ladies and gentlemen, buckle your seatbelts while I deliver this tale of
woe WHOA FRAK
The Rag-Tag Fleet sets out from the ruined colonies under Admiral Helena Cain and President Tory Foster. Our CAG is Louanne Katraine and our fourth member of note is a mysterious priest who buggered in from somewhere going by the name of 'Cavil'. As a Cylon Leader it's unclear to us what Cavil's agenda is and whether he ultimately wants the humans or Cylons to be victorious, which makes him exactly as trustworthy as the rest of us.
Hem hem.
As usual we begin with a Cylon base star off the nose and Raiders inbound. Cain charges in with Pegasus and damages the basestar but return fire knocks out the Pegasus CIC and lands our dear Admiral right in sickbay. Galactica is damaged by further base ship missile fire, crippling the Armory and later the hangar deck. Smashing start, right?
But it's not an omen of things to come. The first half of our game is a monument to human efficiency, with Cain and Tory cooperating to magnificent effect. Cain gives her turns to President Tory, who uses her abilities to leverage skill cards out of Quorum play, building up a repository of engineering ability as well as implementing food policies and inspirational speeches that put our resources
above their starting positions. Kat the CAG escorts civilian ships off the board and we stay well ahead of the Cylon force, which is left languishing on the pursuit board. Even Cavil pitches in, using his influence to vanish away a base star that pops in to harass us (presumably he needs it to pimp around sightseeing supernovas and whining about his pale fleshy Dean Stockwell body.)
With this convincing show of trust we realize that Cavil is in the human camp this game. Cavil sets up camp aboard Galactica after infiltrating the Fleet; we're cool with that. We're slightly less than halfway to Kobol at this point, moving quickly, morale and resources high. Cain uses her blind jump ability to keep us charging along and in no time at all we hit the midgame and the sleeper agent phase with our only real worry being depleted fuel reserves.
Immediately after the sleeper agent cards are dealt, a Raptor crash damages Pegasus. Moments later, an enormous Cylon fleet jumps in, surrounding us. Civilian ships are in peril, but we have a response ready. "Cavil!" the admiral orders. "Get to Communications and order those civilians to move under the cover of our Viper patrols!"
Cavil goes to Communications.
Cavil sends the wrong coordinates.
The civilian ships fly away from the Vipers, into the Raider swarm.
We watch them explode with what mildly be termed a general air of distress. Almost half our civilian fleet is gone. From sickbay, Cain orders nuclear release, using both our warheads to take out the two basestars off Galactica's bow. But the Raider swarms still remain, some of them in killing range of our civilians. It's now the CAG's job to get the surviving civilians out of there while we prepare the fleet to jump.
The CAG opens her turn by ordering all of Galactica's Vipers to land. Then she sabotages Galactica's FTL computer, resetting our jump clock. The Raiders massacre another quarter of our civilian fleet.
Kat is a Cylon. Our marines gun her down and send her to the resurrection ship, leaving Cain and Tory the only humans on the Fleet.
With our population and fuel reserves dangerously low our priority is clear: save the remaining civilians. President Tory takes command of Pegasus' main batteries and opens fire on the Raiders, taking out a swathe of them but also killing a civilian ship as collateral damage. Less than 1/5th of the human race now survives.
Moments later Cavil orders his Raiders to engage Pegasus. The swarms are overwhelming and Pegasus, battered by the Raptor crash and earlier damage from the base ships, detonates. The President is sent to sickbay on Galactica.
Pegasus did her job - for the moment our surviving civilians are clear, and with the base stars nuked, and although the surviving raiders are numerous they are spread out and need time to close in. Unfortunately the same can't be said of the Heavy Raiders; two of them crash into the flight pod and unload their Centurions.
From this point on it's down to the wire. The two Cylons - Cavil and Kat - are able to push the Centurions towards the decompression safeties with alarming speed. Our armory is offline and we need to repair it. Tory gets that done. Cain launches Vipers from Galactica CIC to try to help our surviving civilians get off the board, but moments later CIC is hit by Raider fire and she's sickbayed
again. We have only two Vipers spaceborne; one of them in position to defend the civilians. Heroically, he holds off four Raiders single-handedly but is shot down by the last one.
A Cylon bomb takes out Colonial One. We're so battered that we make no effort to stop it. The cackling Cylons declare that they did it for the lulz.
But even in the face of human extinction Tory and Cain will not be deterred. We need two more jumps to make it to Kobol. At Cain's urging Tory rushes to CIC and declares an emergency jump. The jump clock was nearly full; we lose only one population (leaving us at one
) in the process. We're now one jump from safety, and quick use of the Armory manages to handle one of the two Centurion boarding parties.
We had a plan here. It almost worked. We needed a pilot, badly, and Tory volunteered to have herself airlocked so she could come back as another human - if you're executed as a human you get to draw another character, like Starbuck, Lee or Anders. Unfortunately we couldn't pull it off, and in the end we went down a turn later when the colossal Cylon pursuit force caught up with us and wiped out the last of our civilians. Without Pegasus or a CAG or even any Vipers up we didn't have a prayer.
Cavil gleefully revealed his hidden agenda card:
Illusion of Hope. Allow the humans to get within two jumps of victory, then annihilate them. Consider it done, Brother Cavil.
In the end we ran out of population because we couldn't effectively screen our civilians. We never got enough Vipers up and never repaired the four damaged Mk. VIIs sitting on our hangar deck (those things are great at civilian escort.) With Centurions one space away from the decompression safeties it was abundantly clear that our problem was not handling Crisis Cards - which Tory's political acumen generally blew away - but stopping bad Cylons from touching poor old Galactica and its various consorts.
Next time we'll learn our lesson. MORE VIPERS. MORE FIREPOWER. It would also help if the CAG were not a Cylon.
