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ERICWHITE100

Join Date 02/2006

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Novice Poster - Created 5 Posts

Normal vs. Challenging GAP

difficulty

Hi all,

To sum this up, I can win every time on normal difficulty. I have not been able to win yet on challenging. Normal gets boring because I outpace the AI so I is not a challenge. Challenging creaps up on you. You think you are kicking butt, but all of a sudden the AI shows up with a fleet that is 5x more powerful than mine. Game over.

SO..... first, what am a doing wrong? I have been playing TBS games since the early days of Civ I, and played all MOO, Civ, and any other game like them ever, and been pretty good at each one. There are like 5 additional difficulties above challenging. I have not ruled out the possibility that I am doing something fundamentally wrong, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it would be. So, my conclusion is that there should be another difficulty level between the two.

Any thoughts?

ideas

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Post your strategies, then we can review/comment. Tech trading with races is very important for income, make sure you have a decent diplomacy skill. 100% approval rating doubles the growth rate of population, good thing to remember for the start of the game when you can run your empire off the 5000 BCs you get initially. Rushing for the best worlds is HUGE in the beginning of the game, read the forums for ideas on how to maximize your expansion. I'm finding that the AI on intelligent is good but I'm not having too hard a time winning in the end.

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All you have to do is up the intelligence of one race and the overall difficulty goes up to Challenging.

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I didn't realize that about the pop rate vs. appr rate, but that makes sense since the AI always seems to out populate me. My typical strategy has been:

1. Buy a colony ship for 3 turns straight, which gets me to the best worlds.
2. Buy a research center the first turn.
3. Buy a manufactuing center the second turn.
4. Keep the last 1k for a buffer.
5. Run with Tech high early, gun for good techs, then trade for the lower techs (I trade very often, especially with mnior races who you can screw with a high diplomacy skill).
6. I usually try and just build colony ships on my home planet for a while, and populate as many planets as possible until they are gone.
7. I have run at 70% approval rate, but now knowing this new info i will run at 100% at least until my big planet pops are near max.
8. I traditionally maximize research for my race bonuses, then throw the other 3 points into planet improvement 1.

Could the population/appr rate thing be why the AI always out paces me in most catagorys? They are running around with scouts, colony ships, and constructors in higher quantities than me, and doing research MUCH faster, at least early on. I always catch up, but usually only at the cost of having a smaller military. I don't see how they can maintain such huge militaries but still have such strong economies, production, and research. I will try the 100 appr rating tonight to see what happens.

About my early buying patterns: I don't see how not buying buildings and colony ships early can be a good thing, but if it works for you, it must work.

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I doubt the population thing is the critical factor, as I'm winning well enough on Painful and haven't had the problems you describe. This is probably a silly question, but are you running at 100% spending? I suspect half the people who are havig trouble never move that slider.

As long as you are getting your share of planets and doing trading, your opening is probably good enough for Challenging. Lately I've been going 100% social to start, to get factories built up on my homeworld fast (slightly acclerated by buying) so I can really crank out colony ships and scouts. It's more efficient BC-wise. But that is on larger maps where grabbing the first planet right away isn't as important.

I didn't notice Trade (the frieghter kind) in your strategy. If you don't get that going, you will definitely be at a disadvantage in income.

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Yeah, I micromanage the spending slider, pretty much every turn. I just read through the "tech whoring" thread, and it appears that most people sell their techs for cash. I have never actually done this, but instead just trade for other techs. I would imagine this would give me a big boost.

The issue with traders is that it basically takes a long time just to build colony ships (early on with 3 factories it still takes like 20 turns) and basically I get out-colonized if I would break to build traders. If you are not buying colony ships, and you are putting 100% into social. Don't you get out colonized?

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I was talking about the global spending slider. I usually turn that to 100% right away and never turn it down.

Anyway, the traders come after the colonization is done.

The start on a larger map for me looks something like:

Turn 1, buy a factory, set 100% spend, 100% social, queue another factory
Turn 2, finish buying second factory (reduced price), queue another - repeat until you have 5 (only have to buy the first few)
Turn 5 - now, with the 5th factory, switch to 100% military, design a fast colony ship and a scout (based on cargo hull). Produce the scout in 1 turn.
Turn 6 - Produce a colony ship every turn until you think you have enough on the fly. The key to being able to produce these ships that quickly is +50% military production, which effectively reduces their cost, and having the two military techs to start, which provides a further boost to military production (other techs in custom race are engine techs).

Basically, from Turn 5 on, you can produce a nice, fast colony ship every turn for less than 100bc's out of your pocket. Mix these in with one or two even faster scouts and a fast constructor or two and start vectoring them to likely stars. Redirect as needed. You can have all the colony ships you're likely to need and still have 3000bc in the bank.

After you've produced enough colony ships ('enough' is a judgement call based on your current scouting and the minimap), you can try to get some labs built (100% social), go 100% research and try to catch up on tech for a few turns, give your colonies time to grow a bit. Then major investment in social to get the infrastructure up, and start thinking about putting some back into military to build up a couple of ships and maybe freighters. You can afford to build a lot of stuff and run the economy flat out because of the money you saved not buying all your colony ships.

Bottom line is building can be a lot more efficient than buying. If you don't need it right away, better to build it. On a smaller map, where everything might be gone pretty fast, you probably have to buy, but at least redesign for a faster colony ship. Never build a core design if you can help it.

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Ah, +military production doesn't work the way I thought it did. So where I said it was equivalent to a discout on ship cost, that was appears to be incorrect.

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Ok, now I can beat the thing pretty good on painful. There are several ways to victory, but tech whoring is really the biggest. It is actually pretty sad that you can do this:

I set my race abilities to all research usually, but there are several things that work well. I do rearch because of tech whoring.

1. Do pretty much what you said, factories, large social production.
2. colony ships, but I put some back on social after the first few ships.
3. After I do enough colonies, I turn down mil to about 30, crank up soc to 70 to rock out the new colonies for many turns. Change to building contructors everywhere. I build starports and factories primarily. After each colony has 2 factories, I build recreation, then research, more factories, then more research.
4. I build manuf cap and tech cap ASAP.
5. Build traders asap.
6. in there somewhere I will change to 100% research (after I have several factilities) and build some path up several levels, then go sell it and make a few k to keep my run going.
6. After the colonies are pretty much rocking, I change to 60% research then 20/20 on the others.
7. By this time, I have way more research capability than anyone, and I am loaded with cash. Who needs banks, or anything else when you are rolling in dough?
8. I focus early on going up several techs in one tree to sell, usually things I don't care that they have, like soil stuff.
9. Research diplomacy, and secondarily culture stuff.
10. I make sure I get the galactic bazaar.

So, this is a technology based win really. I hope they have an option to not trade techs soon, as this is getting boring.

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Why would you need Mil at 30% You only have one world producing ships isnt it better to put social at 100 and focus your homeworld on mil which will transfer 50% to military from social :/

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