izigame.me

“Best Colonel Tigh drinking simulator. 13/10”
This game has good story ruined with sooooo many mistakes in design.
1) Horribly basic tutorial. Does not tell you how to intercept enemy missiles; adjust attack range; turret top/bottom placement; FTL jump first, build ships after; cheese with viper squadrons, and prioritizing missions across the map over enemy attacks on planets. You learn it on your own through trial and error. “But here is how you use flak” the most useless ability you can’t even use for 20 missions until you get your own battlestar, by when you ether learned vipers are better or ragequit the game.
2) It took me many returns and ragequiting to just get started playing. Any ship or mission lost in early game is an immediate softlock, even on easy difficulty.
3) The game prioritizes blue missions over stopping cylon raids. And if you don’t time your $140 FTL jumps, you won’t make it across the map in time. But they are THE goal in the war. Meanwhile helping planets in orbit does not give you any money or respect back.
4) WHY THE FRAK MUST I BUY THE BATTLESTAR BLUEPRINTS FROM IN MY OWN HANGER CREW?!! YOU HAVE CLEARENCE FOR THIS!!! WE LITERALY BUILT AND DELIVED THE 5TH ONE BEFORE I COULD EVEN MOVE FREELY ON THE MAP!!!
There is also nothing stopping you from making more than 8 original Jupiters at any point in the game. Had that ability been removed by story, that would have made their value actually iconic.
Did not like the game turning Galactica from an average Jupiter battlestar war survivor into THE legendary colonial war flagship from the start. That feels unearned, especially it getting immediatly benched for all of episode 1.
5) The story is fine enough.
The voice actors do a great job of capturing the right level of stressful, grating, hopeful and aggressive.
But when the game outright forgets its own rules, or the admiralty overreacts for the sake of making conflict, that's when you throw your mouse through the screen. Datalus stand at Ragnar? I had only to mop up the straggler light carriers and would have won. Cancel the evacuation plan? “Nah. Pass me my shotgun instead.” Discovery of Galleon? Mopped all the enemy battlestars, loosing only all my torpedoes and vipers. Cancel the mission order? Dead silence.
Even IF you do these story parts first, the game still tells you “now kill everyone on the map” almost every time.
Sure its a prequel, but its not a game, if winning the hard fights gives no payoff.
6) Savegame carryover episode content is great. Feels like you actually are making progress in a brutal war.
The game does NOT let you save past last mission victory. You could accidentally lose a lot of progress by suddenly winning the episode.
7) The “we want to make a ship war boardgame, but with a 3rd axis” is obvious immediately, as it brings NOTHING good to gameplay or a 2D realtime strategy/tactics games. Yes, some ships have turrets that shoot up or down only, but logically that means that in space you just flip the ship upside down and keep firing. Instead everyone agrees there is a “down” in space. Maneuvering vertically just makes things more complex for no benefit. And you have to micromanage every ship in your fleet. You can’t leave these guys alone for 1 turn, else they won’t fire their missiles, brace for impact, or even outright crash into the only asteroid for miles.
8) Repetition. Once you get going, you will get stuck on the same maps doing the same identical fights. Set all ships to defensive, launch all squadrons, set max speed forward, wait for enemy to missiles to hit your AA guns and fighters, intercept enemy fighters with 2 of your own, set all ships to max attack mode, repeat. Autoresolve should not be your best go to button.
9) AI cheats. I have no idea where the AI gets this much money to rubberband out this many attack fleets. For all the resources I have to burn on just getting around the map, the enemy fleets have no such setbacks. The moment a “remove 1 cylon fleet of the board” mission shows up these fleets literally start spawning every turn so you can’t remove a hidden fleet of the map.
Showdown with Latchises POINT BLANK DOUBLE TORPEDO SALVO revealed he is unkillable past 40 hull points. And later rematch is just the same fight.
10) Maximum fleet size of 7+1 and 8000 fleet supply points will be infuriating once you get enough resource points stockpiled. “Sure you can rush an armada in 1 turn, but you are only allowed 7 ships” The more ships you bring to a fight, the more damage you do, the more missiles and vipers you launch, regardless of point count. But using big ships means you are locked out to 6 or less ships, when the enemy tends to bring 9 or more. And those +50 points in ship cost outright block you from having a powerful fleet. You can’t even have a fleet of 7 Artemis light battlestars at that cost.
For me the best story fleet was the 2 Adamants, Hercules, Ranger, Selestra and the biggest battlestar you can get. You cant beat Datalos 2 raptor slots + bigest draids for 550 Selestra cost.
11) Operation Anabasis is an attempt to recreate episode “33” on repeat. But at the core of it there is no actual drama. The enemy has no max cap on their forces. And you are at the literal RNG gods mercy where they jump into the map. So you ether bring the best and use the new civilian ship as decoy to save your standing fleet, or you lose your ships by having the enemy swarm you with everything. I started with 16000 point 10000 crew of Minervas with Vipers 7, and Herculeses (because of FLAK ability), lost only 1 Minerva, came back with 9993 survivors, and 80% of all "rescued" civilians dead. A pointless adventure just to hear two women complain about barge duty.
12) Being able to send only 6 ships to ghostfleet during only story missions was bit of a loss. I would have prefered feeding ghostfleet with sidemission ships, waiting in dread for the unknown.
13) You get 1 new officer to recruit every turn, but fleet CIC officers are OP to all others. With CIC you can up the fire rate and range, or go maximum flak power and enemy spotting dradis. No other fleet officer type can top that. Every captain skill tree lacks to the need for maxed out max CIC command and 8000 point fleet size.

14) Squadrons are overdesigned and cant be used with FLAK effectively. I hate the games forced useless raptor slots. Boarding is too slow and does not let you capture enemy ships. Sweepers are ok, but you only need like 1 and their chaf is spent in 2-3 turns. I would rather have no raptors, send out my vipers and use FLAK all the time. Replace spare raptor slots for Assault Raptors.

15) You can't update your default build setup. Every new ship has to be refitted with better munitions and squadrons manually every time. "Forgot to outfit your supply ship? Your Rangers will be firing regular missiles instead of antiarmor and torpedoes."

16) "Incoming nuke!" "Thanks. I needed that warning 1 turn ago when it actually launched."

17) In episode 1 assign Silas Nash from Galactica to any other fleet. You'll get 2 Nashs in episode 2, who share the same stats. Not sure if you can max him out this way, as mine had only 1 promotion left starting episode 2.
18) My cheese recepie for victory: FLAK forceshield.
Place your ships so their flak covers one another from the start. Send all your squadrons at the enemy. Activate flack over your ships. Your batleships take no damage from flak.They can't use their missiles or torpedoes. But the heavy cannon set at max assault range don't care.You can place a Ranger or Janus on top of your flack shield, bit more to the back.
Adjust defensive posture where needed.
"Take it slow."