This thread has been very interesting to read. My group has only made it to NC once out of three games played with the expansion because the cylons dominate so badly. The one time humans did make it to NC, the last morale was lost on the second players turn. However, we were playing with the rule that humans had to be able to fulfill all requirements of "choice" cards. Not doing that will help. We weren't even aware of the cylon admiral issue. That would have been an unpleasant surprise discovery...

In addition, it appeared to me that NC seemed to be easy for the humans overall. Is it the general opinion that the last battle after Galactica returns is very easy?

I like the idea of a skill challenge to jump the fleet but I am always loathe to add house rules? Is there any indication of any of the designer's thoughts on this problem?

Is it better to use the sleeper agent instead of the sympathizer? Due to the additional infiltration rules, we have just continued to use the sympathizer(as explained below).

One last thing, no one in my group has played with the cylon leaders. (Most are new to gaming and avoid anything that looks too complpicated) Are they worth playing? Thanks.

Chiisaiakai said:

Please, that was nothing. Since I'm almost always lost in this thread, I got time to wander in my thoughts and practice my foreign languages

....in other words : PLEASE SOMEONE SUM UP THE FRAKING SITUATION OF THAT TOPIC ! thanks

Sorry guys. I've been away for a while. I'm surprised to see the thread still going!

I haven't decided on the colors for the skill check at the end yet. Mainly because we've mostly been playing without NC lately. The one time we played where we were going to use NC was a disaster for the humans... they were defeated before the NC phase could start! LOL! I like the colors you guys have chosen for the skill check (red, green, blue)... and you give good reasons for them.

My group seems very similar to Chiisaiakai's group in that our cylons usually prefer to stay unrevealed. We get into some pretty fierce witch-hunts in our group... and that is usually what causes the humans to lose. The people playing cylons love to keep the paranoia going... so why ruin it by revealing and letting everyone know who can be trusted? The witch-hunts and paranoia are one of the reasons why this game is so popular with my group.

Caliban, I think you mean to be asking if it's better to use "cylon leaders" instead of sympathizers. The game rules have always had sleepers. As for our group, we definitely prefer the cylon leader over the sympathizer for a couple of reasons:

1) The humans don't have to force themselves to bring a resource into the red zone in order to prevent a cylon being added to the mix (we don't like this kind of meta-gaming... which is why we also don't like the idea of always having to execute the admiral... same kind of meta-gaming).

2) The cylon leader maintains some mystery with their agenda. Even if everyone knows you are playing a hostile or sympathetic cylon, your agenda could actually be the opposite. There are a couple of sympathetic cards where you have to help the cylons win, and there are a couple of hostile cards where you have to help the humans win. Since you can't say what your agenda is, the other players will have a tough time trying to figure out your intentions. One thing is for sure... it's MUCH harder to win as a cylon leader. However, I don't care about winning... I just enjoy the game. So I'm happy to play the cylon leader if nobody else wants to.

Thanks for the response. I may have the names of the cards wrong but, I thought that there are cylon leaders, the cylon sympathizer from the basic game and the sleeper agent from Pegasus that's meant to replace the sympathizer card. I was wondering whether it's better to use the sleeper agent instead of the sympathizer to avoid the "humans have to make one resource red" issue and whether or not it's more fun. And also just a general opinion on the cylon leaders.

However, now that I write the question again, I realize I may be confused about the sleeper agent card. Is that just a reference card to use when there is a cylon leader? I thought it was supposed to replace the sympathizer card. I will have to go read the rules again when I get the chance.

It's an option to replace the sympathizer card. There's another reference card to use for infiltrating cylon leaders.

Ok. Good to have that clear. Then my question is, do people find it more fun/balanced to use the Sleeper Agent instead of the Sympathizer? In order to add rules incrementally, we currently use Pegasus and New Caprica but, no cylon leaders and we still use the Sympathizer. Due to our group not being too "meta gamey" we haven't yet had the "have to have a resource in the red" issue, though I'm sure it's coming.

This problem with the Cylon admiral has totally ruined New Caprica for us. We just toss it out of the game until a fix presents itself. We had one fix idea, but it wasn't totally satisfying. Still, I'll share it in case anyone else would like to try it.

When the fleet has made it to a distance of 7, the President chooses whether or not the New Caprica endgame will be used. This is totally thematic and hopefully alleviates the metagaming a little. Then again, if the President AND the Admiral are Cylons...

We were happy to see that the expansion fixed up the idiotic sympathizer problem from the base game, but this is just as bad. Still, it's easily remedied and maybe one day we'll consider that aspect of the expansion usable.

Does "kill the admiral if there's an unrevealed cylon" not work for your group for some reason?

James McMurray said:

As with the strategy of intentionally driving resources into the red to avoid a Cylon sympathizer, it's... well, stupid.

Ah, so it's a personal choice thing not a "the rules don't work" one. Cool.

James McMurray said:

Yeah. Anyone who digs executing the admiral is more than welcome to do so. It's not as if I could stop you even if I wanted to. It'll never happen in a game I'm playing though. Because "the rules don't work".

Right, but it's a "the rules don't work" from an emotional or thematic standpoint, not a functional one, which is what I meant when I asked. By all means play however you want, I'm just trying to discover how exactly the rules work towards creating playability (or don't), which can't be done when the vagaries of group dynamics are factored in.

Basically, it's my assumption that FFG will errata the rules if they don't work. However, if the feedback they get is usually along the lines of "we don't like it" rather than "it can't be played" then they're much less likely to change anything, since pleasing everyone is impossible and its the negative voices that are usually much louder.

If my informal poll from a few pages back can help them determine that, great. For my group, we've only played one game with Pegasus and I (as a cylon Ellen) won it using the early jump strategy. We'll be playing our second game of it tonight, but that won't be nearly enough data for me to determine whether the rules work on a functional level. I doubt that tonight's cylon admiral (ir he exists) will even bother trying to stay hidden that long, as a guaranteed execution will happen, and the damage he could do before that point is almost surely stronger than the loss of one morale (which might not even happen if the executioner has a Preventative Policy handy).

For our group I don't foresee there ever being a need for executing the admiral, as the guarantee that it will happen negates the power of the cylon admiral never revealing. But like I said, I've got no data to back that up yet.

James McMurray said:

I'm not sure I understand the difference you're getting at. Functionally, the cylon admiral execution and the sympathizer redline work. The difference I see is that some people use these strategies from a pure analysis perspective while I find them both reprehensible because they both violate the theme.

I can see where both of these problems came from, but it strikes as very odd that FFG didn't notice them early on. One might assume that they playtested the game to death and saw every angle, but that's not been my experience with FFG. I commonly compare them to a software company. They get their game to market. They let the market find all of the problems. They issue "patches", usually by selling you expansions.

The sympathizer was meant as a balancing mechanism. If the humans are doing well, add a Cylon. If not, forget about it. At face value, it looks good since making the game ALWAYS have or not have that extra Cylon would throw off the balance. But did FFG foresee groups intentionally doing bad at first just to avoid getting that extra Cylon? I don't believe they did. I mean, does it make sense that the humans would intentionally shoot themselves in the foot for the first half of the game in the hopes of making that second half go a little smoother? Of course it doesn't. Mechanically, it can work. Thematically, it makes no sense whatsoever.

With the admiral and New Caprica, FFG has set up a tense situation to pressure the humans into hurrying up and to cause them to push their luck by jumping early. I don't believe they saw the Cylon admiral problem in that players would just start routinely executing the admiral when they reached New Caprica. Again, it makes mechanical sense, but it makes no thematic sense.

I like the pressure of getting the civilians up into orbit, but the admiral problem really ruins this part of the expansion for me. In the past, I've considered having the President choose whether or not to go to New Caprica, but another idea has come to mind. What if the admiral AND the next in command have to agree to jump the fleet? One player can't create an instant failure then. There are then two positions where a hidden Cylon can cause the humans grief, but not just suddenly render the game null and void. So how will the mechanical players adapt to this? There's no longer a game-ending pressing need to find that last Cylon. They can execute someone later AFTER they see who's negating the jump to hopeful victory. Hmmm... I'm really liking this idea. Someone poke holes in it for me!

New Caprica has one other minor problem. The regular crisis deck never gets used again. That means that you only have to clean out the Cylons that show up with Galactica and that's really not so hard to do. I'll have to think a bit more on that one...

We played 1 1/2 games tonight. The first game was 5 players and I was a cylon Cain. the admiral issue was not going to come up as we'd already discussed the necessity of offing the admiral and so there was no payoff in it. However, the game ended halfway through when another player revealed as a cylon and it turned out that the loyalty deck had 3 "You are a cylon"s and on "you are not a cylon" (the fifth player was a leader). We restarted, which was good timing anyway since another player had just shown up. In the second game there was no cylon until the sleeper phase, and it wasn't the admiral, so the issue never came up.

Trump said:

As long as the base stars are around there's some threat of new cylons being launched instead of activated, so there is always some risk. You won't get an assault, but there seemed to be a lot of heavy raider and raider icons in the 15 or so NC crisis cards we saw.

James McMurray said:

It'll depend on the characters in the game, of course, but this part can be a bit anti-climactic. Kat, for example, just chewed up the raiders in my last game. The admiral probably has at least one nuke left. And KNOWING that shutting down the existing basestars is adequate encourages the martial players to get that done ASAP.

Trump I agree with you completely on all counts! The sympathizer issue in the core game as well as the cylon admiral/execution plan in pegasus both irk me a lot as a BSG purist and I want my games to stay as much in theme as possible. I hate the idea of 'power gaming' something like this because it takes the fun out of it. To me power-gaming = doing badly to keep the sympathizer human, executing the admiral before new caprica or even something as heinous as executing each player in turn in round one to root out the hidden cylons.

Anyway, I love your idea of having the President and Admiral agree to jump. The image of two military officers turning the key in a nuclear submarine comes to mind. That's how I'm going to play it with my friends (we haven't tried Pegasus yet, first game tonight). I suppose the only obvious hole is if they're both unrevealed cylons who pretended to be human all the way up to the end, but the odds of that must be significant.

On that note, a cylon Pradmiral doing his best to save humanity up until that phase would also be deadly. In that case, maybe have the team nominate someone at the table to take the place of the President as far as opting to jump is concerned? So if there's a Pradmiral, just say 'ok, Tigh is the Pradmiral and we nominate Apollo to also make the decision on when we jump'.

Something like that, I'm not sure... Although the people supporting cylon admiral pre-emptive executions have a point to an extent: if there is an unrevealed cylon still hanging around when Galactica comes to the rescue, then something must be up and the players should be suspecting each other.

Anyway I'm just playing the devil's advocate here trying to think of ways this rule doesn't work. So far I'd say a cylon president AND admiral is the biggest one, but that ought to be extremely rare (plus if the humans make it that far and there are TWO unrevealed cylons, they should seriously be questioning their authority figures). The Cylon Pradmiral is a close second. It's the motivation to be 'human' that makes it tricky.

When you're a cylon in the original game, there is no point in helping humanity for more than a short while so you may as well sabotage as much as you can, but in Pegasus, you have an incentive to 'be human' for this reason.

Bah, I wish I hadn't read the threads about this and instead just waited to see if it happened to me. I imagine the odds of someone independently saying to themselves 'hey... if I'm a cylon admiral I can just wait until new caprica and jump the fleet' are pretty low unless they play the game a LOT. I'm the only obsessive one among my friends so I don't think they would have figured it out on their own.

Anyway, Trump your idea is the best one I've seen so far and that's the rule I'll be using with my friends when we play, so thanks!

Trump said:

re: powergaming vs. thematic play

If you find the posts I've made, you'll probably have the impression that I definitely take the rules very seriously, and approach the different scenarios with a particular 'powergaming' bent. That's because I get a great deal of enjoyment out of rules manipulation (that is, using rules to solve problems, rather than abusing them by unreasonable interpretation, conveniently ignoring them, or cheating).

That said, I do enjoy the thematic parts of the game, and you'll notice that my issue with the problematic scenarios in this thread and the one I linked on the first page (if it still exists) are that the execution mechanic and certain other gameplay aspects are really counter-theme.

I definatly understand wanting to stay true to the source theme behind the game. If someone really likes Star Wars and they play a Star Wars game, logically the person playing is expecting a certain adherence to the themes of Star Wars. However, a game is not THE source material. For instance, how fun would a game be to play if it followed exactly how the source material went. Seems like it would be kinda boring to me, gee, the rebels beat the Empire again, how exciting. That's kinda the point of playing a game, it's linear and we don't know how it'g going to end. If the players know it's going to follow the show exactly, why bother playing, it wouldn't be worth it.

With a game based on a source material, one has to let go of the material alittle bit. If Apollo is a Cylon, are you not going to execute him because he isn't a cylon in the show and survives the whole series? Maybe they shouldn't make any characters for the game that died in the show because if they survive to the end of the game, it wouldn't be thematically correct. Perhaps loyalty cards shouldn't be dealt out to people who for sure were not cylons in the show cause if they get cylon cards thats not thematically right either.

The game is "thematically" perfect, the paranoia, the political jockeying, backstabbing, the desperation. Just consider every game an alternate timeline where characters, events, and loyalties are not known and you will be fine. In the show, there is an airlock, people do get put inside it. In order for the game to be fun everybody has to be on the block. If that lunatic Cain had her way she would put the half the fleet out to pasture just to get one cylon, what if she did "take command".

It's like the Marvel, "What if" comics, they aren't what really happened, but they are fun nevertheless, just like the board game. Just follow the rules and have fun, and don't worry if the game doesn't turn out to be a repeat of the show, its better that way.

Napoleon

napoleonWilson said:

The problem isn't that certain aspects of the expansion are counter-theme in the way you describe. Obviously we understand it's a game and that the events in the game will not follow the exact course as they do in the show. The problem is that some of the mechanics are counter-common-sense, theme-wise.

I just think the Cylon admiral is frustrating and the jump is insanely powerful now. No action should allow a cylon player to obliterate all twelve civilian ships and reduce morale by up to 4 or 5 human players.

napoleonWilson said:

I certainly don't think the game should be a re-enactment tool. However, the game is not "thematically perfect" as you put it. Paranoia, political play and suspicion and generally unprovable accusations are perfectly good. The thematic implications of the Airlock as a loyalty verification tool are not "thematically perfect". I mean, it bothers me that executing faultless individuals (like New Caprica unrevealed Cylon Admirals) or using the Airlock as a "cylon detector" are extremely counter-theme and counter-intuitive.

It is exactly like the old joke about burning or drowning someone to see if they're a witch: If they burned, they were innocent and dead, if they did not burned, they were a witch (and subsequently subjected to dismemberment). When death is trivialized (and it is very much so with the implementation of the execution rules), it gets put into practice.

Frankly, my playstyle doesn't come into it; I dislike the tone of a mechanic in a game being almost directly analogous to a terrible joke and/or historical hypocrisy.

iceberg84 said:

Oh and how a Cylon should be able to obliterate a Bunch of Morons running in Circles for at least 5 rounds until Galactica is comming back to orbit. If hes not lucky the Galactica is barely not even there in his turn. what is he doing then? Saying "No i dont feel like evacuating another civilian ship" aka plz execute me? Or use the Breeders Canyon aka execute me?

The more player the game has, the less this is an issue.

Turric4n said:

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say. Do you mean if he refuses to help evacuate he's a cylon and will thus reveal himself? Not necessarily. There are ways to avoid evacuating without being suspicious. Plus the more players there are the more it's an issue because the more turns will pass allowing galactica more time to return. Even if it happens once in 20 or 30 games, it's too much.

no sorry. you are making the point that a valid strategie should not be there rather than finding countermeasures?

the point is when there are 5 player there are 2 cylon from which at least 4 are human on caprica in this scenario and evacuating civilian ships, that are 4-10 prepared ships and if the cylon admiral has not the perfect timing luck of getting galactica back on his turn there are a few rounds left in which you can still evacuate 1-2 ships per human player. in worst case for him there are going to be 6-9 prepared and he sits there and calculates if they lose or win..

Turric4n said:

Even if all the ships are prepared they still need to be evacuated. Assuming each player has one turn to do it, in a 5 player game with 12 ships still in play in the worst case scenario for the cylons where the unrevealed admiral is last to act, only three other human players will have had turns which means 3-6 ships will have been evacuated (based on whether or not they had executive order cards to release two ships per turn). That's still 6-9 civilian ships destroyed instantly plus 3 human players still on new caprica since I assume no one would leave until all civilian ships make it off the planet. so let's make a further assumption that each destroyed civilian ship amounts to 1 population per ship and maybe 1 fuel per two ships and - 1 food overall (I don't remember exactly what's on the back of each ship token.

So in that scenario where the cylon admiral has incredibly bad luck on his side, he's still got a good chance at destroying 6-9 population, 3-4 fuel, 1 food and 3 morale in a SINGLE action.

Considering the fact that this will destroy at least HALF the starting population and fuel, the humans would have no chance. Clearly this is NOT a 'valid' strategy. It's a flaw that was overlooked. Also keep in mind that the scenario I listed above is one in which the admiral acted last. 3-6 civilian ships could have been evacuated but he still took out half the civilian fleet which deals an incredible amount of damage to the resource dials.

I have never played a game where the humans won with perfection and didn't have any resource in the red, but that is the only situation which would allow the humans to survive such an action.

Anyway, the problem was resolved for me with Trump's idea of having the President and Admiral both agree to jump on one of their turns. By including the second highest-ranking human player in the decision, it renders this 'strategy' irrelevent and negates the concept of executing the admiral out of turn just in case. It makes the game MORE thematic if anything and more fun by including more than one player in this dramatic decision (when to jump).

Anyway I don't have my game board with me right now so I can't confirm the math above, but I encourage anyone to do so and correct me. I would however point out that the most important fact here is that it's almost impossible for the humans to make it to new caprica and escape without losing a significant amount of resources, so even if the cylon admiral only destroys 5 or 6 civilian ships and a few humans, that's still a lethal blow in any game short of all the cylons cheating by not attempting any sabotage whatsoever, which would defeat the purpose of the game.