Recently we had a 4 player game with a new house rule. Since the release of Pegasus the humans have a 80% win ratio, partly due to that my immediate playing group aren't particually fond of New Caprica (mainly due to the length of the game, personally I don't mind it, I love long games!)

So we decided to house rule it slightly, in order to make it a bit fairer to the cylon as currently in a 4 player game the sole cylon has quite a difficult time of it. We'd not include the Pegasus ship at the beginning of the game. Instead it would only appear at either distance 4 or if we pulled the "Reuniting the Fleet" crisis, we thought it'd make things a bit more interesting as well as thematic.

Well... I was the Cylon, Cylon Admiral Saul Tigh to be exact. And I don't know if it was a combination of luck, good acting or unbalancedness, but it was a massacre. I managed to destroy Galactica at distance 1 (my personal best!)

In my defence I think I played quite well. I managed to successfully spike a check that damaged 3 of the vipers in reserve, and when it became apparent that a cylon was amongst us. I managed to convince everyone that Zarek was responsible (he was 100% certain it was me that was the cylon but he's a very vocal and aggressive player so I managed to use that to my advantage), using my cylon hatred I managed to brig him, which was my only option as we didn't have an airlock to flush him out anyway, which was fine by me. I even managed to get the President Laura Roslin executed via the failure on a crisis card, which was good fun. And once I sensed my time was coming to an end, rather than revealing I opted to jump to Communications and told a couple of Civvies that it was safe to fly straight into a horde of raiders, quite an evil moment.

Admittedly after that, I had an unbelievable string of luck, despite the humans hastely brigging me, we had 2 swarms of Cylon ships pop up, and I had really lucky dice rolls on my behalf. I ended up with 12 raiders and 2 basestars on the board and was scoring hit after hit. And the humans had two crisis's that knocked the jump prep icon backwards, so they were still at the start of the prep track. Any vipers in space were quickly destroyed and I managed to shoot down Lee Apollo twice.

Completely viperless and with no Pegusus main battery guns to whittle down the horde. I was getting 12 shots at galactica a turn, roughly get 2 or 3 hits a turn. Before long Galactica was completely destroyed, by the humble raider no less, first time we actually had a 'Galactica Destroyed' end game result. Anyway ramble over, point is, the mood went sour and the humans weren't happy at all and decided it was very unbalanced in the Cylon's favour, I argued it was just more incredible luck on my part.

But anyway, what would you consider the most balanced way to play the game? Maybe if we're not including Pegasus until later, maybe we should remove all the Crisis cards from the Pegasus set aswell as they are a bit more hardcore. Should we remove treachery cards? Do you think its best to just play with the base game set only until Exodus gets here?

I personally quite like Pegasus and New Caprica, but its rare that my group wants to play with both, so I'm just curious to see what you guys consider the best playing option. Until Exodus gets here at least!