The Gunstar Scimitar, one of the few battleships to escape the Cylon attack on Caprica, has a problem. Yes, it is the only military vessel standing between a pursuing robot army intent on wiping out the last of humanity and an unarmed civilian fleet, but the safety of the civvie ships that cluster around the Scimitar like pilot fish to a whale shark isn’t the immediate worry. Nor is it the imposter robot hiding among the command crew, planting bombs across the fleet and sewing seeds of discontent at every opportunity. It’s STDs. The colonial marines crewing the gunship are riddled with them. Charitably, you could say the soldiers saw it as their duty to restart the human race. Whatever the case, as the commander of the Scimitar, I have to choose whether to spare the marines their blushes and let the infections continue to spread or step in with some prophylactics and a lecture on safe sex.
If you choose to avoid embarrassment, the healthcare level of the entire fleet will drop, as infection spreads unabated through the amorous crew. Step in with condoms and talk of birds and bees and your relationship with the now-chastened military will deteriorate. Not every decision in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, the roguelike FTL take on the sci-fi TV series, is to do with the nighttime antics of your crew, but they do all carry consequences.
Your objective in every run of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is the same. You must survive jumps through 12 sectors of Cylon-controlled space and link up with the Commander Adama of the Battlestar Galactica. He is pulling together an armada to push out into the stars and find a new home for humanity. Holding your fragile fleet together long enough to catch up with Adama is not easy, though. As well as battling STDs, you must balance the needs of different factions, battle the Cylons who catch up with you in each sector, and deal with the frequently emerging crises by using your tired crew and scant resources.
It’s best to think of each sector on your journey as an episode. From the moment you arrive in a new sector, you have limited time before the Cylons arrive and you are forced to leave. That time is measured out in a small pool of actions. You must spend those visiting points of interest, dealing with crises in the fleet, or training the crews of the civilian ships. In addition to those actions which advance time, you also have some moves you can make only once per sector, such as visiting the bar to spend downtime with your crew and progressing your search for the imposter sabotaging the fleet. But I’ll come back to that. After you burn through your actions in the sector, you must face off against the Cylons in a real-time battle. Their forces are infinite and stronger than you. Your aim is to hold the toasters off just long enough for your jump drives to spool up so you can escape to the next sector and do it all over again.
The first thing you’ll want to do when you arrive in a sector is weigh up your options. There might be an abandoned station with fuel tanks just begging to be syphoned off, a depot stuffed with supplies aching for redistribution across the fleet, or maybe even a lost squadron of Mk 7 Vipers you can track down and recruit to your gunship. However, committing to any of these missions will cost time and resources. At a minimum, completing a point of interest costs fuel. Run your fleet’s resources dry and when it comes to jumping at the end of the sector, you will cause massive damage to your ships. If the fleet’s health hits zero or your gunship is destroyed, it’s game over for your run.
But you can also choose to invest more resources for a bonus. Your senior crew only has the energy to perform one action each sector, but send them on a mission and the rewards can be massive. Without a hero, a fuel syphoning mission may only return one additional fuel for the fleet, but if you send your head of engineering, they can up that to three. Even more if they’ve a trait that earns you a bonus. Send them to find a lost squadron or a hero in a drifting escape pod and the new recruit’s starting trait will be rare or higher. Traits can do things like earn bonus resources, or increase a squadron’s attack power in battle, or expand the radius of your battleship’s flak cannon screen.
However, points of interest are only one of things that will sap your time in a sector. Most of your energy will be spent solving crises. Sure, that may be a wave of STDs spreading across the fleet, but more often it is an act of sabotage, a ruptured hull, or a civilian uprising over working conditions. Some crises are straightforward: a Cylon has planted a bomb on one of your ships and it will explode in three turns unless you spend the resources to defuse it. Your choice is simple, use up a hero’s precious action point, invest limited supplies or scrap, or simply let the bomb go off and take the hit to your fleet’s health. Sometimes doing nothing is the best option.
Unlike a minor crisis, which can be resolved or ignored until the timer expires, a major crisis is either a costly, ongoing threat to your fleet, or a massive one-off fee. For instance, in one crisis, a murder took place on a civilian ship. I could either choose to investigate the crime or leave the civilians to take justice into their own hands. If I chose the latter, and bypassed the crisis, my repair costs for all ships and squadrons would jump up massively for the next two sectors. However, picking the former would reduce supply production across the fleet until the culprit was found.
As your run continues, these crises can pile up becoming a serious drain on your resources. You may at one point be facing a revolution on one of your civilian ships, an outbreak of plague on another, and a murder investigation on a third, forcing you to pick and choose where to spend your resources resolving them. A lovely touch is that the crises that spawn often reflect the status of your game. If you have a tense relationship with the military because, I don’t know, you gave them a lecture about proper condom use, then the next flashpoint you face will likely be a military junta. However, despite the setup, the crises themselves blend into one another because the actions are largely identical. Solving major crises often boils down to the same thing: a set of sub objectives, each of which is solved by either spending a chunk of supplies or using one of your senior crews’ actions. Canvas the scene of the crime: one hero action or four supplies; speak to the leaders of the revolution: one hero action or eight supplies; administer to the sick: one hero action point or six supplies. You get the idea.
The persistent crisis that is different is the Cylon investigation. In every run, after a few jumps, just when you’re starting to get comfortable, bombs will start to appear across the fleet. The culprit is within your senior crew and through a process of elimination you will need to expose them. Each sector, you can investigate an aspect of your crew’s history – their past before joining the fleet, medical history, fleet record, and material evidence. You can also overhear rumours in the bar, get offered suspicions by factions you’ve made friends with (again, in my game this was not the sternly-talked-to-STD-riddled colonial marines), or examine evidence left over from thwarted sabotage attempts. There will always be two suspects with three suspicious blots on their records. You then need to spend supplies or lock the suspect in the brig to find out the truth. However, while Cylon imposter is randomly chosen on every run, the investigation plays out in exactly the same way. It should be full of drama and intrigue, but instead it’s bland and predictable.
When you reach the end of the sector, the battle against the Cylons is swaps to real-time. Each melee begins with your battleship and civilian ships on one side of the screen and the Cylon battleship at the other side of the screen and you launch your squadrons into the space in between. Your job is simple: survive until your jump drive counter reaches zero and you can escape to the next sector.
There are fleeting moments where Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes captures the look of the 2004 series. The two goliaths at each side of the battlefield fling munitions at each other, shredding any fighters caught in their flak barrages, nukes crisscross space and you’ll need to divert Vipers from their targets to intercept the missiles, and all of the Raptors, Vipers, and Cylon raiders that feature in the series make an appearance. But, as with the crises and the imposter investigation minigame, battles repeat and repeat and repeat. At the beginning of every encounter I sent my ships to the same starting positions, used the same formations, and barely varied my tactics. Even as my squadrons levelled up and I found new weapons for my battleship, I barely changed how I played.
I love the look of Scattered Hopes. Its low poly ships and pixel art textures are beautiful, the UI is crisp, and yet there is a lifelessness to its action. As I flick through the screenshots of battles, it’s impossible to ignore how static the battlefield is. The ships sitting stock still in the same location fight after fight. Even the way the ships move, is in simplistic straight lines. There’s a shot in the game’s opening cutscene that’s from the cockpit of a Viper firing out of a launch tube. It’s a shot familiar from the series and it’s glorious in this style, but there’s never a moment of that action in the game.
Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is playable for a run or two, and it has flickers of the series that inspired it, but spend too much time in its company and it simply becomes robotic.