Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is heralded as the first great Battlestar game, and it’s been a long time coming. A fantastic blend of turn-based space battles and grand strategy meta-management, Deadlock is both brilliant and challenging. Once you’re past the early stages of the campaign, battles will get more and more fierce with you coming out just by the skin of your teeth, provided you even do. However, there are a few techniques which will make things a tad easier as you battle the Cylon fleet.

Deadlock’s gameplay is as much about movement and positioning as it is a complex game of rock-paper-scissors. Some ships are perfect counters for others, and you’ll need to keep a lot of factors in mind while commanding your ships and responding to the movements of the enemy ships. While situations are fluid, if you keep these tips in mind you’ll have a better chance overall.

Positioning is crucial

Always match enemy maneuvers

Firstly, the relative positions of your ships to the enemy ships is absolutely crucial. Simply staying in range and pounding away at the target might eventually get you the result you want, but it’s extremely inefficient. In Deadlock, ship health is double layered. You have the overall hit points of the hull, which when reduced to 0 causes your ship to go boom. Additionally, you have armor, which is distributed into ‘regions’ on the ship’s surface, like aft, top, bottom, starboard, etc, etc. You need to chew through one of these regions before you start scoring damage on the hull, and if you’ve been firing at an enemy ship’s aft for a while, and then they turn so your shots hit starboard, it’s like starting all over again. You need to respond to the maneuvers of your opponent to stay in the same relative position to the target.

Another important aspect of ship positioning is elevation. More or less, ships will be moving on the same plane as opposed to moving in full free 3D space, however you can still alter the elevation within the map of your ships. This is an important thing to keep an eye out for because collisions will whack your ships to hell really bloody quickly. Sure, purposefully sending a low-health ship into an enemy to take them down with you, but when a weak opponent Kamikazes your Jupiter halving its HP, it’s a major blow to your chances.

When positioning ships, you should also plan out what ships go against what enemies. In general terms, sending multiple small ships against one larger enemy is a better choice than sending something in the same weight category up against it, as you’ll either be diluting its damage, or, if it focuses fire on just one of your ships, the others won’t be bothered while picking away at the target’s health. In fact, Deadlock is at times counter-intuitive, because the small ships tend to be more effective overall than the bigger, heavier hitting ones. The Manticore frigate, the smallest non-fighter in the Colonial Fleet, is one of the most useful ships in the entire game, and it’s also the very first ship you’re given.

Cosmic Rock Paper Scissors

Never forget the power of fighter squadrons

Speaking of small ships hitting hard, always always launch your fighter squadrons from carrier ships, because those little buggers do silly amounts of damage. Fighters are pretty much good against anything, but in case the enemy fleet whips out their own squadrons, definitely send yours after those, because if you don’t, they will wreck your ships before you can say “fraking toaster”.

Another factor that you should definitely remember is hacking. If you’re playing as the Colonials, remember to stop it, and if you’re playing as the Cylons, remember to do it. See, ships in Deadlock have a number of subsystems, which affect various abilities. Navigation determines how much control you can assert on the direction the ship will move in, fire control allows you to shoot, engines determine speed and so-on. These subsystems sustain damage after their associated armor region is broken through - unless you’re getting hacked, because hacking causes direct subsystem damage. A full-HP ship won’t do you much good if it can’t shoot and can only drift in a straight line.

We hope these early tips help with your gameplay strategies, but we’ll have more soon so keep checking back!