Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: Battlestar Galactica

[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="fabio"] It really does make ship damage markers pretty pointless.[/quote] Post-Exodus, I've won one game by destroying Galactica with ship damage (after destroying Pegasus) and lost another as a human because we had to divert so much effort to keeping damage down. At one point, every single Raider piece was on the board and attacking Galactica along with both basestars and a heavy, and sometimes you get lucky with the dice. [quote] It's kind of the mechanics' fault that that is the optimum move. Getting a free jump at the beginning of a cycle versus saving it until you're swamped by enemy ships at a random point in a cycle. The risk of Kane being a Cylon or being neutralized by them outweighs the benefits of the latter over the former.[/quote] Well, then you probably should play without her as a character. If you can't in good conscience allow someone to decide when to use their power in the game and defend it accordingly, then it's best to avoid the issue altogether. At 30+ games of which most have been with Pegasus included and with Kane (largely because people want to be admiral and I tend to take her if no one else does), I have never come across the jump-first-turn-or-cylon argument, which is perilously close to the nutty "shoot Baltar with Cally" first turn "optimization" that I've recently seen argued as a result of her special ability. As Kane I would rather be suspected and potentially killed/brigged than simply auto-deploy my power, regardless of whether I have a cylon card or not. If you've worked out the percentages, I'd love to see them. But I play with some pretty spergy people at times, and they seem to have no problem acknowledging innocent until proven guilty as a first commandment over paranoia and optimization. [quote]Guess I'll try it then. The fleet aspect was getting boring because of the Pegasus stuff. It was just a matter of keeping the vipers by the launch tubes while Cass moved all the civilians there.[/quote] From what you're describing I'm less convinced it will be a solution for you. It seems like you or your group has a very clear min-max bias to playing the game which really exposes its rough edges. Exodus smooths out a lot of those edges, but it isn't going to change that Galactica is fundamentally about bluffing and not about math, and if it feels like the latter you're doing it wrong. [quote] How does it handle the aspect of hidden Cylons? The original was too easy for the humans (investigative committee), Pegasus tried and floundered with treachery. This is the part my group would care most about, and the description of the human agenda cards just sounded terrible. [/quote] The Pegasus solution to IC was to clarify what many of us had as house rules already, which is that IC doesn't reveal destiny cards. That has proved a sufficient nerf to the card to keep it from being a game-changer at every key point of the game, which si the problem people were describing with the destiny deck revealed. Treachery was an altogether new mechanic along with the reckless cards that it worked with, and while I wouldn't cast it aside I would say it is only partially successful in terms of being significant at times but rarely as useful as simply having a decent value card of any normal color, especially with experienced groups that know better than to go reckless late in the game or if there's a cylon with a hand of cards ready to go. I haven't used the human agenda cards, so I can't speak to them directly except that they aren't of interest to me in the abstract (not least because of how similar they are to the Cylon Leader bullshit). I would say the main contribution of Exodus is altering the tempo and strategic focus of the game so it's approximately an even split between focusing on crises and ship combat/jumps rather than the heavy bias towards the former that existed before. It's just a much more frantic and tighter session where you tend to get a lot of distance 7-8 game ends with razor thin resource margins, regardless of who wins. Again, try to imagine your games without the errand boy pilots and cylon attack cards, and with a CAG that has a very valuable set of powers up against a far less random Cylon fleet. [/quote]