Suicidal cheese
or: The three principles of winning on Suicidal level
from 
GalCiv2 Forums
GalCiv2 Forums
Disclaimer: The following lines are about tactics that allow you to win without breaking much of a sweat on even the highest difficulty levels (yes, we’re talking about „Suicidal" here) – they’re very close to or even on the other side of the border of cheese tactics. If you don’t like that or despise those who use them, don’t bother posting in this thread as it won’t do any good to both you and me.
However, my goal is not to flame about how easy the game is or to tell you how to storm the Metaverse by submitting game after game on the highest levels (although you might do that), instead I’d like to point out some exploits that could be fixed in my opinion, and I’ll write about my ideas on how to fix them as well.
There are cheese tactics that can never be fixed by Stardock – like save and reload, pre-scouting the map before really playing or using Ctrl-N until you get THE perfect location – the ones below can and hopefully will be changed.
I played and submitted three games on Suicidal level in the last days, each one on a gigantic map with 9 enemies. Each game took me about 7-8 hours to play and they were rather straightforward to win – to my own surprise. It was harder to win a military victory in GalCiv 1 on Maso than it is in GalCiv 2 on Suicidal at the moment.
The last game was played last night (latest patch, for sure!), I was hoping to get into the top 3 to grab a medal, but apparently the metaverse wasn’t updated for at least 15 hours and I’ll be overtaken until it is, I guess. Having finished it, I decided not to do another one in the same style for the moment because it felt a bit stupid and boring. Then I thought about it and realised that I used three basic tactics to build up and win the game without many problems. Here they are:
(1) Tech trading like a madman
As long as you have a decent research output yourself, you’ll always be able to be on par with or even above the tech level of the AIs. How that? It has been explained several times on the forum how to play as the „tech whore", buying and selling techs from anyone to anyone, thus making sure that you have all techs that anybody has, leveling the playground for the AI among themselves and making a nice profit as well.
To put it simple: Tech trading is too easy and too profitable.
Suggestion: Make the AI much more picky about diplomatic deals, perhaps a penalty should be applied to the human player on the levels above „Tough" (the „AI on par" level).
(2) Military power – a bubble that rarely bursts
As soon as possible you should get the tech for the spin control center and build it somewhere, then you take your largest available hull and put as many weapons in it as possible. Nothing else, just weapons. Park a bunch of these ships in orbit around the planet with the spin control center and watch your military rating rocket to the sky - it’s amazing how peaceful and nice the AI is once you have a high or the highest military rating.
In the last three games I was attacked a total of four times, I think. Every time it was rather easy to hold off the enemy for a while, destroy some of his ships while building some more on my side – usually I even got some money or techs in the peace treaty that followed.
Suggestions: Perhaps the factor of the spin control center should be reduced a bit, I’m not sure if it is five times or only two at the moment (the text is contradictory), but it might be too much as it is an easy way to make the AI shudder of your forces on paper.
The ability to boost your military rating that much with slow, low-range, attack-only ships is problematic, perhaps the formula which calculates the military rating should be changed (e.g. speed could be included as a factor) – but this might be a complicated task.
Also I think that the AI is frightened a bit too much by high military ratings. When you’re number one in the list, not even all AIs combined would dare to declare war on you.
(3) Sneak attacks, or: the AI doesn’t see it coming
The AI is not wary enough when it comes to enemy ships near their planets. It is possible to park a powerful fleet and enough transports next to each one of its planets, and the AI doesn’t seem to bother. Either I got very unlucky and missed the „We know what you’re up to" message repeatedly, or the multithreaded AI doesn’t work on my Win2K machine (which wouldn’t surprise me that much given that I had to change my country settings to get the graphics to show). Either way, my „wars" usually took only one or a few turns, the AI had no chance to react because it didn’t see it coming.
Suggestions: The AI should be much more anal about foreign attack and transport ships within close range of its planets (imagine Chinese troops in Mexico for a second...). On a related note, the AI could be wary of constructors waiting near their resource starbases as well.
Peace treaties and broken alliances should force a short moratorium for declarations of war, the length (how about something between 5-15 turns?) could be linked to the moral alignment of the wannabe-attacker. The possibility of going from full-blown alliances to total war in a single turn (without time to react for the AI) and the lack of consequences for repeated breaking of peace treaties is unprecedented even in the violent parts of Earth history, I think.
Thus said, I wanted to point out that I’m having a lot of fun with GalCiv 2, thanks for a great game, Stardock!
But the weaknesses described above bother me, and I’d like to help finding solutions for them. They're not that cheesy that I'd accept a "just don't use them" statement. Other than that, your comments or show of support will be most welcome!
However, my goal is not to flame about how easy the game is or to tell you how to storm the Metaverse by submitting game after game on the highest levels (although you might do that), instead I’d like to point out some exploits that could be fixed in my opinion, and I’ll write about my ideas on how to fix them as well.
There are cheese tactics that can never be fixed by Stardock – like save and reload, pre-scouting the map before really playing or using Ctrl-N until you get THE perfect location – the ones below can and hopefully will be changed.
I played and submitted three games on Suicidal level in the last days, each one on a gigantic map with 9 enemies. Each game took me about 7-8 hours to play and they were rather straightforward to win – to my own surprise. It was harder to win a military victory in GalCiv 1 on Maso than it is in GalCiv 2 on Suicidal at the moment.
The last game was played last night (latest patch, for sure!), I was hoping to get into the top 3 to grab a medal, but apparently the metaverse wasn’t updated for at least 15 hours and I’ll be overtaken until it is, I guess. Having finished it, I decided not to do another one in the same style for the moment because it felt a bit stupid and boring. Then I thought about it and realised that I used three basic tactics to build up and win the game without many problems. Here they are:
(1) Tech trading like a madman
As long as you have a decent research output yourself, you’ll always be able to be on par with or even above the tech level of the AIs. How that? It has been explained several times on the forum how to play as the „tech whore", buying and selling techs from anyone to anyone, thus making sure that you have all techs that anybody has, leveling the playground for the AI among themselves and making a nice profit as well.
To put it simple: Tech trading is too easy and too profitable.
Suggestion: Make the AI much more picky about diplomatic deals, perhaps a penalty should be applied to the human player on the levels above „Tough" (the „AI on par" level).
(2) Military power – a bubble that rarely bursts
As soon as possible you should get the tech for the spin control center and build it somewhere, then you take your largest available hull and put as many weapons in it as possible. Nothing else, just weapons. Park a bunch of these ships in orbit around the planet with the spin control center and watch your military rating rocket to the sky - it’s amazing how peaceful and nice the AI is once you have a high or the highest military rating.
In the last three games I was attacked a total of four times, I think. Every time it was rather easy to hold off the enemy for a while, destroy some of his ships while building some more on my side – usually I even got some money or techs in the peace treaty that followed.
Suggestions: Perhaps the factor of the spin control center should be reduced a bit, I’m not sure if it is five times or only two at the moment (the text is contradictory), but it might be too much as it is an easy way to make the AI shudder of your forces on paper.
The ability to boost your military rating that much with slow, low-range, attack-only ships is problematic, perhaps the formula which calculates the military rating should be changed (e.g. speed could be included as a factor) – but this might be a complicated task.
Also I think that the AI is frightened a bit too much by high military ratings. When you’re number one in the list, not even all AIs combined would dare to declare war on you.
(3) Sneak attacks, or: the AI doesn’t see it coming
The AI is not wary enough when it comes to enemy ships near their planets. It is possible to park a powerful fleet and enough transports next to each one of its planets, and the AI doesn’t seem to bother. Either I got very unlucky and missed the „We know what you’re up to" message repeatedly, or the multithreaded AI doesn’t work on my Win2K machine (which wouldn’t surprise me that much given that I had to change my country settings to get the graphics to show). Either way, my „wars" usually took only one or a few turns, the AI had no chance to react because it didn’t see it coming.
Suggestions: The AI should be much more anal about foreign attack and transport ships within close range of its planets (imagine Chinese troops in Mexico for a second...). On a related note, the AI could be wary of constructors waiting near their resource starbases as well.
Peace treaties and broken alliances should force a short moratorium for declarations of war, the length (how about something between 5-15 turns?) could be linked to the moral alignment of the wannabe-attacker. The possibility of going from full-blown alliances to total war in a single turn (without time to react for the AI) and the lack of consequences for repeated breaking of peace treaties is unprecedented even in the violent parts of Earth history, I think.
Thus said, I wanted to point out that I’m having a lot of fun with GalCiv 2, thanks for a great game, Stardock!
But the weaknesses described above bother me, and I’d like to help finding solutions for them. They're not that cheesy that I'd accept a "just don't use them" statement. Other than that, your comments or show of support will be most welcome!
Fan the flames of war at every opportunity (hey, Mr. Drengin, I've got this nice plasma weapon I've just developed - how would you like to test it for me on those Torian cruisers that look dangerously close to your territory?) Keeps everyone else's military rating down, and their starbase spamming under control. Cripples their economy, ergo their research and production. Their only safe trade routes are with you! Always have a few high speed constructors waiting to pounce on resources when starbases get destroyed and you can very quickly control every resource on the map. It is possible to win a military victory without ever being "at war" with anyone, and without ever building or owning a troop transport. 