Back on topic. After playing X-wing for years I recently started collecting and playing Star Trek attack wing as well.

some of the minis are NOT as detailed however the newer ones are pretty good. Not as good as the X-wing ones but that is due to the Scale differences mainly.QC is also not as good with STAW however their Custmer service is pretty good about on par with FFG IMHO. I like the many different ship combos and factions that are available in STAW. and yes you can mix in match factions if you play that way. however many tournaments do not allow that or do two Ops where one is faction "Pure". The game plays very similar to X-wing. I like the various OPS that come out as it makes game play different and unique every time you play. unlike X-wing which is always X team vs Y team. Also when you play a STAW Op you buy a "Blind" ship in an unmarked Box that you then have to add to you fleet which makes things interesting AND you get a new ship every time you play. Also the prizes for various Ops are usually new ships and resource cards. I find that also waaaay more interesting and useful than the usual 7 or 8th plastic range ruler! or 9 recon spec card!! or coin!! lol As for game play yes the mechanics do favor X-wing better rather than captal ship combat however then myriad of different captain/crew/tec/weapon/factions/movement templates keeps it interesting. Just my 3.5 cents... Also just have to say the Borg Giant Cub and DS-9 space station are really cool looking.. Also along those lines the Scale of attack wing is waaaay off but that is a concession due to the many different ships that are in the game. Its a fun game on par with X-wing in my opinion as far as pure fun goes. but both are fun for different reasons.

I can't believe you just argued in favor of requiring a competitor to buy a blind pack in order to participate in a tournament.

I was tempted to get the Borg Cube. Then I looked at the model. Typical shoddy Wizkids production. Only looks okay at a distance.

it doesnt even look like a borg cube....

i mean, it would be possible to say the borg deployed ships about the same size of the federation ships and that would dodge the 'wtf is this?" response for the cube's size and strange texture, but Borg dont do that sort of thing. If they arent completely dominating, they assimilate and adapt technology. Keyword, technology, not strategy. Thats why the Undine (species 8379 or whatever the hell they were numbered) were able to rip them a new one with ease: they cant be assimilated and their technology is too different to simply adapt to.

So they really shot themselves in the foot with introducing Borg regardless of how they handled it. If they made it true to the series, Borg couldnt be a playable race. If they broke the scale or broke the borg's mentality on tactics, people would flip out at them for breaking the immersion. Welp, guess what they did lol

it doesnt even look like a borg cube....

i mean, it would be possible to say the borg deployed ships about the same size of the federation ships and that would dodge the 'wtf is this?" response for the cube's size and strange texture, but Borg dont do that sort of thing. If they arent completely dominating, they assimilate and adapt technology. Keyword, technology, not strategy. Thats why the Undine (species 8379 or whatever the hell they were numbered) were able to rip them a new one with ease: they cant be assimilated and their technology is too different to simply adapt to.

So they really shot themselves in the foot with introducing Borg regardless of how they handled it. If they made it true to the series, Borg couldnt be a playable race. If they broke the scale or broke the borg's mentality on tactics, people would flip out at them for breaking the immersion. Welp, guess what they did lol

Species 8472

Trying for a reasonably complete answer for the OP

The games use essentially the exact same mechanics, just tweaked a little bit. The trek game has speed 6 straights, speed 4 turns and reverse maneuvers, but if you play x-wing you would be able to play attack wing just by learning some jargon.

The "factions" barely qualify for the name in STAW. You can mix and match ships from different factions in the same squad and captains can be placed on ships of different factions. All for a minimal cost. As I understand it, for a while at least, Picard commanding a Borg cube was seriously overpowered (although that particular combination is not TOTALLY in fluffy)

Wizkids, the producers of attack wing have a TERRIBLE reputation for bad balance and power creep. Virtually every release is more powerful than the last and a must buy if you I tend to be competitive with strangers.

Related to that, they will release the same model with different paint jobs and title cards frequently. It's the same type of thing as x-wing aces packs, but they seem to do it a lot, so you can easily end up with lots of miniatures of the same ship.

Their concept of prize support borders on criminal. FFG prize support is alternate art cards and fancy tokens that are identical game wise to the regular card board. Wizkids prize support is alternate cards with improved stats, making it virtually impossible to do well in a tournament until you have played in several of them first in order to collect the super cards.

Wizkids also produces convention exclusive cards, also with improved stats, and is notorious for not making enough of them to supply demand. There were a couple issues a year or two ago at gencon where some people got hurt at the wizkids booth because there weren't enough exclusive cards available and the booth staff outright lied to people about it.

Moving on to the miniatures

The early ones for the game were a joke. Easily as bad as the old vinyl mage knight figures. Soft, bendy, lacking in detail, with crappy paint jobs. From what I have seen however, the quality of the miniatures has improved significantly since then. The paint jobs are still not as good as x-wing, but that is mostly a lack of shading which, to an extent, works for trek since trek ships are so clean and sparkly. Scale is a total joke though.

The cards, IMO, are significantly worse than x-wings. The graphic design was going for a Star Trek LCARS look and it just doesn't work and they use screen captures instead of artwork which makes the whole thing seem more like some fan project than a professional product. Also, I once noticed that the cards for STAW are not uniform in size, in a stack of them they varied by a couple millimeters, which is pretty amateurish.

As for good things to say, every expansion comes with a scenario or two, some of which seem interesting, so it has a leg up on x-wing there, I also think STAW cards include some background information, something I really wish x-wing did. I gave also been told that the game can be perfectly fun if you are just playing with friends who are willing to apply some house rules, restriction and stat mods to curb the worst of the imbalances.

This is absolutely the case. If you want to just buy a couple ships and play with your buddies it's... fine. The scenarios help a lot there too.

But if you want to even think about competitive play... hoo boy. You're going to get a, ahem, refreshing view of FFG's game balance and prize support, I'll tell you that much.

I have suffered the pain of watching those travesties and wish it upon no one.

F*** you jj, from hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hates sake, I spit my last breath at thee!

While I am certainly not fond of Jar Jar Abrams work, he earned serious cool points recently. He apparently went and pressured CBS to drop a lawsuit that was preventing a really cool looking Trek fan film from being produced, and according to reports they are dropping it and letting the film go forward.

Trek fan film...is that the supposed final 2 years of the original Enterprise voyage they never did? i remember hearing about that fan thing and that Grant Imahara was participating but didnt hear anything further.

The fan film in question is Axanar; it tells the story of Garth of Izar and the Federation-Klingon war which occurred before the original series. Garth, having gone insane, appeared in I think season 3 of the original series.

Yeah, the film in question is Axanar, which looks fantastic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1W1_8IV8uhA

The final 2 years of the original 5 year mission is being done as a web TV show, I forget the actual name. I've not actually seen it, but I have heard good things about it.

I don't think they actually have yet, though.

Back on topic. After playing X-wing for years I recently started collecting and playing Star Trek attack wing as well.

some of the minis are NOT as detailed however the newer ones are pretty good. Not as good as the X-wing ones but that is due to the Scale differences mainly.QC is also not as good with STAW however their Custmer service is pretty good about on par with FFG IMHO. I like the many different ship combos and factions that are available in STAW. and yes you can mix in match factions if you play that way. however many tournaments do not allow that or do two Ops where one is faction "Pure". The game plays very similar to X-wing. I like the various OPS that come out as it makes game play different and unique every time you play. unlike X-wing which is always X team vs Y team. Also when you play a STAW Op you buy a "Blind" ship in an unmarked Box that you then have to add to you fleet which makes things interesting AND you get a new ship every time you play. Also the prizes for various Ops are usually new ships and resource cards. I find that also waaaay more interesting and useful than the usual 7 or 8th plastic range ruler! or 9 recon spec card!! or coin!! lol As for game play yes the mechanics do favor X-wing better rather than captal ship combat however then myriad of different captain/crew/tec/weapon/factions/movement templates keeps it interesting. Just my 3.5 cents... Also just have to say the Borg Giant Cub and DS-9 space station are really cool looking.. Also along those lines the Scale of attack wing is waaaay off but that is a concession due to the many different ships that are in the game. Its a fun game on par with X-wing in my opinion as far as pure fun goes. but both are fun for different reasons.

I can't believe you just argued in favor of requiring a competitor to buy a blind pack in order to participate in a tournament.

I don't think they actually have yet, though.

What? Dropped the lawsuit? No, not yet. This is a very recent development and I'm sure it will take at least a month or two for the legal teams to sort out language.

The story I read also said that CBS was also going to put some guidelines in place to govern what can films can and can't do, so it is entirely possible that they are just shifting gears and will put so many restrictions in place in the guidelines that the project can't go forward anyway.

Hope it all works out though. Axanar is probably the first Star Trek property since DS9 went off the air that actually looks good.

From what I've heard, the Axanar production has some very, very concerning things set up that Paramount/CBS can't allow. Namely, it is set up too easily to make money.

We'll see.

From what I heard, the big sticking point was that, while all the funds they raised were being used to cover the cost of the film and not to make profit, a lot of that "cost of the film" was the creation of studios and infrastructure that could then be used after axanar was done to create for profit films.

I don't necessarily think CBS was in the wrong to bring the suit, though they did overreach an aweful lot (the nature of litigation, accuse the other side of anything you can think of and force them to defend it), I just want the movie to be made because I love the ST universe and the actual owners aren't doing anything good with it.

Wizkids and balance do not go together.

Nor quality control or component quality.

I would urge you to have a closer look at the dragons, they are quite well sculpted and most have decent paint jobs.

I think they got better since NECA resurected them. Old wizkids managed to kill off horrorclix in europe by releasing shoddy stuff for the lab expansion. Because europe has minmum quality standards no game store could import the figures and the game died. (Later we did get the other expansions and a re-release of "in the lab". but by that point it was to late.)

Now X-wing figures are just plain better than the trek models, there's no denying that. But the trek figs are decent enough.

I just buy (tons and tons of) dice masters, and wizkids seems to be doing that right...

I was tempted to get the Borg Cube. Then I looked at the model. Typical shoddy Wizkids production. Only looks okay at a distance.

I agree with you on that one. doesn't even look good at a distance! A kid could probably cobble something better from a box, some model sprues, random bits and a can of metalic spray paint. For the price it went at my LGS it should have working green LEDs for crying out loud.