I'd just turn it into an research planet. If your ships are using black hole eruptors when the enimies all have stingers, it dosent matter how many ships they have you still murder them

You're not kidding. It can be quite costly to "turn on" such a planet once it's built, however I have always focused on income as a prime motivator.

I think my strategy has been well documented over the years throughout various threads but I'll try to summarize for those that haven't been around very long.

This is primarily a huge/gigantic galaxy strategy basically because you need a large number of planets as well as a goodly number of economic resources to mine to make it work. Some aspects of it do translate to smaller games but clearly bigger is better when it comes to income.

Basically I use income instead of production. I start the game in pretty much the normal manner focusing all of my initially colonized planets on factories and production. I tend to cut my colony rush phase a bit short just so that by the time the colony rush is over my planets are already at full productive potential. Basically I favor quality over quantity although the other way works as well, albeit much differently.

Anyway, so I finish the colony rush with perhaps half of the planets that the average AI has but each of my planets has about 10 factories and I can quickly outproduce and conquer my first victim. All planets that I capture get immediately converted to 100% income only planets consisting of a single farm and otherwise all stockmarkets. I will place a research building on any 300% or 700% research tiles but that's it, otherwise all conquered planets get converted to 100% stockmarkets. Once I get to the point of 50 or so of these type of planets you begin to make significant amounts of money, easily into 100K~200K per turn levels. Once I reach this point I convert my original planets to income only as well and simply buy all my ships directly. It's inefficient in terms of absolute number of bc's spent on ships but far faster and it snowballs very quickly. In this case I end up with sliders set 100% to research with what few research building that I do have and otherwise buy everything. In a gigantic galaxy with usually 6 economic resources my typical mid game income is pushing close to 1 million bc's per week, towards the end of most games this gets closer to 1.5M per week.

Anyway with income like that there is no issue funding uber research planets. However with income like that there's really no need for uber research planets.

Hi!

From himself. What's 40k BCs for a fully-blown dreadnaught when you earn 1,500k BC each turn?

Don't be concerned with such trivialities as is the Real Life. This is a game, that can be played many ways, buying the universe being only one.

BR, Iztok

I'm a newbie, but I looked at this as buying the ship's from the private sector, i.e. Boeing or Rockwell Collins. You can even issue bonds and buy the ships with future debt attached to them, i.e. the other options with a lower initial cost but with costs each turn for a specified number of turns. When you build it, I'm assuming that you have a government which owns the means of production.

Of course this is also an economy in the year 2225, so who knows what kinds of advancements/declines in economic thought, resource ownership, etc. might have taken place.

Bottom line though, from what I can tell reading the forums and playing the game a few times, is that there are many ways to conquer the galaxy. One can focus on research, manufacturing, economy, defense, or use a combination of the options available. My first win in GalCiv2 was an influence victory. I don't think my strategy in that game would work with tougher AI opponents but it was interesting to push the borders of influence of one of my opponents so that there own planets weren't even in their own sphere of influence.

I found it interesting that the poster above who knocked the game didn't tell us what he was looking for in a space strategy game and what game he felt met those needs. I question his motives for posting on this board when he has only negative comments on a forum that is designed for those that want to learn how to better play the game. Does he work for a competitor? Or does he just have a need to be negative about things and feel superior about his own tastes?

Anyway, thanks for everyone who posts good tips, strategies, and helpful hints as well as those who answer the questions from those of us who are just learning the game.