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The Battle Of Wolf 359 - one NPC vs 39 player ships
sophlogimo
Member Posts: 6,507 Arc User
Over the years, this or something like has been proposed many times: A battle the re-envisions the famous battle of Wolf 359, where a single Borg cube under the command of Locutus of Borg, the assimilated Captain Jean-Luc Picard, utterly destroyed 39 Starfleet ships without much damage to the Borg ship.
But how could one do such a powerful NPC, without making the entire experience too easy or too hard? Let us collect and comment concepts and ideas about that here. Simple rule: If you disagree with something, don't just bash it, but also provide a counterproposal or admit that you donÄt have a better idea.
My own take:
To stay true to the source material, the cube would have to be tanking a lot, and then take out the attackers one after the other. But against 39 player ships, this would mean to use immunities and rapid healing powers along with a realistically high amount of shield and hull hitpoints. The tanking should be set up so that combining hit points, healing, and immunities, the cube should be able to live through the time it takes it to kill all 39 player ships. How would I compute that?
So let us say it is an Elite queue, and we assume (akin to the dps of the USS Houston in HOSE) 30,000 dps per player ship. Each player ship, we will assume, has something like 50% resistance, 100,000 hull hitpoints and 20,000 shield hitpoints per facing (with, again, something like very roughly 50% resistance effectively), in addition to, say, 3,000 heal per second.
We want the mission to take 39 ships roughly 15 minutes, or 900 seconds. Let us just say the Borg Cube's heal per second will be a phenomenal 10,000 per second. All 39 player ships combined do a dps of roughly 39*30,000=1,170,000. We substract the Borg Cube's heal per second from this, so we will need the Borg Cube to be able to take a total of 1,160,000x900=1,044,000,000. Let us round this down to one billion. Both shield and hull resistances should be 50%, so actual hitpoints should probably be 250 million hull and 60 million per shield facing, with at least two copies of Tactical Team for redistribution.
On the attacking side, we want the cube to be able to destory all the 39 ships once within the 900 second mission duration, which means roughly 23 seconds per kill. Each ship can take roughly 360,000 hitpoints before it explodes, plus 23 times its heal per second (which we have assumed to be 3,000), for a total of roughly 429,000 hitpoints. Dividing this by the 23 seconds the cube should be required to do a dps of about 18,650.
Now, simply letting those two parties fly towards each other to slug it out in open space is a bit boring. In the original episode (TNG: Best Of Both Worlds, part 2), the cube's actual objective was to get to Earth, to assimilate the people there, and the Federation fleet intercepted them at Wolf 359. Obviously, in the Trek universe, there is some means of forcing ships to stay out of warp for a while, so we'll just assume that each undestroyed (deaths=0) ship can stop the cube from warping to Earth. In other words, the mission fails for the players if each and every player ship has been destroyed once, and they succeed if they destroy the cube. The cube AI would then have to track which ships it has destroyed already, and largely ignore them (say, being destroyed gives that ship a big fat negative Threat modifier) until it wins.
So far about my take on this. How would you implement a queue for that battle?
But how could one do such a powerful NPC, without making the entire experience too easy or too hard? Let us collect and comment concepts and ideas about that here. Simple rule: If you disagree with something, don't just bash it, but also provide a counterproposal or admit that you donÄt have a better idea.
My own take:
To stay true to the source material, the cube would have to be tanking a lot, and then take out the attackers one after the other. But against 39 player ships, this would mean to use immunities and rapid healing powers along with a realistically high amount of shield and hull hitpoints. The tanking should be set up so that combining hit points, healing, and immunities, the cube should be able to live through the time it takes it to kill all 39 player ships. How would I compute that?
So let us say it is an Elite queue, and we assume (akin to the dps of the USS Houston in HOSE) 30,000 dps per player ship. Each player ship, we will assume, has something like 50% resistance, 100,000 hull hitpoints and 20,000 shield hitpoints per facing (with, again, something like very roughly 50% resistance effectively), in addition to, say, 3,000 heal per second.
We want the mission to take 39 ships roughly 15 minutes, or 900 seconds. Let us just say the Borg Cube's heal per second will be a phenomenal 10,000 per second. All 39 player ships combined do a dps of roughly 39*30,000=1,170,000. We substract the Borg Cube's heal per second from this, so we will need the Borg Cube to be able to take a total of 1,160,000x900=1,044,000,000. Let us round this down to one billion. Both shield and hull resistances should be 50%, so actual hitpoints should probably be 250 million hull and 60 million per shield facing, with at least two copies of Tactical Team for redistribution.
On the attacking side, we want the cube to be able to destory all the 39 ships once within the 900 second mission duration, which means roughly 23 seconds per kill. Each ship can take roughly 360,000 hitpoints before it explodes, plus 23 times its heal per second (which we have assumed to be 3,000), for a total of roughly 429,000 hitpoints. Dividing this by the 23 seconds the cube should be required to do a dps of about 18,650.
Now, simply letting those two parties fly towards each other to slug it out in open space is a bit boring. In the original episode (TNG: Best Of Both Worlds, part 2), the cube's actual objective was to get to Earth, to assimilate the people there, and the Federation fleet intercepted them at Wolf 359. Obviously, in the Trek universe, there is some means of forcing ships to stay out of warp for a while, so we'll just assume that each undestroyed (deaths=0) ship can stop the cube from warping to Earth. In other words, the mission fails for the players if each and every player ship has been destroyed once, and they succeed if they destroy the cube. The cube AI would then have to track which ships it has destroyed already, and largely ignore them (say, being destroyed gives that ship a big fat negative Threat modifier) until it wins.
So far about my take on this. How would you implement a queue for that battle?
Remember, STO is nothing but a cosmetics game, where only the rule of cool matters. The game mechanics are intentionally out of balance, don't try to "optimize" anything, as it would just frustrate you.
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Also Picard, as a senior starfleet captain had helped to draft the book on fleet tactics, so he'd know exactly how the fleet would react.
However, it would be nice to fight a truly overwhelming foe at least once. As to who that foe would be is another question, mainly cos I see a reenactment of wolf 359 as the kobayashi maru test for the really arrogant idiots
Where OUR actions (not some cheap bloody scripting gimmick) determines whether
1) we win
2) we lose horribly
3) we fight them to a standstill
4) some desperate heroics buys enough time for some of us to run away
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
the borg cube has an electromagnetic field that made is impossible to beam through outside the shield, inside it was easier to beam into the cube, the cube had tractor beams and shield drainers along with cutting beams. the only reason starfleet lost 39 ships is because they had no answer to the borg shield disruption technology, tractor beams and cutting beams. hasty strategy or under-performing ships would not of made one bit of difference.
borg also had really strong weapons, that included missiles, beams and torpedoes and magnetometric guided charges should their sensors become useless.
they have transwarp drives to get around their foes if they tried to escape at warp and simply use their disruptors to drain the shields and pull the vessel out of warp.
the cubes defenses include force fields, a subspace field and the ability to regenerate massive damage pretty quickly, upto 70% of the vessel could be destroyed and could be fully repaired fairly quickly.
so what players should be expecting is a lot of tractor beams, disruption devices taking out shields in a few hits, warp drive dampening to keep players from trying to leave the area, cutting beams to destroy vessels if they are held by a tractor beam, beams and torpedoes also in use. in addition borg should beam on to ships to disable systems and assimilate the crew.
players should not be able to deal with the borg in weapons or shields, adapation to both is key to at least delay the inevitable as the battle of 359 is meant to be a loss, a true no win scenario. it also means perma death to the event, the one who survives longest in combat earns the best prize.
the cube you will face will have to be at least 3x larger than the cubes already in the game, it must have effects that will challenge the players and their ships all the time. the idea is a show of hopelessness, that you can not win, but try to do your best.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
My main bugbear with STO's Space Borg conflicts is they completely lack that ability to adapt. Now, Cryptic and a few other people, including myself, will also point out that ships built since have auto-frequency-rotation built into their energy weapons on the ships to counter that. Evidence is really based on conflicts that Voyager had during their return journey where they were very effective in combatting the Borg.
Op's proposal is a good one, but the shine will quickly fade if the Borg aren't given a fighting chance in space, because it'll be just like all other Borg space battles where they are limp and feeble! There should be no way in hell a single ship can takeout an entire Borg armada!!
It would kinda be like Crystalline Entity, except you can't win.
The current PVEs are a little on the easy side, we need a decent challenge so teams need to have a balance of sci,tac and engineering and have those elements work together to succeed
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
My character Tsin'xing
Why would you want to re-create this?
This 'battle' was more of a one sided slaughter where Federation Ships were hopelessly destroyed with no real hope of victory. That's something you want to re-create as a STF or mission?
If so, it won't be hard to do. You just need one Borg Cube that's completely invincible and give it beam arrays that are capable of one shotting player ships. The mission starts, the cube activates BFAW and everyone dies.
That would be a pretty accurate re-creation if that's what you're after.
That's a lot like what Birth of the Federation did. If you didn't win on the first round, you didn't win.
But I think your question is valid. Why would we want to do this? In my case it would be to have an interesting challenge. Unlike the Naka'cola Alert which I found to be more annoying than anything,
--
Here's another way it could be done. Instead of a straight up fight, you're trying to buy time for Mars' shipyards to evacuate and for Earth (or the Enterprise?) to prepare their final defenses. The more players you have attacking the cube, the longer it takes to reach its targets. But the more players that are helping with evacs and whatnot, the faster that goes along. So the team has to decide on how they're going to split their forces. Final score depends on Damage + effectiveness of non combat actions - number of ships destroyed.
I don't know about the idea of perma death. I could see players quitting then ultimately bypassing the stf altogether before too long.
maybe give it a max limit of 3 - 4 damage types adapted at any one time, would force diversity. Throw in some more unique mechanics, like adapting to shields or regeneration or something, and you could have a VERY interesting encounter indeed. But then the DPS crowd would get a headache when confronted with a situation that requires actual tactics, and just queue for ISA instead ...
USS Melbourne was the ship Riker was approached to command
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
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"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Not a lot of people even run HSA.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it isn't the DPS crowd that whines when things get too difficult. In fact, most of us are advocating for more elites.
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Also just as we fed/rom/KDF have made changes our weapons/shields/ships to better combat the Borg's style of combat, they have now fought with us long enough they could have developed a way of neutralizing these changes we implemented to combat them an now rely on quite a bit. I could see them figuring out a way of locking out a ship's ability to rotate their shield and/or weapon frequencies for a duration of time, this could be something that you could introduce in the beginning of the stf/mission to create the idea of them once more being able to adapt to both your ship's weapons an shields.
This new Borg stf could have you fight a Vessel that gains a stacking shield resistance/hardness buff against the most used weapon energy type used during a phase of the encounter, while also having a stacking debuff/buff that improves their damage or shield-penetration/by-passing against the shield type the Borg ship's weapons are firing on the most. Add in elements of like needing to collect technology/wreckage that is blasted off this new improved Borg ship that the Task Force Omega rep faction are seeking to research an develop improvements for their factions. Give some of the ships as well as some of the boff/captain abilities effects that can reduce, remove, or negate the stacking debuff or buff that is applied by the Borg Vessel.
I could also see more of a fact that the Borg vessel would try an disable targets than destroy them, and so you don't blow up like normally in a stf but more you need to make repairs to your ship (unless hit by a torpedo directly that depletes your hull then say bye bye to your ship). I honestly think this should be how space combat deaths should be, that energy hits are more disables to the ship if reduced to zero hull compared to torpedoes. Maybe at some negative amount of hit points you would finally blow up needing to respawn, that either you slowly repair your ship via hull heals you own or that other ship captains use on you. Also maybe there could be some ability that depending on what kind of ship-class you have, and what kind of captain career you chose would work with varying degrees of success to bring your ship back online like the ground ability to revive pcs/npcs. You could work the stf around the idea it is there to capture ships it has disabled making it that the rewards are based around not letting it assimilate or capture disabled ship via reviving them before it can, maybe it can attempt to to assimilate/capture multiple ships at once, but also as it captures/assimilates more ships it adapts to the "frequency rotation tech" we are using faster making it even more dangerous thru the buffs/debuffs both stack faster while also harder to remove/reduce/negate.
I agree with you it would need a really good reason to be run, good rewards, payoff (dill, marks, what not), but also engaging combat that is different enough to keep people interested. Giv8ing us several different maps that it takes place on that have a few minor different objectives unique to that map giving you rewards for doing them, hazards both stationary as well as moving, enemies that spawn giving it less of a mind numbing grind feel by keeping it as fresh as possible.
Actually, I think it's not quite accurate.
The reason I say this is because Wolf 359 lasted long enugh that the Enterprise was able to catch up to the Borg Cube despite requiring repairs and the Cube being at least as fast as the Enterprise, probably much faster.
So the whole mission would need to be designed with the goal of the players lasting long enough to keep the Cube busy.
Ultimately, the fleet at Wolf 359 was not able to seriously threaten the cube. Why did it even stop to fight them in the first place? I would say that the mere act of attacking the cube forced it out of warp, and as long as the fight continued, it couldn't just go to warp.
With the above in mind, I think the misison objective would be not to destroy the Cube, and instead keep it busy long enough. There might be special events at regular intervals where players must complete some kind of interact to stop the Cube from going to warp. Maybe beaming aboard troops, activating some science gizmo, or whatever. Maybe people also need to ferry survivors away before they get caught in the cross-fire.
So the whole thing is not a DPS challenge, but a tanking challenge. People are forced to stay close t the Cube, otherwise it leaves, and are getting exposed to increasingly more powerful attacks, until no ship can survive it, even the worst cases.
The best tankers in the game might be able to last a while longer, and get extra rewards. Say after 5 minutes the mission is "won", but you can extend it up to 10 minutes (at which point the Cube will fire insta-kill attacks, representing it having adapted to the enemy ship's defensive abilities.)
I kinda like the idea of "no respawns". But I am not sure people would want to spectate for that long, so it might be a no-go.
Overall; I think there might be ways to represent the challenge accurately, but I am not convinced it would be all that fun. And of course, recreating it with player ships instead of canon-appropriate ships kinda makes one wonder what the whole point is anyway. We know today we can blow up Cubes - it's as easy as eating pancakes.
No Win Scenarios only happen either in training, when an instructor test your frustration and suspension-of-disbelief threshold, or when someone else drops the ball and screws over the guys on the sharp end. And even then, it's very, very hard to force an armed combat anything into "no win."
Because NWS only applies to that scenario. Once a competent leader embraces Game Theory and start changing the rules of engagement, all bets are off. Case in point, the Kobiyashi Maru. I know full well what I'd do, were it not for a computer saying I can't: After defeat becomes a forgone conclusion, I'd start tractoring burning klink hulks, jumping to warp 2, and hurling them at klingon population centers. Incoming ships can either intercept, or sacrifice their civilians trying to kill me.
The only reason Starfleet no win scenarios work is because everyone, for some reason, blithely assumes that the captain they're observing isn't more brutal than they are.
-Dedication plaque of the Federation Starship U.S.S. Merkava
Even if you took this route, I still have the same question..
Why bother?
Right now, it's been suggested that we have either a mission where a large number of players fight an invincible Borg cube until they die, or a mission where players have to distract said cube by feverishly running for their lives long enough for what? for someone else or something else to come along and save the day like the Enterprise did?
Neither scenario sounds like very much fun from a players perspective. The 'Battle of Wolf 359' is great as a story and as part of Star Trek Lore. As a playable scenario in game however, I'm still not seeing a way that this would even remotely enjoyable.
As an STF mission, this just sounds to me like the early makings of yet another totally empty queue.
The need to "last as long as possible" certainly means it would be one of those "forced timegate" missions that people hate so much.
There are probably better historical battles. For example, The battle to take back Deep Space Nine, for example.
The cube, a NPC entity on a trajectory escorted by probes controled by players. Goal for team BORG would be the save arrival of the cube at point X.
While federation ships comprised of mostly mirandas, constitution and excelsiors try to blow it up or slow it down (forcing it into regenerative mode).
15 minute countdown until the bulk of the fleet arrives (win federation team) or the Cube reaches earth (win BORG team)
Borg Probes can either heal the cube or fight the federation.
Has been seen and done in many other games already, so ...
it's even a pattern for future historic PVP engagements, because the historic part gets rif of the current political situation in the game, namely galactic peace.