To Kethas-
Strategy-wise:
1. You revealed too early; you had put yourself in position to just get shot down by the raiders and go to sick bay. You should have stayed human and looked for an opportunity to take away an easy crisis then dump your hand to make us fail the new one we drew. This would also have helped keep uncertainty about the Cylons going for longer, and probably allowed Baltar to do more damage before becoming outed.
2. Tactics, leadership, and politics are most often positive for checks. Thus, drawing engineering and piloting are your best bets once you are a cylon.
Yes, I probably revealed too early. However, I don't see how having 0 revealed cylons vs. 1 revealed cylon makes it easier for an unrevealed cylon to stay convincing.
I'll also probably draw more engy/piloting while revealed in future games, but in this one I kept drawing leadership/politics/tactics because I actually was using 'em.
The extra cylon card was added instead of the You Are Not a Cylon card (50% chance), and it happened to be given to Starbuck, a revealed Cylon. Starbuck, Baltar, and Tigh formed a straight 3 player block.
This is what I was yammering about in the early game. Given the rules we were playing with, it wasn't a 50% chance we'd have three cylons; it was a 11/14 chance, or roughly 80% chance.
Both the extra Cylon and Noncylon cards are added to the deck. Eventually (read: after the sleeper phase), we have 14 cards in the deck, of which 3 are cylon cards; 13 of those cards are eventually handed out to someone. Every card is equally likely to be the card that is never handed out, so there's a 3/14 probability that a Cylon card is never handed out, and a 11/14 probability that a Non-Cylon card is never handed out. Ergo, there's a 11/14 probability we have three cylons.
I think there should be one underlying philosophy to keep in mind when designing changes to this game. Random but fair is inherently unfair in practice. As much as possible, chance should be minimized to create a more balanced session where luck is less important than skill (or the perception of such).
Sign Ups for the next Epic (10 Player) game will be Monday the 23rd. Don't PM me or try to reserve a spot here.
The extra cylon card was added instead of the You Are Not a Cylon card (50% chance), and it happened to be given to Starbuck, a revealed Cylon. Starbuck, Baltar, and Tigh formed a straight 3 player block.
This is what I was yammering about in the early game. Given the rules we were playing with, it wasn't a 50% chance we'd have three cylons; it was a 11/14 chance, or roughly 80% chance.
Both the extra Cylon and Noncylon cards are added to the deck. Eventually (read: after the sleeper phase), we have 14 cards in the deck, of which 3 are cylon cards; 13 of those cards are eventually handed out to someone. Every card is equally likely to be the card that is never handed out, so there's a 3/14 probability that a Cylon card is never handed out, and a 11/14 probability that a Non-Cylon card is never handed out. Ergo, there's a 11/14 probability we have three cylons.
Actually I picked one random You are a Cylon from the two that were left. Then I added in a You are Not a Cylon and shuffled them. Then I picked one from there to add to the remaining loyalty cards. It was a 50% chance to get a third Cylon.
but I really, really didn't want to give up Massive Assault.
I WAS WAITING FOR YOU TO PLAY THAT CARD! Oh man! Alas...
If it weren't for the triple-heavy-raider-activation play we needed to do, I was going to suggest you play your super crisis that round and then I follow it up with Massive Assault. After they got three rounds Tigh could then follow with a third Super Crisis.
I was going to wait until any cylon attackers showed up (preferably a Massive, but I wasn't picky) to start chucking people in the brig. Then hopefully we could keep them in there for as long as it took to get the damage on Galactica high enough that my reveal would win the game.
I kept increasing Morale and Food because we'd done such a good job on crises. I knew that if we were going to win, it was through population, centurions, or damage.
As the glorious warlord that is Balter_Bot I had the Super Crisis with the huge Skill Check and activated every type of ship, was hoping someone would play a Massive Assault. :P
But the game was essentially over until Tigh revealed and ended it in the exact opposite manner.
Any kind of Cylon set up would have been nice, but not a single one was drawn since before the first jump.
Just played a game last night, tried some alternate strategies that I think worked out rather effectively.
4 person game. Me (Baltar), Starbuck, Admiral Adama, and Zarek. Nobody was a cylon in the first phase of the game. We lost a few resources, but we actually kept it together rather well. On to the sleeper agent phase.
I was the sympathizer.
So I discarded all but my 3 highest leadership cards. On every turn I drew leadership until the leadership deck was almost gone, only discarding really low ones. Once i had 5 or 6 of the 7 Declare Emergencies, I moved on to tactics to try and drain the Strategic Plannings. I did this because, as we had been talking about in Blarney's game, every skill check has either Tactics or Leadership in it, and each time the average is 4.5 ish points that the particular skill will be required to give. As such, by removing the top 60% of the deck, I aimed to suffocate the humans out of passing skill checks. Also, it gave me a LOT of firepower for skills that didnt involve either leadership or tactics, since I'd have 1 or both 5's in my hand at any given time.
Also, I used the resurrection ship first to cast my 2 suspicious loyalty cards onto starbuck (the cylon ended up being adama), and then stuck around in the human fleet steeling high power tactics and leadership cards from zarek and starbuck, and damaging galactica a decent amount of the time. It worked out well, especially then adama revealed and joined me in draining the tactics deck of high power cards.
In the end they lost because they ran out of morale, as a direct result of not having enough skill cards. Funny thing was, final check downed their last morale, and it was yellow, green, and purple. Both of us cylons had EXCLUSIVELY green and purple cards in our hands, but their hands were so weak they were simply unable to make it.
I'm editing that spreadsheet for use in a PbP game I'm doing on another forum, Darian, and I'm trying to figure out: how do you shuffle the decks in a spreadsheet?
EDIT: This would normally be a PM kind of question, but I thought the information might be beneficial to others thinking about doing PbP's. ;-)
There are a number of ways to randomize (Such as making a column of RAND()s and sorting), but I like to use random.org's Sequence Generator for these sorts of tasks. Just get a random sequence of the appropriate length, put them in an adjacent column, then sort to shuffle.
I use the scratch sheet in my spreadsheet - paste the cards I want to shuffle into an empty column, fill the column next to it with an appropriate number of RAND(), then sort by the second column. I usually sorted 5-7 times to simulate a full shuffle (deciding the number of sorts before starting so as to minimize my own bias affecting the results).
I use the scratch sheet in my spreadsheet - paste the cards I want to shuffle into an empty column, fill the column next to it with an appropriate number of RAND(), then sort by the second column. I usually sorted 5-7 times to simulate a full shuffle (deciding the number of sorts before starting so as to minimize my own bias affecting the results).
MrBlarney's technique is more elegant, as always.
Not really - it actually takes more time/work to get numbers from random.org and sorting than dragging out a bunch of RAND()s then sorting once. I'm just a creature of habit and like to have a record of what order was generated. You actually don't need to sort more than once, since shuffling that way is nothing like a traditional shuffle - the RAND() --> sorting method is more akin to a scramble shuffle or a game of 'pickup' where cards are quite randomized in a single iteration.
Again with what I'm sure is a perfectly simple question: Is there an Adobe Illustrator file I can use for constructing the board each turn, or do I need to create that from scratch-ish?
Drop me or MrB your email address and one of us can send over a starter board. I'm using the Gimp, not sure what MrB uses; either way, you should have no problem importing the layers into Illustrator and working with them.
Thanks, guys. If anyone's interested in watching the PbP, it'll be happening here.
EDIT: Also, I'm making some changes to the basic .psd file so that it'll be kinda like having the board, and then a set of rubber stamps off to the side. It's pretty sweet. I might add a sidebar on the right to contain distance traveled, etc.
Huh. I finally hit a ruling I wasn't sure about...
What happens if a revealed cylon plays the "Fulfiller of Prophecy" crisis (via the Caprica location) and chooses the second option?
The current player discards 1 Skill Card. After the Activate Cylon Ships step, return to the Resolve Crisis step. (Draw a new Crisis Card and resolve it.)
Now I know that she can't be forced to discard, but she also doesn't get to Activate Cylon Ships. We decided this meant that she drew and played the next crisis, and the Prophecy had no effect. What do you guys think?
I would say that option does nothing: revealed Cylons don't get a resolve crisis step. Crises played by a cylon player are done during the action step, not the resolve crisis step.
I don't think there are any official "spots" or number of games that we can run concurrently. Just Thanatos threathened that one time that if someone starts another game without inviting him, there would be consequences most dire.
Edit: Have the humans EVER won a game on these forums?
I am definitely interested in playing a game on the forums here if anyone has a spot in a future game. My roommate owns a copy of the game so I have played a couple times and am familiar with the rules and play. Shot me a pm if you need someone to fill a spot and I don't notice the thread starting.
I was on the other extreme... I didn't get to be a cylon for my first 6 games or so. Then I played as Baltar. :P
I hear a lot of people saying they prefer to be cylon... is anyone else like me and prefer being human? I take far more pleasure in rooting out the culprits than in doing the uh.. culpriting. I especially love being human as Baltar.
One of our IRL games, I was the admiral and had picked 2 astroid fields (3 distance and -2 fuel). Then I became a cylon during sleeper phase. I finished the game unrevealed and bled them dry of fuel. They were at distance 7, but could not jump again because they only had 1 fuel left. Then a crisis card came up that I got to put my cards in last on, that had a fail of lose 1 fuel. So I dropped like 7 or 8 cards at the end of the check. It wasn't even close.
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El SkidThe frozen white northRegistered Userregular
Last time, I was Apollo. I chose him specifically because he was less likely than Baltar (my usual) to end up dancing the robot. Alas, it was not to be; I drew the "send a character to sickbay" loyalty card in the first round.
For the first half of the game, I did pretty much nothing. I think I may have tried to sabotage the "Detector Sabotage" crisis, but I didn't put too much in, because I didn't think I could take the irony of accidentally revealing myself by failing that particular crisis. It passed. The President checked Boomer's card on one Crisis, since Boomer had been the other Cylon last time; she came up clean.
Then we hit the Sleeper Agent phase at exactly 4 distance with Legendary Discovery. The Admiral (a new player) remarked that the game was not as action-packed as he had been led to believe. One Crisis card, when we failed, forced me to "move one character to the sickbay". I asked everyone if I could move Boomer out of the brig to the sickbay -- looking back, I'm fairly sure that's against some half-hidden rule, but no one objected on those grounds, so we'll just call it a houserule. They were like, "What, are you two the Cylons again?" Me: "No, I just really think she's innocent. Remember it kinda looked like Starbuck might have sabotaged the last check? And we know that Boomer was clean during the first half, so statistically, she's not any more likely than any of the rest of us."
The President wasn't completely comfortable with it, but she saw the reasoning. Her reaction made me begin to suspect that she was the other Cylon.
Next jump: Starbuck (Mission Specialist, so she got to choose the destination) asks the admiral, "Didn't you want more action?" So she drops a Cylon Ambush location, distance 3. We are now at distance 7, and I haven't even started wrecking shit yet. I play up the, "You really didn't have a better option?" angle, to throw suspicion Starbuck's direction. It works, in a vague kind of way; people don't suspect me, at least.
A few other cards get dropped before my turn, such that we have 5 civvies clustered at the aft, with Raiders at 1 o'clock. We've got 1 Viper protecting them, with another one at 5 o'clock, ready to move into position.
Me: "OK, I'm going to use my CAG ability to activate up to 6 unmanned Vipers."
Everyone: "Yay!"
*moves both Vipers down to the opposite end of the ship from the Civvies*
Starbuck: "That's pretty sketchy, Apollo."
Roslin: "Yeah, why would you do that?"
Starbuck: "Because he's a Cylon."
Me: "Well, there's a lot of cards that drop basestars and shit at the front of the ship, I'm just anticipating that. I think the civvies will be fine."
Roslin: "You're not explaining yourself very well. Why are you doing this?"
Starbuck: "Because he's a Cylon."
Roslin: "....yeah, I guess so. Does that mean that Boomer is the other Cylon, again?"
Boomer: "No, he never looked at my cards, how would he know? I'm human."
Me: "If that happened, though, I would pretty much laugh for hours."
So Starbuck XO'd the President to Arrest Order me. Didn't matter, they lost 3 of the 5 civvies before the jump, which was about what I'd hoped for. They managed to pick up one jump prep.
Boomer's turn, at 8 distance. She vacillates about the best choice, finally opting for...
....revealing her loyalty as a Cylon, and draining the Morale down to 1. We high-fived and laughed so much. The admiral started talking about the possibility of surrender. I immediately followed Boomer to the basestar, drawing Massive Assault as my super crisis. By the time it got back around to us, they still only had 1 jump prep -- shitty luck on their part. The President, however, had managed to rouse morale back up to 2.
Boomer dropped the Cylon Intruders card -- they failed. I dropped Massive Assault.
Starbuck drew a shitty crisis, and used Secret Destiny to exchange it.
33. Every Cylon ship and every civilian ship was now on the board. Boomer and I wrecked shit to hell and back.
One of our IRL games, I was the admiral and had picked 2 astroid fields (3 distance and -2 fuel). Then I became a cylon during sleeper phase. I finished the game unrevealed and bled them dry of fuel. They were at distance 7, but could not jump again because they only had 1 fuel left. Then a crisis card came up that I got to put my cards in last on, that had a fail of lose 1 fuel. So I dropped like 7 or 8 cards at the end of the check. It wasn't even close.
You suck.
I honestly couldn't think of a way to get that fuel back. Throwing you in the brig would not have helped too terribly much, because I'm not sure we would have been able to get that fuel back anyway.
Also, way to have a gf that prevented playing the other night.
One of our IRL games, I was the admiral and had picked 2 astroid fields (3 distance and -2 fuel). Then I became a cylon during sleeper phase. I finished the game unrevealed and bled them dry of fuel. They were at distance 7, but could not jump again because they only had 1 fuel left. Then a crisis card came up that I got to put my cards in last on, that had a fail of lose 1 fuel. So I dropped like 7 or 8 cards at the end of the check. It wasn't even close.
You suck.
I honestly couldn't think of a way to get that fuel back. Throwing you in the brig would not have helped too terribly much, because I'm not sure we would have been able to get that fuel back anyway.
Also, way to have a gf that prevented playing the other night.
EDIT: That sounds awesome Gandalf
You don't lose from fuel loss until the end of the turn. Scout out a destination that can give you fuel back, save a strategic planning for it, and hope.
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I WAS WAITING FOR YOU TO PLAY THAT CARD! Oh man! Alas...
Yes, I probably revealed too early. However, I don't see how having 0 revealed cylons vs. 1 revealed cylon makes it easier for an unrevealed cylon to stay convincing.
I'll also probably draw more engy/piloting while revealed in future games, but in this one I kept drawing leadership/politics/tactics because I actually was using 'em.
This is what I was yammering about in the early game. Given the rules we were playing with, it wasn't a 50% chance we'd have three cylons; it was a 11/14 chance, or roughly 80% chance.
Both the extra Cylon and Noncylon cards are added to the deck. Eventually (read: after the sleeper phase), we have 14 cards in the deck, of which 3 are cylon cards; 13 of those cards are eventually handed out to someone. Every card is equally likely to be the card that is never handed out, so there's a 3/14 probability that a Cylon card is never handed out, and a 11/14 probability that a Non-Cylon card is never handed out. Ergo, there's a 11/14 probability we have three cylons.
Sign Ups for the next Epic (10 Player) game will be Monday the 23rd. Don't PM me or try to reserve a spot here.
Actually I picked one random You are a Cylon from the two that were left. Then I added in a You are Not a Cylon and shuffled them. Then I picked one from there to add to the remaining loyalty cards. It was a 50% chance to get a third Cylon.
If it weren't for the triple-heavy-raider-activation play we needed to do, I was going to suggest you play your super crisis that round and then I follow it up with Massive Assault. After they got three rounds Tigh could then follow with a third Super Crisis.
I was going to wait until any cylon attackers showed up (preferably a Massive, but I wasn't picky) to start chucking people in the brig. Then hopefully we could keep them in there for as long as it took to get the damage on Galactica high enough that my reveal would win the game.
I kept increasing Morale and Food because we'd done such a good job on crises. I knew that if we were going to win, it was through population, centurions, or damage.
But the game was essentially over until Tigh revealed and ended it in the exact opposite manner.
Any kind of Cylon set up would have been nice, but not a single one was drawn since before the first jump.
4 person game. Me (Baltar), Starbuck, Admiral Adama, and Zarek. Nobody was a cylon in the first phase of the game. We lost a few resources, but we actually kept it together rather well. On to the sleeper agent phase.
I was the sympathizer.
So I discarded all but my 3 highest leadership cards. On every turn I drew leadership until the leadership deck was almost gone, only discarding really low ones. Once i had 5 or 6 of the 7 Declare Emergencies, I moved on to tactics to try and drain the Strategic Plannings. I did this because, as we had been talking about in Blarney's game, every skill check has either Tactics or Leadership in it, and each time the average is 4.5 ish points that the particular skill will be required to give. As such, by removing the top 60% of the deck, I aimed to suffocate the humans out of passing skill checks. Also, it gave me a LOT of firepower for skills that didnt involve either leadership or tactics, since I'd have 1 or both 5's in my hand at any given time.
Also, I used the resurrection ship first to cast my 2 suspicious loyalty cards onto starbuck (the cylon ended up being adama), and then stuck around in the human fleet steeling high power tactics and leadership cards from zarek and starbuck, and damaging galactica a decent amount of the time. It worked out well, especially then adama revealed and joined me in draining the tactics deck of high power cards.
In the end they lost because they ran out of morale, as a direct result of not having enough skill cards. Funny thing was, final check downed their last morale, and it was yellow, green, and purple. Both of us cylons had EXCLUSIVELY green and purple cards in our hands, but their hands were so weak they were simply unable to make it.
Extremely effective cylon tactic.
Well, then...accursed humans! Revenge was had!
Still, that's pretty lucky that she's the only one who drew ANY.
That was how my first BSG game went.
I was Laura, I drew about 5 cylon attack cards, and was able to discard 4 of em (one draw was both attack cards, yikes!).
EDIT: This would normally be a PM kind of question, but I thought the information might be beneficial to others thinking about doing PbP's. ;-)
MrBlarney's technique is more elegant, as always.
Not really - it actually takes more time/work to get numbers from random.org and sorting than dragging out a bunch of RAND()s then sorting once. I'm just a creature of habit and like to have a record of what order was generated. You actually don't need to sort more than once, since shuffling that way is nothing like a traditional shuffle - the RAND() --> sorting method is more akin to a scramble shuffle or a game of 'pickup' where cards are quite randomized in a single iteration.
EDIT: Also, I'm making some changes to the basic .psd file so that it'll be kinda like having the board, and then a set of rubber stamps off to the side. It's pretty sweet. I might add a sidebar on the right to contain distance traveled, etc.
What happens if a revealed cylon plays the "Fulfiller of Prophecy" crisis (via the Caprica location) and chooses the second option?
Now I know that she can't be forced to discard, but she also doesn't get to Activate Cylon Ships. We decided this meant that she drew and played the next crisis, and the Prophecy had no effect. What do you guys think?
The OP should be updated to reflect that Valkun's got his next game started, yes?
Edit: Have the humans EVER won a game on these forums?
And no, all the games played here so far on the forums have resulted in Cylon victory.
On the plus side, I'm getting really really good at not giving myself away through getting the jitters and such.
On the other hand, one of the girls I play with has pretty much promised to throw me in the brig on her first turn next time.
I hear a lot of people saying they prefer to be cylon... is anyone else like me and prefer being human? I take far more pleasure in rooting out the culprits than in doing the uh.. culpriting. I especially love being human as Baltar.
I have read along (albeit spottily) in several games, and am reading the rulebook currently.
If there is a game with a seat open in the future, I hope to apply.
shouldnt you be playing popular the popular online role playing game 'eve online'
Yeah, I'm on the other extreme. I haven't been a cylon yet, and I've played 7 or so games.
Like you, I'm actually getting alot of practice with my side- I'm starting to get much better at sniffing out suspicious activity.
For the first half of the game, I did pretty much nothing. I think I may have tried to sabotage the "Detector Sabotage" crisis, but I didn't put too much in, because I didn't think I could take the irony of accidentally revealing myself by failing that particular crisis. It passed. The President checked Boomer's card on one Crisis, since Boomer had been the other Cylon last time; she came up clean.
Then we hit the Sleeper Agent phase at exactly 4 distance with Legendary Discovery. The Admiral (a new player) remarked that the game was not as action-packed as he had been led to believe. One Crisis card, when we failed, forced me to "move one character to the sickbay". I asked everyone if I could move Boomer out of the brig to the sickbay -- looking back, I'm fairly sure that's against some half-hidden rule, but no one objected on those grounds, so we'll just call it a houserule. They were like, "What, are you two the Cylons again?" Me: "No, I just really think she's innocent. Remember it kinda looked like Starbuck might have sabotaged the last check? And we know that Boomer was clean during the first half, so statistically, she's not any more likely than any of the rest of us."
The President wasn't completely comfortable with it, but she saw the reasoning. Her reaction made me begin to suspect that she was the other Cylon.
Next jump: Starbuck (Mission Specialist, so she got to choose the destination) asks the admiral, "Didn't you want more action?" So she drops a Cylon Ambush location, distance 3. We are now at distance 7, and I haven't even started wrecking shit yet. I play up the, "You really didn't have a better option?" angle, to throw suspicion Starbuck's direction. It works, in a vague kind of way; people don't suspect me, at least.
A few other cards get dropped before my turn, such that we have 5 civvies clustered at the aft, with Raiders at 1 o'clock. We've got 1 Viper protecting them, with another one at 5 o'clock, ready to move into position.
Me: "OK, I'm going to use my CAG ability to activate up to 6 unmanned Vipers."
Everyone: "Yay!"
*moves both Vipers down to the opposite end of the ship from the Civvies*
Starbuck: "That's pretty sketchy, Apollo."
Roslin: "Yeah, why would you do that?"
Starbuck: "Because he's a Cylon."
Me: "Well, there's a lot of cards that drop basestars and shit at the front of the ship, I'm just anticipating that. I think the civvies will be fine."
Roslin: "You're not explaining yourself very well. Why are you doing this?"
Starbuck: "Because he's a Cylon."
Roslin: "....yeah, I guess so. Does that mean that Boomer is the other Cylon, again?"
Boomer: "No, he never looked at my cards, how would he know? I'm human."
Me: "If that happened, though, I would pretty much laugh for hours."
So Starbuck XO'd the President to Arrest Order me. Didn't matter, they lost 3 of the 5 civvies before the jump, which was about what I'd hoped for. They managed to pick up one jump prep.
Boomer's turn, at 8 distance. She vacillates about the best choice, finally opting for...
....revealing her loyalty as a Cylon, and draining the Morale down to 1. We high-fived and laughed so much. The admiral started talking about the possibility of surrender. I immediately followed Boomer to the basestar, drawing Massive Assault as my super crisis. By the time it got back around to us, they still only had 1 jump prep -- shitty luck on their part. The President, however, had managed to rouse morale back up to 2.
Boomer dropped the Cylon Intruders card -- they failed. I dropped Massive Assault.
Starbuck drew a shitty crisis, and used Secret Destiny to exchange it.
33. Every Cylon ship and every civilian ship was now on the board. Boomer and I wrecked shit to hell and back.
You suck.
I honestly couldn't think of a way to get that fuel back. Throwing you in the brig would not have helped too terribly much, because I'm not sure we would have been able to get that fuel back anyway.
Also, way to have a gf that prevented playing the other night.
EDIT: That sounds awesome Gandalf
You don't lose from fuel loss until the end of the turn. Scout out a destination that can give you fuel back, save a strategic planning for it, and hope.