Which resource do you find to be most valuable? Which resource have you noticed caused the humans to lose, or got closest to it. My thoughts:

Population: Seems to be relatively easy to hold onto, given you never get overwhelmed by raiders. We've had some pretty overwhelming situations, but the way turns go it seems to take some pretty bad luck. Although we've always had a piolet. I imagine if all the pilots become cylons this could be hard for the humans to hold onto.

Morale: Seems to be the most volatile. Lots of cards to increase and decrease this resource. Hasn't been a tipping point in any of our games.

Food: This, in my experience, is the resource that sinks fleets. Food shortages are common and when pulled insure at least one food gets reduced. This is very important when the end of the game is near and all human resources are almost depleted. If food is ever reduced to one, then the game can end easily by pulling a food shortage.

Fuel: This starts the lowest of any resource and will almost always be reduced when jumping. It's balanced such that, on average, about 8 fuel will be needed for your jumps alone. This means that small increases or decreases in fuel can have large complications later in the game.

Nice post for human strategy purposes.

We've seen fuel and food being the most common problems. In our one human victory, they actually jumped to a fuel depot and recovered some. Morale hasn't seemed to be a problem, as the president has some ways to increase it through quorum cards.

We've had a population loss or two, but they were because the entire game was a disaster and the fleet was smashed.

Gaius Frakkin Baltar said:

Good post.

The neat thing about this game is that all 4 resources will usually be tight and any one of the 4 can easily be the cause of a human loss depending on the way each game plays out, or the way that the cylon players play out their treachery.

Our last game we struggled with keeping Population and Morale the most, and Fuel as we got closer to Kobol. It ended up a victory for Cylons with them draining our Morale to 0. But each game it can change.

Just another really cool thing about this game imo.

As I see it, its Population, as only one card in the entire game can increase this by 1

All other resources has a means of coming back.

Of course if you keep the raiders at bay, you might not loose alot... but one accident...

I may be colored by my only game, where we were doing best on population and morale, and then suddenly lost 4 population, and some turns later lost the game due to population. Truth be told, the Crisis deck was not shuffled all too well, and we got most of the games raiders attacks at the same time. Spent 2 nukes at the start of the game, removing 2-3 base stars and having more jump in on the next players turn - but we didn't miss those warheads later in the game, as it was quiet with no cylons. Almost all the attack cards had been played.

But the fact remains, that you can regain 1 population, compared to all the other resources.

My co-players also felt that the FTL drive was random and that there should be another way to increase the track - I think they are affected by the fact that early jumping was just NOT an option for us.

...Idless

Morale seems to be the best way of damaging the humans (and so, the most valuable). There are a *lot* of crisis cards that damage morale (or at least, more than the others). It seems as though this is the only way of dropping morale.

Fuel is similarly volitile, but a human Admiral will find a Tylium planet and there's a good chance a Strategic Planning will be involved, and that will end any hope of damaging the fuel out. If the Admiral is a Cylon, there's a good chance of running it into the dirt.

Population seems to be the safest. It'd take something truly catastrophic to cause it to run out. Like, an unrevealed Cylon player using the communications location to move the civilian ships into a zone with raiders and no vipers and getting lucky with what's on board them, or continual failure of crisis cards affecting population, or frequent use of FTL Control when it will kill three people.

Food also seems pretty safe, though not as safe as population. There are a few crisis cards that affect it, but there doesn't seem to be enough to actually run it into the ground. Even if you fail a few skill checks with food, you're unlikely to lose to it hitting zero, or even see it enter the red.

Has anyone had any 'military' victories for the Cylons? Where the humans just lost all the population? It seems awfully difficult to do, even with a Cylon attack crisis combined with either of the Supercrises that interact well with Cylon fleets...

My gaming group has found Fuel to be the most precious resource. It's expended when jumping as well as being lost in various crisis cards. In general though all four have created problems in the past. A bit of bad luck can see any of the resources quickly drop towards the red line though. In one game we were still on 12 population pretty close to Earth then a couple of Cylon attacks later we had lost more than half of the resource thanks to losing civilian ships and a rather hasty FTL jump.

Kahadras