Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes forces players to make hard choices

The upcoming roguelite PC game fuses FTL with Reigns

Ronald D. Moore’s post-apocalyptic science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica spanned a miniseries, four seasons, and two movies, but it was never better than its first episode. The Hugo Award-winning “33” is a grueling 45 minutes of television, where the robotic Cylons follow their nuclear assault on humanity by pursuing the survivors through space. The Cylons somehow zero in on the ragtag fleet’s location every 33 minutes, attacking them until they can make another faster-than-light jump. That relentless tension serves as one of the touchstones for Alt Shift’s Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, a roguelite strategy game coming to PC later this year.

“They have to jump, and they can’t sleep, and they can’t do much of the things they want to do,” Alt Shift co-founder and creative director Julien Cotret told Polygon in a video call. “We really wanted to give the same feeling to the players. So that’s why, by design, you do not have time to do everything you would like to do.”

A two-hour demo released on Feb. 16 puts players in command of a gunstar shepherding a few civilian ships through space in hopes of reaching the protection of the legendary Commander William Adama and the Battlestar Galactica. Cotret said he chose to follow a new crew and ship to avoid being constrained by the show’s canon. Every sector of space you jump to offers opportunities to gather desperately needed resources, upgrade your ships, and potentially recruit new heroes. But the Cylons inevitably show up, forcing you into a fight to protect your fleet until you can jump to the next sector.

Alt Shift’s first game, Crying Suns, fused the flavor of Battlestar Galactica with the mechanics of FTL: Faster Than Light. Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes keeps many of the core mechanics, giving players a tactical pause in the real-time space battles they can use to issue commands as they face waves of Cylon ships and an unbeatable Cylon basestar firing nukes that they need to intercept at all costs. You’ll need to carefully deploy and position your own fighters and make the most of the gunstar’s weaponry to survive long enough to get away.

Every hit your fleet takes in battle matters. If the Cylons destroy your fighters, you’ll need to spend scarce resources to repair them before they can be deployed again. If your larger ships take enough damage, they trigger events that can force you to spend more resources or your heroes’ precious time literally putting out fires. Heroes can crew fighters and weapons to give them boosts in the fight, but that also leaves them vulnerable to injuries that can take them out of commission.

I always felt like I was just barely keeping the fleet running. I was so focused on maintaining what I had that I couldn’t afford the upgrades that might improve my situation. Making things even more challenging are the various crises the fleet faces each time it explores a sector, which can range from a murder that needs to be solved to mechanical failure endangering a civilian vessel.

“We have roughly 100 crises for the players to encounter, and we focused mainly on the ones that the player can encounter at the beginning of the run to avoid a sense of repetition,” narrative designer Martin Ringot told Polygon. “There are some crises that are caused by human error or accidents during the daily life of a fleet in space and some that are caused by factions that are unhappy with how you deal with the fleet, or a Cylon being in the fleet and causing trouble.”

Ringot and Cotret were inspired by Corey Konieczka’s out-of-print Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, where players had to manage their fleet’s health and morale while figuring out who among them was secretly a Cylon trying to undermine the group. While it’s not featured in the demo, players will eventually have to figure out which of their heroes is a Cylon who should be shoved out an airlock or a reluctant saboteur who can stay on the ship.

FTL and “33” serve as the pillars of the game’s tense space battles, but the other core inspirations are the narrative strategy game Reigns and the season 3 Battlestar Galactica “Dirty Hands.” That episode focuses on class struggles within the fleet as the workers producing fuel demand better treatment. You’re repeatedly asked to choose sides in conflicts between factions within the fleet and have to decide how to dole out limited resources.

“Every choice you make is choosing between the lesser of two evils in the given context and dealing with concrete and really day-to-day problems coming from the fleet, even if you have some much more important issues to deal with from the Cylons,” Ringot said.

Likewise, each of your procedurally generated heroes has their own morale track that needs to be managed by having heartfelt chats or playing stress-relieving games in the ship’s bar. If you improve their morale enough, they’ll disclose their core trauma. If not, their defining flaws will eventually start causing problems for the fleet.

“Every character in the show has a secret that they will eventually reveal, generally to William Adama because he’s the dad of the show,” Ringot said. “You have to help them, or they will cause a terrible crisis that will be a problem for your ability to survive because they will chase away some inhabitants of the fleet, or you will lose fleet health, or they will be self-destructive.”

This being a roguelite, most runs will end with your fleet being annihilated in battle, though you’ll earn extra resources and other edges for your next run. The full game will also have a 10-level Extinction Mode that’s similar to the Ascension mode of Slay the Spire for players who want to ramp up the difficulty.

“The Cylons will be harder and harder and your own fleet is also more confrontational with you,” Cotret said. “It’s like a small civilization where you have the highs and the lows of humankind.”