I also think it’s fairly weak overall but there are some really great outstanding episodes. Blink of an Eye, Counterpoint, Scorpion, for some examples. And I also agree that the worst Voyagers are really very bad, but are they that much worse than other series’ follies? Is Threshold worse than Code of Honor? Sacred Ground worse than Turnabout Intruder? Fair Haven worse than Profit and Lace?
Thought of a little bit more:
In Best of Both Worlds 1 it’s kind of unclear what the Borg plans for Earth are, actually. The Borg collective says “Your archaic cultures are authority driven. To facilitate our introduction into your societies, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications” when they decide to capture Picard. Locutus says “Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us.” I don’t know if the Borg goal was assimilating everyone at that point (or if the writers themselves had decided). From those bits it sounds like they want the resources of Earth and a slave caste of humans. When Guinan is briefing the crew she says the Borg destroyed her world and scattered her people, but there’s no mention of assimilation.
By Best of Both Worlds 2 assimilation is the pretty clear goal. Locutus says that “you will become one with the Borg. You will all become one with the Borg.” Maybe the process of assimilating Picard was so revolutionary that it took the collective a minute to figure out how great it could be and then it became their entire driving force.
Probably, but capturing Picard to assimilate (and even give a name to!) is already a big departure from the Borg introduced in Q Who. Their attitude also changes after reintroducing Hugh into the collective. Presumably the Borg had a mechanism for isolating and purging individuality in newly assimilated people but not for Borg temporarily cut off from the collective which was likely corrected after the Hugh incident.
It isn’t just about becoming more perfect themselves, the Borg are trying to help everyone they can achieve perfection by becoming Borg. Locutus and the queen both express surprise and confusion as to why humans aren’t just letting assimilation happen. Locutus says “why do you resist us; we only wish to improve quality of life.”
This wasn’t always the case; in their first appearance the Borg only wanted technological material. Assimilating every person would have been very inefficient for that goal and in fact we see their methods were different in the pre-assimilate everyone days. The Borg are hinted at in The Neutral Zone (before the Borg were written, but clearly they were foreshadowing some big future adversary and the pattern fits even though the distance doesn’t) when Worf says “The outpost was not just destroyed, it’s as though some great force just scooped it off the face of the planet.” Nearly directly echoed in Q Who, first appearance of the Borg, when again Worf says “It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet.” Q also makes some remarks about the Borg not being interested in the ship’s life forms, only the technology and what they can use and consume. At that time the more efficient hoovering up everything they need method was used.
Clearly at some point Borg priorities changed for some reason. Maybe they consumed the technology for biological assimilation, decided to test it out, and the people they tested it on were radical altruists and that ethos got muddled in the Borg desire for unity. By Best of Both Worlds we see that the Borg have babies; it looked to me like they were implied to be born / grown from Borg but it’s possible those were already what would become maturation chambers by Voyager’s time. If they are Borg babies perhaps they have some kind of pro-natalist position too: if they can make life perfect then they have a duty to create life in order for life to experience perfection.
I quite like StarSector too. It clearly owes a lot to the Escape Velocity series which I love.
StarSector’s focus on colony management is super fun though. The recent patch was also quite good and seemed to add more story elements which I appreciate. I appreciate the unique looking ships even though some of them end up looking very ugly.
I love working with the AIs. Smuggling them, integrating them into colonies, doing other spoilery things with them. I wish there were deeper mechanics there and more story too, but that could still happen.
You can do that in inkarnate but only with the subscription. Uploading as a stamp would probably be the best way because then you could move and size like you want, plus you could tweak the opacity to trace over it more easily.