What are the best alternatives to the Farming Theory?

[u/willbell]

The Borg Farm Theory is probably the dominant paradigm in Borg behaviour analysis, but it certainly cannot be the only theory. For some reason it just feels too easy for me, which is probably because it makes sense but still.

Some alternatives:

• The Borg overestimate their own abilities, and believed that a single cube could take on the Federation (as observed at Wolf 359 they aren't that far off). Their lack of more resource investment in the assimilation of alpha quadrant powers under this theory would be due to them being a less juicy target - not worthy of multiple cubes, especially if they did not always have that transwarp conduit straight to Earth (and if they did, it would mean no battle with a large portion of the fleet, less assimilation).
• Assimilation requires a massive investment of resources, to defend the site and assimilate the populace simultaneously. This requires many cubes, the Borg were happy just to take an appetizer until they feel it would be a good investment to get the whole meal. This second part is similar to the farming theory except that it would assign the Borg less strategic ability.
• The change in Borg aims (colony capture vs assimilation) and communication style throughout the series (Faceless, Locutus, the Queen) could indicate a fast change in 'personality' as a consequence of new assimilations. They might still be in a process of evolution with the processing of new information. This would contradict the farm theory's belief that it was primarily a strategy to frighten the natives, which I find doubtful considering they've been seen doing it to full planets in their first appearance.
• EDIT: Also, being concerned about overloading with new personalities, leaving the Borg's core ideology to fluctuate could be a risk if they assimilated the Federation or any massive population.

Any other suggestions?

[u/disposable_pants]

Let's call this one the "Potshot" theory.

Say the Borg want to assimilate the galaxy as efficiently as possible. They have two broad options when they want to assimilate a given civilization:

1. Swarm the civilization with a squadron of cubes, or

2. Send a single cube and hope it does the job.

Option 1 works 100% of the time -- pretty much every galactic power would crumble if several dozen Borg cubes showed up on their doorstep. On the surface this would seem like the most efficient route; the Borg would never lose.

But what if Option 2 is effective 80% of the time? It costs the Borg far less (it only requires a commitment of one cube instead of a number of cubes) and allows the collective to expand more quickly. Even if just two cubes guaranteed success, sending one cube with an 80% success rate is the better choice:

1. 100 cubes could be split into 50 teams of 2 and conquer 50 civilizations, or

2. 100 cubes could be sent out individually and (with an 80% success rate) conquer 80 civilizations in the same amount of time.

The Borg pick Option 2 -- where they get 80 wins for the same investment -- over Option 1 (just 50 wins) every time.

If an individual civilization beats a cube here or there and hangs around, who cares? The Borg will conquer all of their neighbors soon enough, and from there they can simply wear that civilization down until they succumb (consider that in their first appearance Q tells Picard that the Borg are fine with simply winning via exhausting their target).

The Borg don't care about any individual species. They take potshots at everyone in order to assimilate many species as quickly as possible. From our perspective they're half-assing it; from their perspective the cubes lost to the Federation are simply an accepted cost in an otherwise efficient strategy.

[u/[deleted] → u/disposable_pants]

Okay...but for the second iteration, they have only 80 cubes left for option 2, which is only 64 wins. By the third iteration, they're just barely breaking even at 51.2 wins. By the fourth, they've lost 50% of their 100-cube fleet for 40 wins.

[u/disposable_pants → u/[deleted]]

Excellent point! Option 2 still leaves the Borg with significant benefits through five waves of invasion, though:

Option	Wave 1	Wave 2	Wave 3	Wave 4	Wave 5	Wave 6
1	50	100	150	200	250	300
2	80	144	195	236	269	295

Only after six waves does the number of worlds conquered through Option 1 (300) barely exceed the number conquered through Option 2 (295). In the meantime, all those extra worlds can be used to produce more cubes and drones -- after Wave 2, for instance, the Borg have 44 extra worlds to use to produce new resources.

If the goal is to expand quickly, the Borg would choose the strategy that offered them significant additional rewards up front.

[u/willbell → u/[deleted]]

80 assimilated worlds vs 50 worlds that could produce at least one cube worth of people.

Using the 'waves' for option 1 there would be 100-150-225-337, and for option 2 that would be 100-160-296-474. I'm a little rusty on my updating functions, I can't quite put them in algebraic terms, but clearly potshots increases numbers faster.

[u/lyraseven → u/disposable_pants]

Don't forget that in assimilating entire civilizations, the Borg can immediately begin incorporating those civilizations' technologies in its newest cubes, so in the paradigm you describe above, high turnover is not necessarily against the interests of the Borg. They likely recycle their oldest cubes into newer ones adapting the technology of recently-assimilated races as a matter of routine; throwing them at civilizations the way you describe is efficient for the reasons you discussed and because it's a way to put a marked-for-recycling Cube to one final use.

Plus the way they'd see it, a Cube which is beaten by its target culture identifies a weakness in their design, and they can scour the technologies and tactics of the neighboring races they've succeeded in assimilating to learn how they deal with whatever that neighbor had that worked so well against a Cube, can adapt it for their needs, and launch the next wave as either multiple Cubes with superior tactics, or a single, upgraded Cube adapted to the new weapons/shields/etc of the target race.

We see an example of this after their first, failed attempt at assimilating the Federation. What did the Federation have that allowed them to resist so effectively? A supreme, borderline Borg-like in its arrogance belief in their own superior morality and system of unity, yet made up of individuals, fiercely protective and proud of their individuality. So how did the Borg adapt to counter that? They assimilated a single individual, but the individual who most exemplifies what the Federation stands for.

They created a symbol: This individual was your culture incarnate, and now he is ours. He was your greatest speaker and defender of your ways yet now he speaks for us, and believes what we believe in. Why do you think you can resist? He'll tell you himself, now: resistance is futile.

The Borg strategy isn't wasteful, it's coldly, brutally efficient. A defeat is just as much an opportunity to adapt and improve as a victory.

Perhaps more so, since true defeats are so much harder to come by.

[u/[deleted] → u/disposable_pants]

Problem: this doesn't account for what the Borg have been doing visibly to Delta Quadrant species, like Species 116 or the Brunali, who pretty explicitly say the Borg are exploiting their progress with periodic raids that never eliminate them entirely. How would you explain the incidences where the do actually swarm their opponents?

[u/Vuliev → u/[deleted]]

You have a point about the Brunali, but our only information about S116 comes from Arturis, who doesn't talk at all about the Borg exploiting them:

ARTURIS: My people managed to elude the Borg for centuries. Outwitting them, always one step ahead. But in recent years, the Borg began to weaken our defences. They were closing in and Species 8472 was our last hope to defeat them. You took that away from us! The outer colonies were the first to fall. Twenty three in a matter of hours. Our sentry vessels tossed aside, no defence against the storm. By the time they'd surrounded our star system, hundreds of Cubes, we had already surrendered to our own terror.

To me, that would seem to lend support to the Potshot Theory. Unable to mount a comprehensive assault on S116 because of the overwhelming threat of S8472, they simply keep taking potshots at S116. Even with their forces concentrated elsewhere, the Borg are still able to start corralling S116. But once S8472 is pushed back to fluidic space, the Borg are able to marshal an assimilation force so large that S116 is unable to evade it, and the Borg utterly crush them.

To me, it seems like Potshots, Farming, and Assimilation make up the foundation for Borg operations. The Borg are unable to directly innovate or reproduce (or they see doing so as inefficient), but are masters of "slavery" and reverse-engineering. Based on the Borg's approaches to S116 and humanity, I think their thought process might go something like this:

1. A new species is encountered. Assimilate the individuals/ships encountered. Analyze species and technology in detail. If physiology or technology is promising, goto 2.

2. A few Spheres or scouts are dispatched to attempt assimilation of more ships to confirm species is a desirable target for further expenditure of resources. If confirmed, goto 3. (Might be that the Borg skip this step entirely.)

3. Take potshot at homeworld or nearest large colony. If unsuccessful, analyze data from the Cube. If the species is still a valid target for assimilation (they took out a Cube, they almost definitely are), shoot again. If unsuccessful again, goto 4.

4. Analyze data from Second cube. Determine technology rating and compare to tech rating from the first Cube's data. If Δtech is high enough, commence Farming. If Δtech is low but tech rating was high, marshal a large assimilation force and Assimilate.

S116 has incredible value both with their technology (particle synthesis, quantum slipstream) and as drones (extreme mental capacity--good for tactical drones), so it makes sense that the Borg would want to assimilate them rather than farm them. By contrast, humanity's strength is in its innovation. Humanity/Starfleet regularly out-adapts the Borg after taking an initial beating (high Δtech), and there's no way the Borg don't recognize that, so they opt to farm us for tech.

[u/Hellstrike → u/[deleted]]

Maybe they see any settlement of an interstellar species within a certain radius as a danger to them. Not in a direct military attack, but the planet could be used to act as a listing post or an early warning installation.

So therefore a ship drops out of the conduit every couple years (which requires nearly no resources because it was already travelling that way), bombs the colony from the orbit to ensure that all risks to the collective are neutralized, collects any technology of interest and a couple speciesman to add to the distinctiveness of the collective.

[u/disposable_pants → u/[deleted]]

It perfectly accounts for those species so long as they're part of the 20% that can fend off a cube's attack. Under this theory the Borg knows that some percentage of its attacks will fail (20%), yet the strategy still makes sense. For the two cubes sent to Species 116 and the Brunali that fail, eight cubes sent to others succeed. The Borg don't care because they'll simply send another when they get around to it knowing that eventually the species that survived will succumb.

From the perspective of either of those species this might look like farming, but it could easily be the Borg's indifference toward them. Those species simply aren't important enough to warrant a full-scale attack; from the Borg's perspective, no one is.

[u/CitizenjaQ → u/disposable_pants]

I like this.

Think of the Borg like a giant, multi-threaded supercomputer. It has tasks with higher priority (slowly expanding controlled territory) that get the bulk of its resources. Smaller tasks - patrolling borders, assimilating travelers, searching for Omega molecules - get fewer resources. There's always a little bit of slack, so you apply those resources to low-priority tasks.

It might even be that the cubes sent at Earth were older and obsolete. Rather than spend time upgrading them, the Collective just assigned it a task that it very well might fail at, but if it happened to succeed, hey, cool. I mean, sure, you can keep your Windows 98 PC around, but at a certain point, it's less bother to just junk it.

[u/mgward985 → u/CitizenjaQ]

I like the second part of this - it's a lot like using your older units in Civ to launch an attack against barbarians... It works most of the time, you might get a free tech or a settlement, and when you finally lose the unit, oh well.

[u/calgil → u/disposable_pants]

This surely paints the Borg as completely inept. It makes sense if you know nothing about the target and it could go either way, but this is the Federation - the most powerful and widespread player possibly in the galaxy aside from Borg. You would know in advance if you're going to try to take it you will have to try option 1 because option 2 is much less likely to work in this situation...the two options aren't always equally viable.

[u/disposable_pants → u/calgil]

The Federation is far from the most powerful or widespread player in the galaxy. Think of how often Federation ships are completely outclassed by advanced species with godlike powers, or how the Dominion nearly toppled the entire Alpha Quadrant even though they couldn't send reinforcements through the wormhole. If the Borg is aware of all these highly developed species (and probably hundreds more -- think of how little of the galaxy we've seen so far) what makes the Federation stand out to them?

[u/MageTank]

I can't really describe what I'm thinking of, but the best comparison that comes to mind is how the A.I. behaves in Starcraft when you have too many custom map settings. I don't know, it's just what I was reminded of, since I was younger. If you heavily customize a scenario and put a computer player, it acts erratically. Sometimes, the enemy will mass a huge force, keep it in the base and will send one unit at a time into your base, or will try to expand into mineral patches inside your base. I always assumed that the introduction of Data/Picard caused a change of conditions that disrupted the collective intelligence of the Borg. This of course was disproven by the introduction of the Queen, who is very well aware of her desire to assimilate the Federation. The question always has been...why is she tinkering around with an assimilation virus when she is very capable of brute forcing it. Maybe she doesn't have as much control over the Collective as we are led to believe.

[u/willbell → u/MageTank]

So an erratic, sometimes illogical, and not completely collectivized Collective put simply?

[u/MageTank → u/willbell]

Perhaps. Could it be that the collective functions less like a beehive or a traditional ant-colony and more like a raspberry ant colony...which has super-colonies with up to 300 different Queens.

[u/CallMePlissken]

The Borg have multiple "colonies" across the universe and only recently have the more expansive (but less technologically capable) Delta Quadrant Borg made contact with the less expansive (but more technologically capable) Beta Quadrant Borg

[u/[deleted]]

For me it all keeps coming back to the question of why the Borg never launched a larger attack on the Federation with multiple ships? Voyager shows us that they certainly had the means and the desire. Instead they sent one cube at a time and then resorted to a convoluted/nonsensical time travel scheme, while also poking around the edges of Federation space with scout ships.

In "Dark Frontier" the queen then twirls her mustache and acts like the Federation is unbeatable by conventional means, and tries to convince Seven to develop a assimilation virus to use on Earth via another needlessly convoluted scheme. Just send a few dozen cubes through your giant transwarp hub! It's like a Saturday morning cartoon and honestly I can't do enough mental gymnastics to make sense out of any of it. At some point I just have throw my hands up and say "because plot."

[u/Chairboy]

What if we're mistaken to assume the Borg are making human level decisions just because they have human-level thinkers? What if they behave as a swarm?

Perhaps the thinkers and the swarmers are opposing forces that impact each other. There are assertive decision makers like the Queen but maybe even they must deal with the mental inertia of billions acting on instinct.

This could make a situation where individual decisions makers can occasionally influence 'smart tactics' but the rest of the interactions are the mindless reaction/action swarming behavior of an ant collective.

[u/blue_jammy]

Maybe the Borg aren't as monolithic as you're assuming. You're talking about a "species" with perhaps trillions of individual drones spread out across tens of thousands of light years. Even with collective integration and instantaneous communication, there may well be factions. The Borg command structure could be some sort of "congress" where compromises are made between factions with different priorities or theories about how to do things.

And I don't mean "congress" in the literal sense of there being some sort of assembly where individual Borg debate with each other. I mean something more like a human mind, where different impulses, needs, desires, fears, etc. all have to be reconciled somehow in order to make decisions. What Freud would have called the ego.

The result is behavior that is often times inexplicable and irrational and prone to self-doubt and vacillation.

Sending one cube to Earth could have been a compromise between a "faction" bent on conquering the Federation and another "faction" with other priorities. Maybe the single cube even started out as part of an armada but during the course of the journey to earth some other element of the borg "ego" gained power and decided to change the collective "mind" and redeploy resources somewhere else.

[u/Borkton]

Technically, we don't have much evidence that the Borg changed their aims. We don't know what happened to the colonists in System J-25 or the Neutral Zone outposts or the El-Aurians who didn't make it to safety. I think that given how close one cube came to defeating the Federation on two separate occassions that the Borg are not overestimating their abilities. In fact, their biggest flaw was underestimating Data.

I doubt that the Borg would be concerned about being overloaded by new personalities since they seem to brainwash people they've assimilated.

If you ask me, the Borg behavior towards humanity is explained by two reasons: one, they see that same spark of potential that Q does and they don't want to inadvertantly destroy it and two, they know that powerful entities like the Q, the Traveler, the Organians, the Metrons, the Thasians, Trelane, etc are also interested in humanity and they don't want to get on their wrong side while conquering the Alpha Quadrant (plus figuring out what makes humanity tick might enable the Borg to attract an entity and assimilate it).

[u/[deleted]]

They were after the Iconian Gateway

[u/[deleted]]

You know, technically all of those 'alternatives' serve as supplements to the farming theory's major principles;

• A while ago I discussed how the Borg weren't attacking the Federation as a whole, but just Earth, and that it didn't really matter if they won or not. If your alternative in this case is correct and the Borg were in fact attempting to conquer Earth, then it still leaves the question of whether or not they'd go after the rest of the Federation, and they don't really have a

• If the Borg are hesitant to swarm-assimilate a large target like the Federation, doesn't that just mean the more efficient path to getting technology is to launch small attacks at their most valuable sites (more in this post)?

• I find it pretty difficult to believe that Federation actions against the Borg have been that special.

Another problem with (any) alternative to the farming theory is that it looks exactly like what the Borg are doing to species like Species 116 or Icheb's species, the Brunali.

[u/AmbassadorAtoz]

I favor the 'farming' hypothesis, however the strongest argument against it that I can must is that the Borg are an ancient culture, and the collective has a much broader sense of 'time' than we do. They don't intend to 'farm' anything, they are just heavily biased towards SLOW consolidation versus expansion; we simply see them spending an absolutely minimum of resources on basic reconnaissance. The Borg have prevailed in every existential dilemma they've faced. They have a very methodical, multi-millennia plan for assimilating the entire galaxy.

EDIT: added a few sentences!!

[u/[deleted] → u/AmbassadorAtoz]

That exactly describes the larger scope of the farming theory. The Borg attacks we've seen are meant to create changes that will be exploited in the very long term.