DEVs, don't cut corners, give us a proper BSG Experience.

[Paradox3713]

Battlestar Galactica Deadlock Developers,

I watched your gameplay video recently and saw a lot of great potential to do a BSG game right. But given that it was the only video seen thus far I'm hoping you improve upon this game and don't make the same huge mistakes that a previous company made with their Online version of the BSG universe. You see some of the players still playing that 'cookie cutter clone' are now making assessments that the game you are making is nothing more than a recycled and reskinned clone of another game you released about 2 or so years ago. I find is very funny that they are choosing to be so critical given that they and the developers failed across the board with the other game for about 6 years or so straight. The problem was that they didn't follow through and make the game even remotely Battlestar Galactica outside of the assets being skinned as BSG. All they did was reskin a previous game they had created and they didn't bother to complete the conversion. So now the only people still playing it are the people who clearly don't have much respect for themselves as they keep complaining yet keep playing.

In looking at what you have put together for your recent gameplay video I can tell you exactly what will make your game standout among the rest, and what will make your game better than even the fan made flight sim that was created years ago. What is truly needed is something that most games lack and that is depth. Here is what you need to get there.

1. Let the players be the fleet commanders but let them chose only one ship as their flagship. It is okay having them commanding the fleet, but allow the ship commanders to deal with their own internal issues such as damage control, intruders on board, or engagement tactics to be used against the enemy when needed. They are commanders after all. When not being ordered to attack a certain target by the player they should be able to show they know how to operate, maintain, and fight the enemy with the ships under their command. Also consider giving ships personnel as part of subsystem and fighter repair times. Because crews matter. If during combat crew members are injured or dead that should be a play a factor in the fight as well as affect the player performance score.

2. Program AI Commanders with good tactics and maybe create some seen in BSG. Like I said, it’s about the feel and experience so give that to your players to keep them playing.

3. Squadron Leaders for Viper and Raider squadrons. When these types of units engage each other they should behave as squadrons in combat would splitting of into 2-ship and 4-ship squads during engagements with pilots gaining experience. If a Squad Leader or senior Flight officer is killed someone is promoted into that slot. Simple flocking type behavior is unacceptable and is so 1990s. It also does not create a proper BSG combat environment and feel. Concerning control of a Viper/Raider Wing, as a squadron is 18 or 20 craft, if they finish their player given task, they should default back under the control of their Baseship and that ships should choose the priority.
4. If available a Raptor should be assigned to every 9 or 10 ship squad and when assigned give a coordination performance bonus to the squad there are assigned to which would be proper for BSG.

5. Hero or Command (Captain/Major) level Raider/Viper pilots should have the flexibility to change the priority if there is a higher threat within range. (i.e. If they see a nuke inbound to a base ship or if they notice that a mission critical ship or their own base ship is in serious trouble, they may chose to intercept that threat or direct a flight to intercept a threat.

6. Making ships have proper designations and that they loaded out to those designations and roles respectively. Frigates are typically anti-fighter escort ships and should be loaded as such. Cruisers and Destroyers should have their own proper loadouts that fill out their roles in the fleet. One of the problems that the other BSG multiplayer game had was that the developers never properly loaded out ships to fill tasks and roles to deal properly with threats. The same weapon systems used for attacking large or medium classed warships were also used for attacking small fighters and missiles when they should have been preset with flak cannons and point defense batteries to handle the smaller threats. Also ships didn’t have proper ranges so instead of their being epic looking fleet battles you had every player controlled ship stacked on top of each other so close they could spit on each other. There was literally no real tactical level combat. It was basically the American Revolutionary War in space combat wise and none of the battles looked like a BSG battle.

7. DO NOT USE COOKIE CUTTER SHIP LAYOUTS! Diversify based on race, Human vs Cylon. Each with their own respective strengths and weaknesses. There is nothing worse than having the same ships on both sides only with different skins. If it starts to feel like that BSG game I mentioned you will fail like they did! You have the potential to be superior here. Don’t play yourselves.

8. Don’t hide behind the support of Fanbois, and think you can sit on your asses and do nothing because they are talking down angry players. When the players of that other BSG game were asking for real work to be done to improve their game the developers hid behind their Fanbois who kept using the same tired excuse year after year that improvements would take too much time and money. And when I say it happened every year I mean it happened every freakin’ year. After over 6 years they accomplished nothing and the game is an utter failure. DON’T DO IT! So again you have a great opportunity here and some serious potential to get this program done right. But the only way you are going to truly be successful is if you give the best Battlestar Galactica experience gamers have ever seen.

You can prove the critics wrong and make this game great. Do not make this a rehashed, re-skinned clone of your previous game.

[BossDos]

Well said.

But i would like to add a few points.

1. I would like to see an FTL Feature. But why you gona ask? ATM after what i seen of the Beta Gameplay all this Fights are simply plain all-out attacks.
And thats neither tactical nor the essential of BSG after my opinion.
Atm. if i commit to a fight i need to go all out and take all loses, but sometimes i dont want to. When there are fights which are to costly to win, because i will lose to much ships or one very important battlestar, i dont want to take it or i want to take it but secure this ships.
For which i would like a FTL Feature like the retreat Feature in Battlefleet Gothic. When my Battlestar is heavy damaged i can jump him out of the battle, cutting my firepower down but saving this one ship.
Or perhaps i dont want to fight the whole fight, perhaps there is only one important ship like a Basestar ore a Cerberus in the Enemy fleet, and after i killed it, i dont want to take the fight any longer so i jump out my whole fleet.
Also sometimes i dont want to deploy my whole Fleet at first, sometimes i want to hold ships back, to lure the enemy into attacking my weaker position and then BOOM a Jupiter jumps on their back and fucks them up.

2. Repair Timings. Jeah i want Repair Timings, even out of combat, when my Battlestar sustained heavy damage in the last fight it should take a few turns to be fully operational again with all the negative things coming with it. Perhaps a Cyclon Fleets attacks us when we are not fully repaired? Well then we need to fight less effective or need to run via FTL.
Perhaps thats a Feature for which you could use the Daidalos pretty well. Its a shipyard, ships asigned to there fleet or near to it should repair faster then the lone battlestar in a different starsystem.

That are some things which would i like to see too and add them to yours.
Because i want a realy good BSG-Game with the whole right feeling. And atm after what i saw, its not quite yet there.
Not that it will matter, i will buy it anyways.

[fisher2000]

Well said.

But i would like to add a few points.

1. I would like to see an FTL Feature. But why you gona ask? ATM after what i seen of the Beta Gameplay all this Fights are simply plain all-out attacks.
And thats neither tactical nor the essential of BSG after my opinion.
Atm. if i commit to a fight i need to go all out and take all loses, but sometimes i dont want to. When there are fights which are to costly to win, because i will lose to much ships or one very important battlestar, i dont want to take it or i want to take it but secure this ships.
For which i would like a FTL Feature like the retreat Feature in Battlefleet Gothic. When my Battlestar is heavy damaged i can jump him out of the battle, cutting my firepower down but saving this one ship.
Or perhaps i dont want to fight the whole fight, perhaps there is only one important ship like a Basestar ore a Cerberus in the Enemy fleet, and after i killed it, i dont want to take the fight any longer so i jump out my whole fleet.
Also sometimes i dont want to deploy my whole Fleet at first, sometimes i want to hold ships back, to lure the enemy into attacking my weaker position and then BOOM a Jupiter jumps on their back and fucks them up.

2. Repair Timings. Jeah i want Repair Timings, even out of combat, when my Battlestar sustained heavy damage in the last fight it should take a few turns to be fully operational again with all the negative things coming with it. Perhaps a Cyclon Fleets attacks us when we are not fully repaired? Well then we need to fight less effective or need to run via FTL.
Perhaps thats a Feature for which you could use the Daidalos pretty well. Its a shipyard, ships asigned to there fleet or near to it should repair faster then the lone battlestar in a different starsystem.

That are some things which would i like to see too and add them to yours.
Because i want a realy good BSG-Game with the whole right feeling. And atm after what i saw, its not quite yet there.
Not that it will matter, i will buy it anyways.

I like the idea of being able to hold a ship back for a tactical jump in. But I would suggest that this would cost a little bit more tylium to do this as you are scattering your forces. I do not know how the repair system (if any) works in the game as I haven't got my hands on it yet but I do not like this idea I think a ship must cost resources to repair because if it is free you will be eliminating some of the strategy away as well as the sense of desperation from the game.

with the jumping into a battle aspect, I do not agree with 'Micro-jumps' within the battle. for example, you could move a ship to jump behind the cylons to flank. We have never seen a ship do this in battlestar and I would imagine it would also cost tylium and it sort of a 'cop out’ for the picard manoeuvre in star trek. Again, if your ship is in danger I think that it is a quick escape that would be unnecessary for the game. The idea of retreat is a really good Idea, maybe you could have that unit not in use for two battles or something, there defiantly should be an extreme penalty on it, to make it almost not worth it.

[BossDos]

Yeah I think, Micro-Jumps shouldn't be there. Perhaps for Raptors, and for the Cyclon Raiders, which are known for doing this.
And what would make them more useful as scout units, because the Raptors are quite useless atm.
But not any bigger ship.

Atm the Ships repair automatically full after a battle. What I think is a quite lame, for little ships like the adamants and manticores that's quite ok because they are small, fast repaired, and it should be quite cheap considered the size. But bigger ships like the Battlestars should take time when they take heavy damage. We saw in the Series at the end that the repairs made by the crew of the galactica were not of that high quality and what heavy dmg she sustained.
Fixing that should take time and cost resources.


And yes a retreat should be punished, perhaps with the option to either jump calculated what should take time and which put you in danger of destruction or that the ftls get damaged or taken down while charging... or jump blind.
When you jump blind the chance of losing the ship permanently should be there because it jumps inside the sun or something.
And the penalty for not having it available in the next battles should be higher.

[fisher2000]

Yeah I think, Micro-Jumps shouldn't be there. Perhaps for Raptors, and for the Cyclon Raiders, which are known for doing this.
And what would make them more useful as scout units, because the Raptors are quite useless atm.
But not any bigger ship.

Atm t ships like the Bathe Ships repair automatically full after a battle. What I think is a quite lame, for little ships like the adamants and manticores that's quite ok because they are small, fast repaired, and it should be quite cheap considered the size. But biggertlestars should take time when they take heavy damage. We saw in the Series at the end that the repairs made by the crew of the galactica were not of that high quality and what heavy dmg she sustained.
Fixing that should take time and cost resources.


And yes a retreat should be punished, perhaps with the option to either jump calculated what should take time and which put you in danger of destruction or that the ftls get damaged or taken down while charging... or jump blind.
When you jump blind the chance of losing the ship permanently should be there because it jumps inside the sun or something.
And the penalty for not having it available in the next battles should be higher.

Yes! Raptors defiantly... the only problem with that is not all raptors are jump capable in this era of the war (blood and chrome) but it would be neat to see a new variant that had this ability. Considering the viper went through different variants, we only ever saw two raptors... the blood and chrome raptor (not jump capable) and the raptor from the series (including the one with chaff pods). There is three if you consider the raptor a different variant from the miniseries but I don't. For the raiders, I don't think they should be jump capable ether. Maybe one or two units but other than that I think not because it would take away the surprise of the attacks on the colonies as I assume nobody would have been prepared for small raiders.

Perhaps this could be a added difficulty... "Fleet Admiral". But I defiantly feel it is worth exploring.

The blind jump ability is genius. If your ship is not lost, perhaps it could appear in a random location on the map. I would also love to see space outside of the colonies solar system explored a little more in the game. We know in Blood and Chrome that the twelve colonies had "other worlds" such as the ski resort planet, I would be interested in seeing more unique locations (not black holes though) I do not feel that this is the franchise for time dilation and all that comes with it. Watch this video from the time index it starts at from the link :- https://youtu.be/_OKzKaGZoGw?t=1462