Early game: Always the same?

In large part...yeah, I think so.

In any 4X game (which GC2 is), the early game is going to be about putting yourself in the strongest possible position going into the midgame. In that sense, the early game is always going to be more or less a pursuit of the same goals: expansion, teching up, growing your economy, and building up a war machine. However, the best way to go about doing that changes from game to game, and sometimes even from turn to turn, so the "variety" comes in adapting to the situation as best you can.


So, as for advice...first off, what difficulty are you playing on? On Beginner, the AI is a drooling moron with three fourths of its economy stripped away from it. If you increase the difficulty, the AI will be increasingly able to assert itself throughout the game (including early on), forcing you to pay attention and adapt lest you risk becoming Lord Kona's next meal.

Second, try changing the galaxy settings. Different size maps are a start, but you can also vary the number of planets and habitable planets to give a drastically different feel to the game. Running out of empty planets after colony number four is one hell of a shock when you're used to a Huge map with 3-5 colonies per star.

Third, try different races. This goes double for if you're playing Dark Avatar, but even in Dread Lords, the Drengin will be interacting with the other races very, very differently than the Terrans will.

I would agree that the majority of your opening game you are pursing the same goals no matter what kind of win you are aiming for. What helps me from getting the blues, is to focus in on my planets. Where I used to have a genric one size fits all building plan that I would scale for each world, I now make each world I come to a custom dsign. I look at its placement on the map, try to anticipate how other races will expand around it, what role it can best serve my empire, and how best to build it up. Not only do you do a lot more thinking than just how to race up the tech tree, but you will quickly find that you will get a lot more bamg for your buck out of your worlds and will be able to up the difficulty (which brings its own new challenges )

I find the "expand" part really, realy, really repetitive. It's the same stuff over and over again. The beginning just isn't fun anymore. I usually play as a super race and spectate the enemy fighting...so that means I want to be in the corner. But you can't because there aren't any choices to where you can start.

i agree. i take a very different approach to playing GC2 than some others. i play for fun, which means sometimes i purposely shoot myself in the foot or do something foolish, to see what kind of challenges it sets up for me (for example, i modded the hyperion shipyard to also add a 20% ship bonus, and decided to build my entire fleet of warships on the planet that bore this shipyard, a planet which i renamed Utopia Plenetia. i only let the rest of my planets build defensive ships, mostly fighters).

but moving past that, yes the choices you make matter, including in the early game. on my first couple games of Dark Avatar, i found it was better to stop myself at a certain point in the colony rush and start teching up. it just depends on how you want to win. it's not difficult to develop an early military supermacy and take some of those worlds your opponents colonized from them and then shift back into solidifying your industry, economy and technology.

i feel that i observe lot of people who say that every game (or the early part anyway) is the same, that these people are often trying too hard to 'do everything.' on easier difficulty levels, this is possible. but when the computer opponents aren't nerfed, you really have to make some difficult choices about how you want to achieve dominance. these choices aren't easy, either. when i started the game, i felt i had to do everything.

it was about DL 1.3 that my mentality changed. i was playing as the terrans, backed somewhat into the corner by the nearly omnipotent drengin - and then i discovered the tech that gave me nano rippers. everything else in my empire fell to the side as i produced medium ships armed with these things. i beat back the drengin and got enough worlds that i was perfectly able to catch up in other boards. after a little while of that, i realized i could have easily began a campaign to take over the rest of the galaxy. just to give you a sense of where i was, i hadn't even researched trade yet - and i never did.

the bottom line is that i find the game to be a lot more fun if i'm not assured a victory. the boredom of the early game turns into a sense of urgency. give it a try at a tougher level!

I've always found the game start very interesting. You really do have several options and what you do here dramatically affects your ability to act in the mid game. If done right, you can get out of the shoot before the AI is ready, and effectively win the game before the first troop transport is built. The key is focus on different starting options to find the most efficient one for your race and game size...

i like the occasional 'god in the corner' game. use ctrl+N to get a map start you like (i mean, if you're playing a 'god in the corner' game, then why not?).

The first hundred turns, and your decisions therein, really make or break your game. It decides how you must play for the rest of the game.

In my games (mostly default settings, challenging difficulty, small maps with 4 opponents), the first decision I have to make is if I should colonize that small planet that starts next door to me... or if I should send the colonizer to a distant star in a gamble that it (a) isn't an enemy controlled star already, or (b) won't be colonized first by a similarly enterprising AI. I can say 50% of the time the AI beats me to a primo planet by 1 turn, so the gamble is usually worth taking.

The next decision you have to make is if you want to rush attack any nearby opponents. Many will start declaring war right away and launching ships to the nearest planets, mopping up stray fighters and keeping the board "clean" while waiting for your researchers to get to planetary invasion.

Or perhaps you will instead want to focus on starbase construction! Defensive/offensive starbase techs can make your puny little fighters able to fend of the largest fleets for a loooong time, giving you time to expand in other areas. My favorite is the suprise-popup attack where I suddenly spring a huge fleet using techs I've researched for hundreds of turns, vaulting my military strength from lowest to double- or triple- the competition.

Then there's always the influence play! You can dedicate a lot of resources to influence (usually paired with trade and diplomacy), and not even piss off the competition along the way (if you use influence starbases near your planets instead of the enemy's). Honestly, I start most of my games assuming an influence ability but in most cases it doesn't turn out that way and I have to change course halfway through.

Then there's espionage! I played a game with a spy-heavy race, where I kept two civilizations completely locked down. One spy on each tile of their two planets, small fighters shooting down the occasional colony ship or asteroid miner they could produce. I kept this pressure on for hundreds of turns until I had an invasion fleet researched and built, then I took over fairly easily. My spies were then returned to my control and I could re-deploy them to the next poor suckers!

And, as always, there's the all-out good-planet strategy. Build up your planets into superstructures of amazing technology while maintaining a so-so military (just big enough to discourage war). Don't focus on expansion whatsoever, just play to be a good neighbor!

After my hundreds of games using the above strategies only recently did I load up a truly evil race and begin playing by researching exclusively offensive technologies. And once again, I've changed up my whole starting position.

There are so many ways to play out the first hundred turns you can really change how the game plays out. I think your path up the research tree mainly defines it. Are you going for space weapons? starbase offense/defense? influence techs? politics? trade/economics?

Are you bored with your routine? Try banning yourself from something. For example, ban researching offensive weapons and see how you do. Try banning all research up the planetary-improvements tree (no fancy factories, no fancy banks, etc.) You'll be suprised how you can adapt!

I think the first hour is the most fun! For obvious reasons the colony rush is the most critical part of the game, followed by the desperate struggle not to go broke, then after that you have another desperate struggle to field a fleet in time to compete with the AI, after that it's all down hill excitement wise.

edit: actually the desperate struggle not to go broke after the colony rush is a bit of a shit come to think of it (not fun).

I was getting a bit bored with the start too...I had played exclusivly in the Sandbox until December...

Then I discovered the Campaign...each scenario is different and has opened up a new way of looking at the early game. It forced me to explore different early game strategies.

Now I am hooked on the DL Campaign...so much so that I won't start DA until I get through it.

I agree with Mystikmind. By the end of the first hundred turns (call it the start of year three) I often already know if I have won or lost by resultant economy/industry/military and relations with the other civs. If you get a good setup at the begining, the rest of the game can just be mopup... and you haven't even fought a war yet!!

Plus, I think the devs did a great job expanding the tough choices you have to make in the first 100 turns by adding the colonization techs, as well as the pq 1 and 2s with all of those upgradeable tiles. Add in the slower movement rates generally and often your choice on each turn can make a huge difference to where your empire is standing 200 turns later.

I agree. And every beginning is always different from the others. I normally play on huge, 6 random races, suicidal, rare habitable planets etc. And everytime i find myself doing different choices depending on the starting planet, the neighborhood, number of anomalies etc. For example i'm playing a very interesting match with a great starting planet with 700% in science and 700% in production. As you know such a planet is normally isolated from the rest of the universe so i rushed a factory and then three colony ship for a blind exploration. In a standard match, i would firstly produce some cargo-scouts to explore the vicinitiy and then rush the sensors technology to upgrade the scouts and look for money, bonuses etc from anomalies. This time there were almost no anomalies around so i decided to look for bonus resources and i sent some scouts in the deep space. In the meanwhile i focused my research on the "planet improvement" technologies, knowing that my only hope was in developing my homeworld. Anyway i was lucky and found a 19 class planet far from home with one of my colony ships. I started build market places there cause my economy was sinking. Fortunately all the neighbors around were peaceful and, drengin and yor were far from me: i could concentrate on improving my few worlds and researching technologies. I had almost no contact with minor races (though they're 8 in my game) so i sent a scout in a wormhole and found myself on the other side of the galaxy for a long journey back. This move saved my day because i was able to collect some money from my new friends. I forget that i also decided to go for spies from the very beginning so, at the end of the colony rush i found myself with three planets, some starbases on bonus resources, 7 spies, three very advanced planets and i'm producing a lot of research. Now i'm going to start my military escalation to attack, i believe, the thalans. I fear very soon drengins or yor will start their expansion and i don't want to find myself on my knee when they will look for me. The thalans have three nice planets that, when my army is ready, i will cover with spies for a blitzkrieg... I'll see...

Anyway, i'm sorry for the long description but i enjoy very much playing DA and i think one of the major virtues of the game is indeed the great variety of strategies you need to apply in the beginning.

richard

Wow, thanks for all the great responses, guys. As I said, I'm still learning the game, so maybe I just need to go crazy and play in a large galaxy with a lot of opponents and see what happens!

I still need to fight wars, and form alliances, and bombard a planet from space (!) and many other things, so there's a lot to look forward to. I don't have DA yet, though, and probably won't get it for some time. I just hope they keep updating the base game with patches and features, as there are several things I can already tell will get annoying. I can live with them all, though! It's a great game.

I,m ready to buy DA actually but i'm just waiting for them to fix the conquored planet, tiles dissapearing bug.

Any idea what the next update/patch may bring?