To start with, your ships never actually get tougher, compared to the opposition. Heavier ships like the Artemis and Jupiter Battlestar classes carry heavier and more numerous turret batteries arranged into many firing arcs, but their accuracy against Nemesis corvettes means that you'll spend multiple turns focusing fire on a single light unit while being completely dismantled by the supporting units. "Focus Fire" as written is indefensibly stupid. When hacked, fire control is ALWAYS the first subsystem to go, which means that very shortly you won't even be able to return fire. Also, when trying to hold the range open so that replenishable fighter squadrons can whittle the op force down to something your wall of battle can handle, every single round, every single missile, and every single bullet will damage Navigation, so you won't be able to keep running. The same is not true for the AI players. Another point: Cylon boarders, left unchecked, can destroy a colonial ship. Cylon ships CANNOT be destroyed by Colonial Marines. Colonial Dradis is really myopic for some reason, which means that unless you send scouting squadrons out, you won't be able to use guided munitions or identify your targets until point blank range unless you forego offensive action for a turn. Lastly, they don't give you enough information on the strategy map. It's a given that Galactica will be attacked once recovered, so a strategy I tried was to escort her back to Ragnar with another full fleet. When inevitably I was attacked, it didn't tell me that I was being attacked by multiple fleets, or what the composition of the second fleet was which led to me using my escort fleet to smash a small raiding squadron and trying to take down one of the largest fleets fielded by the Cylon during the campaign with Galactica unaided. TL:DR It's a grind that is intended to distract you with pretty graphics in the hope that you won't notice that the rest of the game is basically not there.
