In Progress Let's save the 12 Colonies from murderous toasters - a BSG: Deadlock LP

[Hellraiser]

Index

Intro (this post)
Episode 1: A path less travelled
Episode 2: Vessel and Nuke: Warband
Episode 3: Battlestar Diplomacy
Episode 4: Weapons of Mass Destruction
Episode 5: Between the hammer and the anvil
Episode 6: The Helios Alpha Escalation
Episode 7: Worst Colonial versus Noble Sons of Sagittaron
Episode 8: Weapons from a more civilized age.



Introduction



„The origins of mankind are vague and blurry. Legends and myths, most likely distorted by centuries of oral passage, speak of Kobol. Kobol, they claimed, was the birthplace of mankind where humans lived together with gods, the lords of Kobol whom a large portion of humanity still worships. A catastrophe struck Kobol and humanity divided into twelve tribes fled in a heavenly caravan as it was poetically called, eventually arriving here on new worlds in the Cyrannus system we now still call the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.


That is a summarized version of traditional explanation for our origin. Scientific fact, back up by archeological findings and astronomical knowledge, cannot definitely prove this hypothesis. No habitable worlds have been discovered by our astronomers outside of the Cyrannus system. It took centuries since the dawn of spacefaring to develop FTL drives, and the known laws of physics make any kind of exodus from beyond the range of our telescopes and survey ships unlikely.


Yet other evidence clearly contradicts the Cyranian origin hypothesis pointing to the Kobolian origin hypothesis. There are no signs of any kind of human activity older than two thousand years. Humans, but also dogs, cats and other common and useful domesticate animals, have low genetic diversity compared to some wild species. Also remains of humans and the mentioned pets have never been dated to be older than the mentioned two thousand years. Suddenly humans appeared with agriculture, animal husbandry, masonry and metalworking. That is a historical fact from known evidence and after thousands of years of archeological study. There even exist minor religious groups that base their core beliefs around this sudden conjuring of civilization, claiming divine origin.


There are artifacts, primitive art pieces, dated as older than signs of humanity. All of them, from the very first mention of them in historical records, are always referred to as coming from Kobol. If so, the skeptics ask, where are the spacecrafts, the radioactive isotopes, the tylium traces, the servomotors from their machines? Why are there only simple trinkets and religious passages? That dear student, is the great question history tries to answer.“

Introduction page from “Basic History I for Youth Academies” - a Caprican schoolbook.

“They frakked up. They bought their mesh services, their holobands and V-World media. They let Graystone and his Caprican ilk do what they want, not thinking of the consequences. They thought they needed no Lords of Kobol, that they were their own Lords. And thus they created their very own people to obey them, to reinforce this illusion of being almighty. Clad in chrome the Cylons toiled for them while they grew fat, lazy, spiritually and morally bankrupt. Toasters, they called them, clunky shiny gadgets that had to work for their benefit, just like the namesake from which this slur originated. Nothing to fear they said, they are just machines meant to serve us just like your phones and holobands. Perfectly safe. Until they grabbed guns and started shooting at the masters…”

Adam Veste, leader of the “Tawa Tigers” Saggitarron insurgent group in his video message to "the people" following the news of the first Cylon attacks.

Campaign intro movie:



Dark times have befallen the twelve colonies. When in the past ambition, greed and lust for power have driven conflict in which brother has killed brother, including nuclear warfare between the empires of Leonis and Virgon, those wars were still limited by the human desire to survive and diplomacy was possible. The Cylons do not fight for that, their fight seems to be a war of both liberation and revenge. Negotiation is not an option, human extinction is a possible outcome.

With Queenstown and many other Picon cities in ruins from the Cylon blitz, colonial command once located in Perkinston is no more. Our job is to follow Admiral Cain who is now the top-ranking Colonial Fleet officer, show the twelve colonies that the desperate unification attempt and the formation of colonial fleet was not in vain and stop the Cylons.

-----

The name of the game is Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, a strategy game set in the re-imagined series' continuity more specifically in the past which was not very well explored. The past in this case being a few years deep into the first Cylon war, which lasted 12 years IIRC.

I actually had an idea to do this back when the game came out but it needed a bit more polishing, difficulty balancing and lacked some features. Luckily these were added it in. On the 29th the (minor) expansion pack will release and I have disposable income so I will start the campaign then, also with the previous DLC which added some new tactical options much needed by the game.

The campaign objective is to:
- prevent too many colonies from quitting the quorum of 12 due to neglecting to defend them from Cylons. It is possible to have them change their mind and get back on the quorum unlike in X-COM.
- not lose the Daidalos shipyard.
- finish all the story missions which we can do when we please/are ready

Most importantly this will be semi-ironman. Why semi? Because the story missions are instant game-over on failure and they are not balanced around ironman (you can't redo with a new fleet). Also loss of some critical campaign assets is instant game over (Daidalos) which will warrant a reload, and the AI loves to focus the Daidalos. In secondary missions where I can continue after failure I will do so. Skirmish fights as well, no reloads in those cases. And both of those are the bulk of the game. So basically the lose condition for this LP is if I fail to prevent 7 colonies from leaving the quorum, which is most likely to happen due to strategic level fucks-ups (or frak-ups considering the setting) such as losing too many ships and otherwise not being capable of stopping the Cylons from besieging the colonies.

Ship damage will be set to persistent, difficulty with be Admiral (hardest).

Also I am accepting requests to name officers after you.
EDIT: You get to name your flagship also, but I will not be applying the flagship names to non-battlestar ships because those are cannot fodder mostly.

If officers are a no-go, I can rename ships of which we will have plentiful, unless the toasters force the quorum to dissolve first.

So all of you can indeed lead the glorious fight against the toasters and probably die in the process during a tactical battle. Volunteer here in this topic, we start the fight on Tuesday.

 

[tindrli]

tindrli reporting for duty sir!

 

[baud]

Baud ready to get exploded in space!

 

[Hellraiser]

Good, good. I checked and you can rename officers so both of you will get the first two fleets. It will not be anything spectacular in the beginning but the mere fact you will be sucking up all the early exp means your command point pool will rise the quickest and thus you will get new bigger toys first. Just a bit of a warning, the officer portraits make oblivion's face-gen look good:

Then again with a face like that the toasters might run away without wasting any munitions!

FYI, here's the twelve colonies, all the major bodies are on the campaign map. The moons are not, also there's some crap in between the four planetary systems.

 

[tindrli]

the faces reminds me of ghouls.. then again they don't sleep much so that's that

 

[Hellraiser]

Do the Colonials lack tools to directly the genome? Not impossible. Inferior biology but superior robotics. If they evolved on different worlds, I would imagine that the native life forms of Cyrannus would possess dramatically different genomes from dogs, cats and men humans (lol, Canadian TV) and that this would be readily observable with direct comparison of genomes. In addition, the sudden appearance of humans on twelve separate worlds doesn't really allow for indigenous evolutionary theory unless you hold that man represents the inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process. But then again, most common animals don't appear to share any evolutionary roots with the other life, which might serve to undermine popular acceptance of such a theory.

We can blame that on Canadian TV and plot holes/fridge logic how you want to call it. They probably wrote themselves into a corner. On one hand they had to have the colonials sceptical of the mythical and supernatural as it created interesting scenarios when weird shit happened. On the other they decided to go with 12 separate worlds and stupidly enough had to have the 12 tribes already originate from Kobol, per the tomb of Athena etc. Even if you assume that at some point they would be clustered together on one or two worlds and spread out later to the rest, one would expect the tribes to mix and new ethnic identities to form. If all 12 were settle at once, it would be hard for people to believe they were native to the system (or, as I suggested in that intro bit, they would have religious beliefs that supported simultaneous divine creation of human civilization on 12 worlds). RDM's original idea was to go with the colonies be states on one planet, but I guess that would make the common spacefaring and FTL in particular hard to justify. In the end the official version is some bodies were colonised later and some had to be terraformed (in this case kobolformed) which makes it even more difficult to believe that scepticism to the exodus-origin theory is justified.

Either way what I wrote is a direct interpretation of what Espenson's or one other writer's alias wrote as a comment under the Caprica-related blog posts back when that aired, which is in line with what we saw with the show. That everything prior to settling Cyrannus exists mostly as myth, legend or semi-religious passage and after two thousand years colonial popular opinion is on the fence if the ancient texts are full of shit or true. The genetic diversity thing was also from one of those comments. What we know from the show is that the exodus from Kobol was already described "poetically" in the scrolls/whatever, as if done by someone who has never seen a spaceship in his life and had difficulty grasping the concept from his low tech-level perspective, which would support scepticism form the colonials regarding their origins.

Also, worth of noting is this from projectrho (great website), which applies not just space combat but fiction in general:

For every kilogram of handwavium you remove from a setting, you add about 10 cubic meters of impossible to maintain plumbing.

Or simply, if you choose to explain something instead of ignoring it, you end up with more plot/logic holes you need to plug.

 

[baud]

Cheering for the toasters, actually. Love the way they click around.

We've got a traitor in our midst! Kill him before he can betray us!

 

[Hellraiser]

We've got a traitor in our midst! Kill him before he can betray us!

We'll space him

 

[Azira]

I'm gonna follow this. Possibly to see my name on the roster, then experiencing sudden, graphic death.

 

[lightbane]

The title has a typo. It's Deadlock.

Let's see how the next update will be.

 

[Hellraiser]

The title has a typo. It's Deadlock.

Let's see how the next update will be.

Sorry about that, PM'd a mod to fix that. Please accept this gif of spess warfare as consolation:

Edit: JarlFrank fixed it, in honor of his deed the second Battlestar I build, assuming the Cylons don't rape us with chrome cocks before that point, will be named after him.

I already have a name for the first one. But I will not spoil it.

 

[baud]

Sorry about that, PM'd a mod to fix that.

It's odd that you can't change it yourself, I've done it a few time for my let's play

 

[Hellraiser]

Sorry about that, PM'd a mod to fix that.

It's odd that you can't change it yourself, I've done it a few time for my let's play

Derp, I just noticed the button for that. It is in thread tools.

In other news the patch is out but the expansion will be released at 4 pm UK time so in 11 minutes unless the tea-drinkers changed their timezone or abolished summer time/DST. Luckily the bloody thing is large so probably it contains the expansion data already and will finish downloading just before 4 pm.

Expect the first proper LP update this evening potato europe time. Well, ok, worst case scenario it will be around midnight. Depends how much I fight with the uploading and writing.

 

[tindrli]

must be midnight then

 

[Hellraiser]

Episode 1: The path less travelled

Previously on Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock...

Cylons rebelled, the war is a stalemate.

Four colonial officers requested to be re-assigned from their local colonial armed forces to colonial fleet.

Imgur is suspected of being Cylon malware.

Obligatory BSG flash-forward teaser montage:



Some music:

Update

Picon just got frakked with a capital F and multiheaded robotic chromed dicks. It was not haevan.

Colonial Fleet has been decapitated with the Cylon orbital shelling of Perkinston where colonial fleet HQ was located.

Our fleet, or rather Daidalos and two pitiful corvettes, are stationed at Scorpia in Helios Gamma. Daidalos has an almost done Jupiter class Battlestar (heaviest colonial capital ship in the game - a battleship/carrier hybrid). We have to piggyback it to Picon, as every colony was promised one Jupiter class Battlestar for signing the articles of colonization.

While that ship is sitting in Daidalos' drydock, my job is to secure Scorpia's orbital space by scrapping some toaster boats lingering about, so that the Cylon's don't know we want to move.

Chapter I

This is unfortunately a tutorial mission. I wanted to not skip these for storyline reasons and because I wanted to be better prepared for when shit turns real.

Unfortunately they changed how skip tutorial works and now it skips missions instead of disabling the "you must do X now" handholding which it did before, which is why I did not opt to skip it.

We have two Manticore corvettes, you can think of these as light cavalry. They are fast and manoeuvrable, have one light gun up front and one in the back and one ordnance slot. By default the ordnance slot is filled with guided missiles, but later on I will be able to swap it for torpedoes, various kinds of mines and even nuclear warheads.

Our manticores ID'd the hostiles. The toasters only have their own Nemesis class corvettes here. The Nemesis is a more subtle weapon than the Manticore. It also posses an ordnance slot and a light forward gun, but it also carries an electronic warfare suite used to hack Colonial ships. That and the missiles make it very annoying. Also they just love to start hacking and stay at max hacking range, running away while your firewalls drop.

The basics of how ships work and how to kill them. Each side has plating, once you blast through it you damage the hull. With each hull hit sub-systems also get damaged (there are also other ways to damage them - hacking and boarding). Damaged sub-systems are bad news but can be repaired during battle. That is if your crippled ship is not blasted into scrap first.

The "hull/armour cannot be repaired" bit is a lie in the context of the new expansion/DLC. It adds some support ships that can repair/reinforce ships a bit during battle.

Ok, one down, 3 tutorial missions to go *sigh*.

Now we need to jump to Picon to finish this fedex quest involving capital ships.

This is a briefing screen, it only tells us what the fuss is about, to actually start the mission I need to jump to the planet with the mission marker with a fleet and confirm I want to start the mission (and not wait or murder cylons in orbit)

Story missions grant tylium (fuel - our main currency used for nearly everything from moving fleets to building ships) and requisition points (used to recruit/promote officers and unlock tech).

Yeah, the titular Galactica is missing. Otherwise things would be too easy.

This is a new mechanic just added in the patch. Fleet damage is persistent. Daidalos grants some free repair points but I still need to spend 4 tylium to polish up the hulls. Repairing far from civilization costs more (not sure how much yet, we will find out probably).

Chapter II

The mythical Jupiter class Battlestar in action. It carries two squadrons of strikecraft (in this case Colonial Vipers mk. I), one ordnance slot (guided missiles) and has enough guns and armour to make opponents reconsider getting near.

Colonial ships can change their posture (probably abstracting crew focus/allocation) from defensive to offensive, this boosts some sub-system effectiveness and reduces the effectiveness for other systems. Neutral posture is best for manoeuvrability, ships with "boost thrusters" on are in neutral posture and sacrifice manoeuvrability for straight line movement.

Look at those guns on that Jupiter. It will pound anything in any direction except the back, which is it's major blindspot overall. The ship also flies like a brick. But who needs grace when you have guns, fighters and nukes?

The Cylons deployed one of their own strikecraft. The Wardriver drone carries electronic warfare equipment similar to the Nemesis. Also since today's patch it generates a jamming field which can deflect guided missiles (Cylon's lacked missile-counters) and reduces enemy squadron mobility (and thus makes them easier to hit/kill).

This is the Talon, the toaster light carrier. It housed the Wardriver you just saw. This ship is the first of the most annoying Cylon ships we will face in the campaign. There are 2 or 3 other Cylon ship classes we will quickly grow to hate (if the Phobos is as annoying as I think it is, assuming the AI uses its unique ability).

The Talon has rather strong broadside weapons and armor. Its main weaknesses are weak frontal and rear armor in addition to lacking an ordnance slot. The one squadron is nothing that scary. Cylon fighters are weaker than colonial and the only reason why they are a threat is because Cylons can field more squadrons in theory.

Indeed the best option is to just kill it before the firewalls go down. Defensive posture raises firewall regeneration which also helps. Also Raptor squadrons, either docked with a friendly shipped or inside their parent-ships hangar, raise firewall strength.

FYI looks like the Cylons wrecked a Battlestar with an Admiral. This means we are stuck listening to Cain's bitchyness.

Ah yes, one key advantage of battlestars unique to the colonials, flaks. Flaks make all guns on one side of the ship create a sustained flak barrier. Anything that is not a capital ship that flies into it is toast. Squadrons get decimated, torpedoes blows up, same goes for nukes (and they don't go nuclear, they just die).

The drawback of this is that this game has friendly fire, and that it lowers the damage output and can make you lose slugfests with other capital ships as the guns are busy firing flak rounds instead of shelling the other guy.

Two tutorials down. Two more to go. Spess canadians/japanese hybrids take the big ship from us. Don't worry, we will build get own big toys eventually. If the Cylons don't turn the Colonies to rubble first.

So we have good and bad news.

Good news is we can now build ship, and the game forces me to build a manticore and rush it (boo, I rather wait and build more ships over 3 turns). Bad news is the Cylons seem to have sabotaged a key navigational aid and Daidalos seems to be running on a 386 so we can't jump far. We need to find the source of this toaster plot.

Rushing a manticore. You can see I can also build a berserk class (well, in theory, the tutorial won't let me). That is a ship from the first DLC, you will see it in action in this update.

It seems that the terminal orbiting Caprica (the primary colonial superpower) is the source of the dreaded cylon IDRIS hax.

This mission will reward our toaster-killing fleet with schematics for Adamant construction. I will explain in a moment what that ship is.

Yeah whatever, just point me at the toasters.

All ships have FTL recharge time. Only after that time passes between jumps, they can jump for free. Otherwise you pay tylium, more the sooner you wish to jump. This means you have to be very careful when and how you position your fleets.

For 70 tylium we can rush it.

Chapter 3

This is the insertion/loadout screen. We can change ordnance/squad loadout (it is free at the Daidalos) and position the fleet.

We have two squadrons available currently, vipers mk. I (fighter) and raports (support/boarding).

Raptors have no weapons (combat raptors are a different squad - they got added in this expansion), but they can board ships (since the latest patch), boost firewalls and disarm mines (since the DLC which added mines).

Oh great, this will totally not blow up in our faces...

Caprica, being the main colony to benefit from Colonial unification, decided to help us out by lending two Adamant class cruisers.

The Adamant is a mini-battlestar without flak. That is to say it is a versatile light ship that has broadside light guns, an ordnance slot and one strikecraft slot. It's main disadvantage is that it is fairly slow. But with fighters and missiles speed is not that much of an issue. Similar to the Talon it has weak armor in the front and read, but still more than the Talon.

These adamants are pretty far from my fleet and they will stay there unless Cylons show up near.

Couldn't they just shut them down? Or send raptor to disable them?

In any case Cylons jumped to stop our destruction of civilian property.

I dispatched my 3 manticores to deal with their nemesis corvettes, skimming around the range of Talon broadsides. Meanwhile the Adamants have been moved to support and shell the Talons. One Nemesis just got blown up.

BTW forgot to mention. Daidalos comes with two squadron slots, I have the default Vipers in them and they were deployed. So with the Adamant-based squadrons I have four deployed.

A Adamant took a beating but similar to the Athena battlestar from last mission these are on loan and will evaporate after the mission anyway. Might as well use them.

Positioning is important, here you seem my own Adamant (well the Caprican loaned one) taking a side full of colonial missiles from a friendly. Cannon fire also can damage friendlies. Luckily the mission is easy and that particular side was not facing enemy guns.

It was all in vain, go figure. I am not sure what is worse, Cylons or politicians.

I use most of my RP on the Admant schematics, the tutorial does not give me a choice.

Speaking of ships now I can finally build what I want. The Berserk class light carrier lacks the ordnance slot and armor of the Adamant. It however has heavier and longer range guns and is slightly cheaper, both tylium and command point-wise.

This is our status. Most colonies are shitting their pants and are one toaster orbital parade away from leaving the quorum. We need these idiots to fund our war machine of robot extermination.

We also see Caprica gives the most Tylium currently. This is because the fleet just murdered some Cylons around it and is parked in orbit raising the colony's morale.

I use my tylium reserves to order 3 new ships. 2 Adamants and one Berserk.

Toasters decide to make a picnic in Helios Alpha. While currently only Picon is under siege (again!) the Cylon fleets are orbiting Icarus (dead rock, see the map I posted in this topic earlier) and the gas giant Zeus will sooner or later attack something valuable. Or combine and attack a colony. It is best to blow them up while they are scattered. Also presence in the system in general lowers morale slightly (not as bad as toasters parked in a Colony's orbit).

Thank to the Cylon blockage space canada-japan is being useless to our war effort. Time for a skirmish (at least it will have no cut scenes).

OPERATION PICON

The Berserk is armed with two medium guns, one on each side.

The Adamant has light guns.

Luckily the toasters at Picon are just Nemeses (is that how it is spelled?) and Daidalos finished producing our 3 new ships. We outgun them severely.

The battle was piss easy, I order 3 more ships. As the Daidalos fleet is near its limit, and because we need to go to Helios Gamma, they will form our second fleet - a garrison popping toaster moles in Helios Alpha.

Meanwhile the religious zealots of Gemenon showed a disturbing lack of faith in the Quorum and defected. The 3 Cylon fleet groups in orbit might be somehow related to this.

Did I mention that technically I did not finish the tutorial yet? Yeah, this is a good indicator what we can expect in this campaign.

Daidalos fleet moves to intercept after some turns of downtime for construction/FTL recharge.

OPERATION GEMENON

Luckily for us this is just another Nemesis flotilla.

The AI loves to throw all missiles at one target. The counter is to either hide the target behind flak or use to assign fighters to defend it. Fighter can shoot down incoming missiles, but only when defending the target of those missiles. This mechanics is of course lifted from the TV series' battles.

The hacking destroyed a fire control on the "Lancer" manticore. Obviosuly without it the guns don't fire, which is bad,.

Still we have five squads of Vipers and 3 Manticores which makes for a very deadly and fast force and make short work of the toasters.

BATTLE FOR GEMENON

Yeah, there were 3 groups there after all. But one might have bailed. In any case, we need to take care of the rest of the Cylons so a second engagement took place on the same turn.

Judging by the unidentified DRADIS contacts, this must be the two remaining groups merged together. This will be more difficult than what I faced so far.

The fleet is split into two groups. The heavier ships go "left" and broadside the nearest toasters they find. Manticores form a wolfpack and go blast some Nemeses with missiles and cannons in a speedy raid on the "right" flank. This game could use a compass on the HUD.

Remember the "Lancer" manticore? You can see its name on the hull here. What you cannot see though is the explosions, as it just got rammed by that Talon destroying both ships.



First ship loss. Luckily it is just a Manticore. You can fully expect that at some point I will lose all of the ones I built, which will mean they no longer have a place on the battlefield.

You have to really be careful, the AI loves to ram. Or it is just easy to have your ships on a collision course.

Apart from the loss of the lancer this was a victory.

Gemenon is back on the Quorum.

Time for the final tutorial mission. An abandoned Tauron rock in the interstellar medium known as Cocalus is to serve as a stop on our way to Helios Gamma. What could go wrong?

Chapter 4

Yes, DRADIS contacts. Just 2 though.

Judging by the Prototype Cylon Raider squadrons (their fighters) the two contacts are Talons. I keep some ships near the Daidalos as I know what will happen soon...

A pair (or 3? I forgot) of Nemeses jumps in. This is a very dirty trick that happens a few times in the campaign and skirmish missions. Why dirty? Because they jump nearly in missile range of Daidalos. If you do not defend it it will eat missiles and possibly get blown up.

Still this prepares you for the future. Later on having the Daidalos in combat is suicide as both sides deploy heavier toys while the Daidalos stays the same. And the Cylons start using torpedoes which can be fired at unidentified DRADIS contacts from any range. It has piss poor plating just a lot of hull points. Which means little as it is easy to hit as it doesn't move (hence the torps are so deadly).

While the Nemeses are dealt with, Adamants and the Berserk go after the Talons. The Berserk got too close and needs to retreat as one side is almost out of armour.

Guess what happened here? Well, here's a screenshot from the post-battle replay:

A manticore collided with a Nemesis, the frakker turned around and rammed it.

Meanwhile the Talons insist on shelling the Berserk. I set it to defensive posture so that it doesn't blow up.

Luckily that works and only the Manticore is lost. Two ships now...

Rhea still took a beating.

Officers! Finally!

The left most skill path increases command points. In the past the base was 2k, but the latest patched changed it to 4k and lowered the skill increases to 1k per level from 1500. That was because Cylons did bother with such small caps and it was difficult to raise new officer level to match Cylon fleet points.

Ignore the current name, I will rename the guy in a moment after the tutorial stops bugging me.

The flagship skills are shit without exception and will be ignored unless necessary to advance other skills.

EXP gains? Bleh. Best one in this right path is the fortification bonus skill, that grants extra income.

Picon is faltering which means it will defect soon. Virgon and Caprica seem to be blockaded. Virgon is too far to intervene but Caprica is not.

Finally the tutorial is over we can do what we want. A story mission will appear sooner or later, probably after we jump to Helios Gamma with Daidalos.

Because IDRIS got haxxed we can only jump using the mid-points to get from one system to the other. So always 2 jumps away, 3 if going diagonally (Alpha to Delta, Beta to Gamma).

Brave Codexers join the Fleet.

I could unlock torps but at this point there are not that useful. After we get some ships with more ordnance slots though that will change.

Baud takes command of Picon Fleet we left behind in Alpha and will liberate Caprica. Godspeed brave soldier!

BATTLE OF CAPRICA

The numbers are equal, 6 ships versus 6.

This is a new ship on toaster side called the Cerastes. It is from the first DLC armed with light cannons, something the Cylons orginally lacked. It provides decent support against strikecraft and is fast.

The 3 Adamants form a battle line for broadside efficiency. Manticores move in to intercept the Nemeses. One of those gets to experience a missile salvo.

Despite killing a Nemesis just now the Cylons just got 3 Talons behind my Adamants. This is bad.

Also the 2 Cerasteses flew under those same Adamants avoiding their firing arcs.

In a desperate move the Styx manticore allocates all resources to getting the hell out of firing range.

Well that didn't work. The other explosion is a Nemesis. At least this time it was an actual kill from fire and not from ramming.

Third ship lost, first to enemy guns.

The Talons focused on the Berserk next, they flanked that ship. Navigation is damaged so it is much slower than usual and pretty much a sitting duck.

Ephmeteus

2 ships lost. This is by far the hardest battle so far.

The Talons are out for blood. Next on their list is the flagship with Baud aboard. Baud orders the crew to go full defensive and fly out of enemy gun range.

It seems to work so far, however one sneaky Talon is flying parallel to the flagship "Ammit". Stupidly the other Adamants chase another Talon.

This was a major frak up. The flagship got out of range, but instead of boosting thruster I decided to go defensive and one of the Talons caught it in its firing arc.

We just lost Baud

Really big frak up. The Cylon AI effective lured my ships away from the rest, so they were free to pummel the Flagship and the berserk before that. Should have re-assigned the fighter targets sooner.

Even worse, the Cerastes survived with one hull point and fired at the flagship after that for two turns. If I just hit him once more before that and destroyed him, the flagship might have survived.

This was along battle, in the end all the missiles were expended.

You served the Colonies well bro.

3 ship losses and an officer, this is painful. The only consolation is that the officer was level 1 so he can be replaced easily.

At least Caprica is safe now. I recorded the replay of this destructive battle, you can find it here:

There is a ship or two waiting to unite with the damaged Picon Fleet.

Also you can see a secondary mission marker. These are optional but provide good rewards. Unfortunately this one is available only for 4 more turns.

This is a typical "research" mission. It provides some cash and lots of RP. Some missions give lots of tylium, other give free officers.

MercantileInterest becomes a female officer in the Colonial fleet. He hails from Gemenon and will take Baud's former role as Picon Fleet commander.

Next update probably on Thursday. Hopefully this time I will keep the flagship safe

 

[baud]

Well, it's too bad that I died, but I expected to get a long walk out of an airlock for my incompetence (spacesuit optional), so at least I died fighting on my ship

Also the replay video is cool.

The game looks interesting, I'll have to check it out, but I doubt my current laptop can run it.

 

[Hellraiser]

Don't worry bro. There's not a whole lot of volunteers for officers at the moment so you will probably be cloned first (or we can assume your user names are naval callsigns and they will be recycled, better for this setting I guess). I will need at least 8 fleets overall (not necessarily full doomstacks but strong enough to fight something alone) to pop Cylon moles before they group up into doomstacks and we will witness a total fleet loss sooner or later, either due to attrition or due to meeting a doomstack.

It was a very big frak up though. I really should have paid attention where the flagship is.

Also bump this thread guys, I am working on the next update.

 

[Azira]

Maybe using spoiler tags would also help, as it keeps the clutter down?

 

[Azira]

 

[Azira]

 

[Azira]

 

[Azira]

 

[tindrli]

 

[Hellraiser]

Episode 2: Vessel and Nuke: Warband

Previously on Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock...

Toasters were removed from Helios Alpha premises.

Despite Picon Fleet's victory in the battle of Caprica, Lt. Colonel baud perished aboard his flagship the Adamant class cruiser "Ammit".

Daidalos became capable of producing Adamant and Berserk class warships.

Cylon mallware managed to cripple the IDRIS network and now Colonial Fleet can only rely on onboard computers for FTL jump calculations.

Obligatory BSG flash-forward teaser montage showing the shape of things to come:



Some music:

update contents

Our current Cylon panic status. Just FYI, concerned and unstable are not the only two status in the game.

Still, only the Virgins... I mean Virgons are on a downward trend currently.

I had to repair Picon fleet after that last bit of officer-killing combat.

We have only two known Cylon fleets on the map, other fleets may hide in the interstellar mid-way points, like Cocalus. Only the one at Virgon is a problem, but we cannot afford to send ships there at this time. In Helios Beta only Virgon and Leonis are populated anyway, so that system is not so much of a priority even if both colonies are rich and populated.

Also there are 3 mission markers on the map. The story marker at Scorpia is visible orange with the colonial (fleet?) emblem on it. The violet-ish one for a secondary missions, which I will not pursue as it is too far and a mission from the expansion pack side-campaign, which I will probably do after we deal with business on Scorpia.

Unfortunately while waiting at Cocalus for ship construction to finish (the plan was to send them to Alpha's Picon Fleet), the Toasters attack. This seems to be the fleet that was busy doing nothing (defragging their hard drives maybe?) around Zeus in Alpha.

One thing that needs to be mentioned, you cannot auto-resolve battles where the Daidalos is present, so we also get no info on odds and fleet points of both task forces. In any case it would be boring if I auto-resolved the fights, as the tactical battles are the best part. Also the auto-resolve seems to give better results than sometimes possible in actual combat.

OPEARATION COCALUS

We have tindrli leading a fleet with the Daidalos, 3 adamants, 2 berserks and one manticore assisted by 7 viper squadrons.

There are four contacts on DRADIS, two contacts are identified as Nemesis class corvettes. Tindrli orders the Vipers to meet them.

Remaining contacts also turn out to be Nemeses, missiles are fired. This will be an easy battle it seems.

FRAK! This happens sometimes in campaign skirmishes, Cylon reinforcements jump in from nowhere. Which is a dick move as Colonials cannot do the same and we also cannot retreat damaged ships via FTL mid-combat (they were supposed to add this feature...).

If you get really unlucky this happens in a tough slugfest and your fleet can get fully wrecked.

DRADIS confirms this is just one ship. It seems to be as close to the Daidalos as it is to the other toasters. This is not that good, last thing we need are sneaky toasters going after our story-critical asset.

Tindrli sends all Vipers to ID and shoot the contact. Luckily it turns out to be just another Nemesis. While it can still do a lot of damage to the Daidalos, it will not be able to destroy it before the Vipers fill it with holes.

Forgot to save the post battle screen and record the battle. It was piss easy anyway so it wouldn't be the best battle of the update anyway. Could have used the FTL for the flashforward sequence probably though.

In any case Daidalos finished building some ships and I spent 40 Tylium to get Picon Fleet (or the new ships) to Picon to boost its morale and have MercantileInterest command some decent forces to protect Alpha.

The mission in Delta will disappear but it is no issue.

Daidalos' fleet also has the FTL drived spooled up so we do a free jump to Scorpia. Why are we doing the story mission now you ask?

Ignore Helena, the real reason is in the rewards. Artemis Class blueprints. The Artemis is a "pocket" Battlestar, not as tough as the Jupiter but is very economical (also fleet point-wise), carries two strikecraft squadrons and can carry ordnance. Also it has artillery guns and proper broadside guns, along with flak screen capability.

As for the other blueprints, I will go over them later in this update.

Scorpia's shipyard, no doubt fueled by the resources of the "half-ring" natural debris field around Scorpia, is the largest orbital shipyard of the Colonies. The independent armed forces of many colonies procure ships vital to their own defence from this facility. Daidalos was once part of the shipyard, but it was separated from the rest of the superstructure after a Cylon attack and re-fitted as a mobile shipyard with FTL drives on Cain's orders.

CHAPTER V

Of course the Cylons know this so they sent yet another strike force to cripple our war effort by removing Scorpia's shipyard from the strategic picture.

You can see a mk. II Vipers docked to the shipyard he. These fighters represent an upgrade to our squadrons. Technically they have less (possibly no) armor plating than the mk. I, but they make up for it with speed and agility which makes them more effective in dogfights and probably harder to hit by capital ships.

However, before you ask why use mk. I vipers when this is a straight upgrade I will answer. Mk I vipers are free, mk II are not, and if we lose a squadron a new one needs to be bought. They are not that expensive though so I will field them.

The toaster force is just 5 ships, including two Talons it seems. One we already ID'd, the other is not but there is a single strikecraft squadron's signature flying near one contact so we can guess it is a Talon. Unless the Cylons started fielding heavier ships (there is one that carries just one squadron).

FRAK FRAK FRAK! MOTHERFRAKING REVENANT!



This is either my first or second most hated (when fighting against them) Cylon ship. This big boat is loaded with guns and nothing else. It has also considerable frontal plating. The sides where the guns are located are less armored, but in general we don't want to be facing those. These things will end up killing a lot of our ships during the campaign with their broadsides, normally I just nuke them at first sight to avoid that problem. But it will be a while before we can arm our ships with nukes.

Tindrli has the Adamants for a first row of a broadside wall, more in the back and below the berserks fly. This way the fire should be drawn by the heavier Adamants while the longer ranged and heavier medium guns of the Berserks pound the toasters.

One Talon just got scrapped, the Manticore will now try to retreat to avoid drawing fire from the Revenant.

Three more toasters jump in, I doubt they plan on making toast. Well, maybe human toast.

Apparently it is a scavenging party, looking for loot. Cain wants it dead, she wants everything chrome dead really. Sinon says the wrecks can prove useful in identifying design weakpoints and improving the fleet's combat capability.

The Revenant just ate a full salvo of missiles from all 3 Adamants. While it hit the tough frontal plating, it still got shredded so now its robotic interior is eating cannon fire from our 5 carriers. Turns out I only used the Manticore's salvo on the Talon before discovering the much higher threat.

I did not mention it, but on the ships I currently field it takes 3 turns to reload the tubes. The salvo size (number of missiles fired) depends on the posture setting of the ship, armory health or fire control health. Of course the number of ordnance onboard a ship is limited, so eventually we can run out of missiles and salvos consume as many missiles from the supply as launched.

Luckily it was just one Revenant and now it is gone. The fleet blows up that Talon they ignored in favor of the Revenant while the Manticore is running away.

Meanwhile admiral Lucinda Cain bitches (forgot to screenshot it).

"I gave you an order commander!"

She bitches some more. I have toasters in firing range of our ships and she wants us to fire on some debris? No wonder this war is a stalemate...

The strike craft the toasters sent to loot the debris field were shot down when they tried to return to their carriers. The carriers turned out to be 3 Talons.

As soon as I blew up one or two of them, they jump ending the mission.

Sinon whines about Cain, Helena whines about colonial fleet not getting to use Jupiters because the colonies are to get them.

Canceron is experiencing some unrest, includign prison riots, due to Cylon incursion. Tauron also has some new toasters around while Picon Fleet rendezvouses with the reinforcements fresh from Daidalos' drydocks.

Let's look at these new toys.

Oh yeah, this thing has heavy guns making it a capital ship killer and has lower ordnance reload time by one turn (2 vs 3 on our current ships). Well, the RP price-tag is not very inviting. We need to double our point pool before Daidalos can start churning these out, which means I should go after the Broken Alliance mission on Aquaria or some secondary mission if one appears. Unless we get really lucky, we will need two.

The Ranger is a nice Picon design. A simple way to describe it is it is a berserk with slightly more plating, worse guns, no strikecraft hangars, but TWO ordnance slots with 2 turn reload times, like the Artemis. Load these babies up with torpedoes and we have a nice long range fire support ship which will cripple slow heavy ships before they get near enough to fire at us. It's disadvantage is that it is not very durable, hence my comparison to the Berserk.

This game is way to cryptic with fighter stats.

Anyway you can see that the Artemis is not that much bigger of a RP investment than our other options, so I will attempt to unlock it first.

The Cylon fleet at Tauron is the biggest one we know of. But not big enough to be too much for Picon Fleet, @Mercantile Interest leads his fleet to liberate the Taurons. Unfortunately his fleet point cap is too low, so some ships stay behind at Picon (at least morale will rise there).

“There are four things you need to know about living on Tauron. You always praise the Heracs achievements. You always praise the Ha'la'tha struggle. You never praise anyone if you have no idea who the rest of the room praises. And finally, you always carry a weapon and wear body armour in case the prior three rules fail you.”

– Dimitrios Halakis, Tauron comedian living in exile on Picon. Excerpt from the last episode of "The Nightly Show with Dimitrios Halakis” prior to his murder by unknown parties.

First we build some new ships. They will stay back in Gamma while Daidalos slowly moves to do the BA side-campaign mission in Delta.

Yeah, I check if we can Promote MercantileInterest to raise the fleet cap. No go, too expensive using RP. Better to pop toaster moles for exp in Alpha.

Since the Cylons might run, I decide to spent 140 tylium to jump and liberate Tauron anyway. We need the exp and that fleet would go trouble other colonies or our fleets if left alive.

The toasters smell blood and attack Picon. We have 2 ships (looks like 2 Berserks from the fleet points) there that Picon Fleet could not take with them. While the emergency jump is expensive I rather keep the ships as Daidalos will be far and getting reinforcements to Alpha will be difficult.

The ships retreat-jump to Cocalus.

BATTLE OF TAURON

Cylons have 5 ships against our 5 ships. But we have the point advantage. My guess is those are Nemeses, again.

And I am wrong! Frak me! Those are 5 Cerasteses (we will not see DLC ships in story missions BTW, expect for the BA campaign).

Oh and here you can see that they indeed do plug the hole the Cylons used to have in fighter-counters as they just wiped out one of our viper squadrons, which I sent to scout and engage head on first.

RIP viper pilots

They kill another fighter squadron and then focus the Manticore.

The Manticore is screwed, I did not level it with the Cerasteses so it receives all hits to its top plating. Even retreating would not do anything as they would keep hitting the top armor.

Still, MercantileInterest survives his first battle and gets 350 exp. Not enough to level up and increase his fleet point cap yet.

Repairs.

The runaways at Cocalus jump to Tauron to reinforce Picon fleet, again.

Those retreats, repairs and more jumps just sucked dry our Tylium reserves.

A mission appears at Caprica, Picon Fleet will engage it in a turn or two as soon as their FTL drives spool up and they can jump for free again (or for cheaper than now)

This is a Warband mission. In addition to raising morale it will give us equal amounts of tylium and RP, both of which we need.

No intel on the enemy forces, also we cannot auto-resolve. From experience I can tell you this can be anything and last time I played the campaign, after the game was released, it used to spawn far heavier ships than regular roaming toaster fleets had.

WARBAND - HELIOS ALPHA, CAPRICA

Is Helena's fleet rank captain obvious or does she suffer from memory loss? The whole reason we're here because we know there are only Cylons here!

Well frak me! As expected the toasters have a full fleet here. 7 ships versus the five of Picon fleet. Three of them look like Talons.

The ones firing missiles seem to be Nemeses, hopefully not the other option. So four of those. And two of them are armed with torpedoes, this is bad. I ordered the Berserk which seemed to be the target to brace for impact and dodge the torps.

Bros, this will be hard and calls for special music.



By mere coincidence (read: the devs obviously watched BSG: blood and chrome so they added the name into the name pool) we have an Osiris in Picon Fleet. Lets hope the "last battle" part is not true. BTW the Osiris IIRC was a "stealth" battlestar (as in hard to detect not invisible) deployed late in the war and is not in this game, but it is a common request of the fans as something that should be in an expansion pack or sequel.

Torpedoes are unguided so they can be dodged, which their target barely managed to do here. Still they are hard to dodge, they are fraking fast. At medium range they are often already too close after launch by the time the next planning phase comes up just after their launch. Here you can see that after I could issue an order it took them only 25% of the turn execution time to reach the Berserks's position. So there is no time to execute evasive manoeuvrers or assign fighters to defence. Fighters are not that good against them as torp salvos have more missiles.

Flaks are as effective as against any missile, but you need to be in position to put a flak screen between the target and the torps.

The Nephtys, having paper for armor, already has internal damage from the guided missiles not intercepted by vipers.

MercantileInterest moves the Adamants to act as a barrier and pick off the Talons out for Berserk blood.

Meanwhile Selene's viper squadron got annihilated by the enemy Prototype Cylon Raider fighters.

The Cylons go after the Berserk relentlessly. More missiles are fired. The Berserk's navigation is damaged so it moves only at about half of its maximum speed.

In the end for the Nephtys it was the last battle

A talon begun fleeing from Picon Fleet, Vipers are pounding it.

Meanwhile the Khensit eats Cylon slugs. Most systems are down and it can barely move while also not being able to fire. Also the broken engineering section probably negatively affects subsystem repair time.

Still it's commander, tries to move it away from the Talons, hoping to survive this battle.

There's only one toaster ship that can fire upon it currently, a very badly damaged Talon. The last Talon still functional I think (assuming its firing CPU is not silica dust already). It has less hull points left than the Khensit and Vipers are preparing for an attack run from a side that has no armor, so it should go down first and our Adamant should be safe.

The Talons are down and when it seemed safe I realised I forgot about something. If only the fleet dealt with the annoying torpedo Nemeses first that is...

Another ship and its crew give their lives for mankind. Fraking toaster torpedoes!

The remaining Nemeses are dealt with. The Osiris was next on the toaster kill list but it survived. Despite a numerical advantage on the Cylon side good tactics and fighter superiority allowed Colonial Fleet to prevail.

This really looked like a hard battle to win, I think if instead of Nemeses (even if they also had torps) they would have Cerasteses we would lose and Baud's coffin would not float alone in space.

MercantileInterest, for his great success at toaster warband eradication around Caprica, was granted the Caprican Cross of Courage by the Caprican Prime Minister. Our war chest gained needed Tylium and Colonial Fleet now has some extra sway over the Caprican Quorum delegates translating to RP.

This will surely do much to advance your standing and rank within Colonial Fleet. If the chrome-domes don't get their revenge first.

However Picon left the quorum and there is still a significant Cylon presence in Helio Alpha. Picon fleet needs to be reinforced with the two ships left at Tauron.

Also there is Cylon presence in Gamma scouring about near the gas giant Ophion.

Because we also need to move Daidalos fleet to Delta for the first BA mission, Azira was assigned to Colonial Fleet by Tauron's Navy. Rumours have it the Heraclitus Junta ruling Tauron (commonly called "Heracs") strongly insisted on this particular commander. It is unknown if they did this to get rid off him or because they believed he will bring glory and prestige to Tauron.

Daidalos is on its way to Delta and jumped to some rock the name of which eludes me.

Azira takes some ships which now form the Scorpia Fleet to fight a Cylon force 400 points smaller than his. Godsspeed Azira, show them how Taurons treat enemies.

SKIRMISH OVER OPHION

The task force of 2 manticores, a berserk and an adamant jumps into position. Azira is on a hunt for toasters.

The enemy force seems to be of similar composition. Two Cerasteses gunships and two Nemeses. Azira's main advantage is 1 more ordnance slots and two fighter squadrons. The battle should clearly go in his favour.

A Nemesis is shot down but our Manticore needed to make a hasty retreat as it lost all rear and right armor.

It was not enough to save it, probably it should have been turned to face the Caresteses guns with its left flank.

Despite that the battle was won. Azira's Scorpia will be reinforced by the Daidalos as some ships will finish before it jumps to Delta and thus will be within one jump range of Scorpia Fleet.

Scorpia fleet has been reinforced, while Daidalos was waiting to jump to Aquaria intelligence has brought to us news of a secondary strategic objective. Seeing the obvious benefit in securing it on time, the fleet rushes a jump at the last moment (one turn was left) to deny Cylons access to some critical assets.

Even in the twelve colonies they take their data protection seriously. Cylons are a threat to GDPR! Not that surprising since they were created by the settings equivalent of microsoft.

Main reason to do this mission is of course the RP. But also we get a free officer which is nice and some tylium to help our war effort.

I do not now how tindrli feels about the colonial equivalent of GDPR and why we just can't wipe the data with a tech team, and repurpose the station into something else but oh well. This is the price you pay for cloud computing I guess.

DATA CLEAN - HELIOS DELTA, AERILON

Currently tindrli commands a data protection compliance force of 4 Adamants, 2 Bersekrs and one Manticore. The Cylons will wish they could shit themselves in fear, because pants-soiling is far more preferable to the stomping they will get.

Unless they bring in some new heavy toys and we get turned to organic mush mixed with spaceship scrap.

I forgot if we need to destroy the Cylons in these missions or just the center. In any case the toasters are a threat to Daidalos so they must be destroyed first. Luckily it seems we have space superiority as they have no strikecraft deployed while we have 8 thanks to Daidalos and all the carriers.

Two rows/walls are formed upon enganing the toasters. Admants take the front as usual, with the flagship a bit to the back to avoid fire. The middle of the wall is left empty so that the Berserks more in the back have clear line of fire to the Cylon vessels.

First visuals on the hostile indicate the enemy force is Nemeses mostly. Torpedoes have also been sighted, flying at our ships of course.

tindrli responds in kind with his own missiles.

Long story short, it was a stomp and they only had Nemeses. No losses on our side and our lone manticore along with Vipers went to finish the Data Center. It took a lot of turns to fly to it...

It looks like tindrli has enough exp for a level up.

Regardless of exp, we have enough RP to get Artemis blueprints. The gods favour the us today.

I had enough of a Tylium stockpile to order two and nothing more. They will take four turns to build. They already have some names assigned randomly but I will rename them.

The first one will be named Codexia, after a colonial ideal that is worth fighting for.

The second one will be named JarlFrank, after a hero of myth.

Those are obviously bullshit explanations.

You can request ship names for future Battlestars and in general I will try to make them your flagships and at least go under your command. One name per codexer, unless the ship blows up, then we can reuse it with a sequential roman numeral (II, III, IV etc.). Lesser/other ships I might rename myself. If we make it to Jupiter class ships, I already have a name for the first one.

Time to check on the officers.

Yeah, it turned out the shit-tier more exp skill leads to the god-tier 50% more Tylium from fortified colonies. We need that.

First however tindrli gains even more fleet points being now able to field 6k point fleets, which will be useful considering we now have some battlestars in the building queue.

The hero of Caprica, MercantileInterest. He also got a promotion and his fleet cap is now raised by 1k points.

Also I almost forgot we got a new officer. Hailing from the tropical city of Argentum Bay lightbane joins the fleet. Odds are he will lead Aquaria Fleet in Delta, after such a fleet is established.

Next on the Agenda is to push the BA side-campaign plot forward and a main mission after that.

Last but not least, here is the replay of the best battle of this update. It is of course the titular Warband mission near Caprica.

 

[baud]

Despite Picon Fleet's victory in the battle of Caprica, Lt. Colonel baud perished aboard his flagship the Adamant class cruiser "Ammit".

More like Damnit, amirite?