Another thing that they did very well was the limited supplies. When they fire off a nuke against a Cylon ship, it’s a big deal, because they don’t have very many of those, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Compare to Star Trek: Voyager, where they told us explicitly how many irreplaceable photon torpedoes they had, then fire off three times that many over the course of the show.
It seems to me that it started as a story about religious fundamentalists attacking a technologically advanced multicultural civilization.