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What a Dilemma! and how to get over them.
By Terrill
Part 1: Getting Over your opponent's dilemmas.
Getting over dilemmas is pretty much the object of the game and there are many schools of thought on this. For one, you can bluff your way through (aka redshirting), you can bombard the mission with a lot of people, or you can just take down enough and hope you don't get stopped.
The latter seems to be a favorite of many. But let's face facts, regardless of how many personnel you take on an attempt, you are going to lose some. Either they will be stopped or killed and how big of a buffer will determine how many dilemmas you can face and still have a chance of solving.
Personally, I enjoy it when someone only beams down a few people to a mission. It means that I have a better chance of stopping or killing off the one person they need for the mission and I only need a few dilemmas to do it. With a 6-7 person away team or crew, I can tie up the mission for roughly 3-4 turns. This is an eternity in which I can quickly pull into the lead.
The strategy of overcoming dilemmas is simply safety in numbers. 8-9 people is a minimum for a first and sometimes even second attempt. Even if you only need 5 or 6 people for the mission, you can safely lose 2-4 people in the attempt and still have a chance of completing the mission.
Part 2: Getting over your own dilemmas
Building an effective dilemma deck
When it comes to building a dilemma deck bigger is definitely not better. If you never go through your dilemmas again all you do is bury the dilemmas that went back to your pile or the good ones you couldn't use before. Dilemma decks should not be any bigger than your draw deck. Less than 40 is a good number.
Balance your dilemma deck. Have close to the same number of space, planet, and combo dilemmas in your deck by a difference of no more than 2. This will help to ensure you have something to play when you are drawing only a few dilemmas.
Balance your costs. 0,1,2,3s should make up roughly 75% of your deck. 4,5,6s should only be about 25%.
Avoid overload. Keep a variety of dilemmas in your deck with no more than 2 copies of most of your dilemmas in your pile.
Avoid redundancy. If you stopped a personnel, is it really necessary to kill them?
There are many other tricks that you can do with the dilemma pile, but I will not give away all of my secrets.
Part 3: Making sure your opponent does not get over your dilemmas.
When in doubt, throw everything you got. If you are not familiar with the playing style of your opponent or if you are playing a superior opponent, the best thing you can do is to throw every playable dilemma you can at them. Even if you overkill the mission, you will be certain that you will stop your opponent.
When in doubt, choose the dilemmas that will potentially stop or kill the most personnel. If you have a choice between possibly stopping 2 personnel with 2 dilemmas or killing 1 with one dilemma, go for the former.
Know your opponent's strengths and weaknesses. If your opponent has done nothing but report Cardassian people, a dilemma like Racial Tension will not work on your opponent. Likewise with Borg. A dilemma like Chula: Echoes will not work on Borg as their attributes are all 5s.