasn't been spelled out yet. um And I'm in testing. i we've We've actually asked them what this is, and we still don't know. um I think it's going to come out in the living rule book. I will see. um But this is supposed to be a mechanic to help you include other factions in in your fleet. So say you want to, Worf is probably another, is a good example. Like he's got Klingon sway. If you want some Klingon officers, in addition to Worf,
01:07:24
Christopher Fritz
um outside of the, ah in your Federation fleet. um
01:07:32
Biggs
I mean, who wouldn't want Goron on everything that they use forever?
01:07:34
Christopher Fritz
Yeah.
01:07:37
Christopher Fritz
Yeah. Right. Okay. And then, um then finally lower rate value.
01:07:41
Biggs
Goron, for anybody who isn't on the Discord, Goron is a major part of the Discord lore.
01:07:42
Christopher Fritz
Yeah. Go ron run. Go run. Go run.
01:07:52
Christopher Fritz
Are you mis-saying that intentionally or are we?
01:07:58
Biggs
Look, okay, look.
01:07:59
Christopher Fritz
I really do like calling him Go-Ron.
01:08:00
Biggs
again
01:08:01
Christopher Fritz
but um
01:08:04
Biggs
ah crit ah Okay, crazy eyes, Gauran, yeah, okay.
01:08:07
Christopher Fritz
yeah
01:08:08
Biggs
um Look, i I will be...
01:08:09
Christopher Fritz
No, no, no, no, he's go run now because he goes, he goes 100% all the time.
01:08:12
Biggs
yeah He's gonna go, yeah.
01:08:16
Christopher Fritz
ah And then then the final thing you need to know is point value.
01:08:16
Biggs
Never stop.
01:08:19
Christopher Fritz
So in that lower right of the committed side is the point value in officer. um If I'm remembering this correctly, you get 50 points for officers um in your crew.
01:08:30
Christopher Fritz
um So Ben Zisco ain't a cheap part of your crew. um So yeah, that is, that is an officer card. Then you know we've gone through officer cards, ship cards, easily the two most important and probably the most dense cards in the collection. um I hope we've helped make those make sense. Yenny,
01:08:50
Biggs
And that's the...
01:09:01
Biggs
Yeah, man.
01:09:02
Christopher Fritz
Oh, yeah. All right. You got any final parting words for the people bigs?
01:09:07
Biggs
ah No, hope that ah by the time you're listening to this, your copy of the game's in your hands and you're able to follow along better than we are.
01:09:19
Christopher Fritz
yeah Amen. All right. Till next time. Have a good night.