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| How you look after getting beat by a Pike List- Oh the Embarrassment! |
Continuing on with our look at the cards that come out of the USS Constitution Expansion, I'm going to look at Christopher Pike, and why he's not so hot. Hint: Multiple Crew Upgrades are usually not that great.
Christopher Pike works as follows:
Christopher Pike (Federation/USS Enterprise Expansion) 
Captain Skill: 6
All of your (Crew) Upgrades cost -1 Squadron Point.
Cost: 4
Elite Talent Upgrades: 1
Captain Skill: 6
All of your (Crew) Upgrades cost -1 Squadron Point.
Cost: 4
Elite Talent Upgrades: 1
Okay,
a relatively straight forward captain skill. Every Crew Upgrade costs
one less point than it normally would. The TOS Enterprise has 4 crew
slots- the Enterprise D, Galaxy Class and the Khazara have 3 slots. The
rest either have 2 or 1. If you pack 4 crew onto the TOS Enterprise,
you're going to get a savings of 4 points. Pike pays for himself on TOS
Enterprise. His best ability is that when you run him to his max
savings, he costs nothing.
So, Federation wise, because you want to build him
towards maximum savings, the cheapest you can make Captain Pike and his
entourage is 10 pts. Go and take a look- that's as cheap as it gets. You
now have 4 crew members.
Why wouldn't you want to max out on your crew
upgrades, or any other upgrades for that matter? The answer involves an
examination of Utility over Efficiency. There's a difference between
building for Utility and building for Efficiency. An Efficient build is
one that uses every point of the list every turn, given good piloting.
An example of this is a 100 pt Klingon Attack Build- you can build this
list so that it exploits every single possible upgrade, every single
turn. If you can use 100% of your list points, and your opponent on any
given turn can only use 75% of her list points on any given turn, you're
essentially playing a 100pt list against a 75 pt list- guess which one
is more likely to win?
On the other hand, a utility build seeks to account
for every possible scenario in any given game- sure you're probably only
going to get a 75% usefulness every turn, but your build will have
taken into account the given turn's variables, and will have an answer-
This turn, you can Sulu against incoming fire, next turn, you can
Tactical Officer to get maximum damage, the turn afterwards you can fly
away and use Miles O'Brien to boost your shields back up.
A utility build is must harder to fly than an
Efficiency build. It's harder to fly because you are forced to make more
decisions per turn, in order to utilize your upgrades effectively. A
Klingon Attack Build just needs to make sure that Martok can give an
extra action to Gowron so that Gowron can keep his cloak and his ability
up. The Utility build has to decide if it wants to use or save Uhura,
if this turn is the turn you drop the Corbomite Maneuver, if this is the
turn that you reenable Worf.
Cautious players flock to the utility build. I
encourage everyone to start with an efficiency build and work in
elements of utility into their list as they find cracks. Your first few
builds should be efficient so that you can learn the simple mechanics of
the game, and not get bogged down in decision making. It's a good way
to learn the game.
So, back to Pike. Pike is a captain for the Utility
Player. Typically, the savings that you'll see will not be worth the
utility you've purchased- utility hits the action wall pretty quickly-
and unless you're buying passive abilities, which either include bonuses
to standard actions (which means that some of your passive abilities
will not be in play depending upon the action that you take) or discard
abilities (one time use abilities better be pretty good and relevant to
your build).
Unless you're building an amazing list, one that is
going to take Utility to the next level, I'd stay away from Pike. The
point savings are minimal, and there are only a handful of crew upgrades
that can really give you the synergy you need to pull it off. You're
only going to be getting one action, and Pike does nothing for you
except give you the ability to take yet another upgrade- something you
won't need after you have 4 crew members.
If you have an amazing Pike build, let me know. I'd love to be educated on this topic!
I think Pike is waiting for just the right ship and crew-member combo. If you can, as you say, load up with passive abilities and get them at a discount, you're ahead of the game. At this point I just don't think the right combination exists...unless you simply want to use him to save yourself the faction penalty when recruiting out-of-faction. But in that case, why not just use Khan?
ReplyDeleteI also don't think that the crew upgrades are good enough to justify Pike at this point.
ReplyDeletePike flies with the Excelsior crew cards quite well - they're already cheap and making them even cheaper doesn't hurt. Throwing away a 1-point Rand to do Engage or Counter Attack as a free action is a bargain, as is disabling Lujor when he only cost you 1.
ReplyDeleteHe's also a cost-efficient card, which helps save some points for expensive crew (or photons) throughout the fleet. He may not be first-rate like Picard, but he's certainly better at what he does than the very similar Thot Gor. Discounting crew (who can generally be useful in combination with one another) is better than discounting weapons (where the only real combo is Energy Dissipator + Photons - still too expensive even at -2 points).