How do you keep up with the joneses?

Well, I seem to have little trouble with challenging, but tough is giveing me a run for the money. I turn tech trading off for my games. It seems ( I can't really tell, mind you) that with tech trading on, the AI swaps tech amongst themselves willy-nilly and you end up trying to compete with the combined research potential of however many opponents you have.
Even on tough with tech trading off, I can keep up or slightly ahead in tech. My current problem is to stay ahead (or at least keep up) in military and production at the same time. Then there is the problem (in my current game) where one of the two races that declared war on me has fantastic ships but no ground combat skill and the other has ok ships but great combat abilities. ARRRRGGGHHH, decisions decisions.

I don't even try to keep up.

I trade techs as much as possible with as many opponents as I can during the same turn or close to the same turn. I can't match the AI, but it's not necessary.

You can trade some of your techs for something and turn right around and trade that new tech to someone else during the same turn. Some of my turns are almost completely taken up by tech trading. It's one of the very few ways you can keep your economy afloat on the higher difficulties.

It starts off painfully slow, but there's a point where the dam bursts and tech trading becomes incredibly fruitful for a turn or two. You can be dead last and suddenly rocket to the lead in most techs and BCs in a single turn.

Use that window of opportunity and it'll boost you to military dominance as well. You can trade techs for cruisers and troop transports and use those same ships to immediately defeat your opponent on the planet that they launched from. A pad and paper helps with that, so you can remember to trade for the specific ships guarding the target planet.

A little imagination and focused treachery can get you ahead in other aspects of the game as well. The main thing to remember IMO, is that you're playing against a mindless and uncreative machine. Honor has no meaning when you face off against it. It's intelligence can only equal a sophisticated set of instincts at best. Use your ability to adapt and you can't lose.

I've heard this many time before but I have not experienced the AI trading techs too much. I find that when i go to trade they all pretty much have some the same and some different. I never turn it off.

Here are some basic tips:

If you're having trouble getting a decent deal, first remember that some techs are highly valued, like weapons and mining. The AI will tell you something like "we worked hard to get that...".

Getting those yellow diplomacy techs helps a lot too. I think many people ignore them for the most part. And of course that Universal Translator.

Try playing as Human. Their super ability in addition to the techs makes them great for trading. deadly in the hands of a real Human. As the Humans i was able to get the drengin to give me a huge fleet of those cheap ships for some techs. figuring that they'll never have the time to use them, cause they'll all be dead. The ships werent that good but at least i didnt have toi fight against them. I let them guard starbases.

Dont trade away diplomacy techs, you'll have worse deals in the future.

As MottiKahn said, trade with everyone on the same turn and trade away the same techs to everyone so they dont.

Hope for that UP vote where you get upto 3 tech from everyone. Just got it for the first time and i was lovin' it. Up until then i was behind. It got the colony rush restarted.

Move to a parasitical proposition.

Thoughts in thread working backwards from the goal...

You can't outtech the AI on the Suicidal (barring something like Wyndstar's AAR), so the goal becomes to pick out strategic techs that will allow you to overpower the AI in some very specific way and then steal all the techs of the AI you are overpowering (or get them in a peace treaty).

For me, this means jumping a neighboring AI very early with war, preferably before the AI is really ready. In one game, while conquering an AI with ~50 planets, I was taking a planet or two every turn. I didn't exhaust the AI tech tree before he ran out of planets and I probably gained around forty techs from planetary invasion for that war. This meant I had whatever tech I managed to develop and almost all the tech of a middling AI.

Ideally, I want easy to conquer AI planets. For DA, this means it would be nice to NOT colonize all the special requirement planets, so that I can hit these with troop transports very shortly after the AI colonizes them. Skip the entire colonization tech tree.

So this means I need to get a war machine before the AI. Therefore all techs that are not geared for this aim are unimportant and need not be researched. Focus on economic, pop growth, factories, ship enhancement techs (sensors, miniaturizations, hulls, etc.) and one military line of techs. Skip everything else (including starbase techs as you will be on the offensive). Do the military techs last as the others help feed each other and military is a drain unless you are actually using it.

Since this is a military strat, use the all factory strat as it will help you build the most ships. If evil, MCC and ASC need to be high priorities. The ASC is especially useful if you can get it before popping out your first military ship. Nothing like popping out large ships in four to five turns from a bunch of planets, while the AI is on medium ships to get you feeling like it's wartime.

There is obviously more to this. Like I always avoid getting ICs until after the first war. They simply cost too much and take too much time to build. If I wait to build the ICs, the AI might get far enough ahead of me to make that first war much more painful.

There are other ways of getting this kind of advantage. In earlier revisions of my strategy, I would sometimes simply arrange to keep trading a couple of border planets back and forth with a technically superior AI. I would purposefully leave them open to his transports with transports of my own available within a turn or two. Every time I re-invaded the same planets, I got another chance at getting some tech...And it kept his transports away from planets I cared about.

The big point though isn't to try to outtech the AI. You can't when it's getting a 300 percent (or is it 400 percent?) bonus like it does on Suicidal. A pathetic amount of research effort on it's part can outstrip you. You have to do something the AI isn't doing or does poorly, and use that as a lever to get the techs out of the AI. Even if you don't like my approach above, start really watching what the AI does. Does the AI do it poorly? Is there another way of doing it? If so, can you turn it against the AI? The biggest advantages seem to come from the most radical, out of the box approaches. The AI simply has no way of anticipating them or addressing them. For instance, the AI simply can't imagine someone wanting to have their own planet taken by the AI, so they can take it back for tech. These kinds of things are beyond it.

I'm glad you stopped in, Purge. I think it was you who had once mentioned game unbalancing as a tool. What would it take to get you to disclose this idea?

  

Interesting ideas, now to use it against all who stand in my way of complete and utter destruction

thx for the tips guys.

Also, I might just go back to normal for a while and test out some different strats. For me, I find theres a big jump between normal and challenging difficulty. For me it gets a ton harder on challenging then normal. Too bad there's not a level in between for us peeps like me who struggle like heck on challenging.

Anyway, again, thx for the help.

You are right in that I do know one extremely unbalancing solution, but I only found it over the last couple of games...That one I am keeping off the GC II forums with hopes the dev team plugs it (and I did send it to them)!

Really the above is the core of what I do. In re-reading it there is one other major thing I do that few others have seem to try...I stop colonizing before all the planets are claimed. On a DA gig suicidal, I'm happy with 50 planets out of 900+ on the colony rush and I simply will not go over 75 or so. It is pretty hard to say that I would rather build a factory than claim an additional planet the first time around, but for me, it works. This lets me turn to internal build up while the AI is still busy pushing out colony ships and is a key part to my getting a superior military up before the AI.

Don't think this is the only way to win though. For instance, I know Magnumaniac is a master colonizer and he pulls off stuff in his colony rush that I have never been able to come even close to matching...

BTW MK, 154K on a medium suicidal...I don't think you need my help!

I've now played through Beta 2 twice, wanted to post my impressions.

First, I see several posts wanting to compare this to GalCiv II. Other than what I found to be a confusing tech tree, which would definitely benefit by being closer to the GalCiv II model, I found myself comparing this game more to the Homeworld, Starcraft, and Age of Empires RTSs. Overall, the game did keep me entertained for hours, but it lacked the immediacy of those other RTS games.

1) I need a way to grab the map and pan it with the mouse. Homeworld did this by pressing both the left and right mouse buttons. Using arrow keys or scrolling to the edge of the screen is cumbersome in an RTS environment. Also, on the subject of mouse control: using the mouse wheel to zoom was problematic. Sometimes the game would actually move in the opposite direction that I wanted to scroll! I also found it difficult to select objects quickly. To select an object, I had to click on the exact center of the object. Clicking on one end of an object did not select it.

2) Interface: I found the system/fleet display on the left of the screen to be almost useless, especially as the game progressed and more and more information cluttered the screen. It was easier to scroll out, click on a system, and either read the information in the colored bars or scroll into the system to see details.

3) Managing my empire in the middle and late part of the games took so much time that I rarely watched the battles. Over 95% of my time was spent zoomed out clicking and placing icons. Here, Homeworld had a far superior feel. In that game, I watched and participated in almost every battle. With Sins, I sent in my fleets and returned to managing, checking occasionally on the progress of the battle by clicking the system and looking at the colored unit bars. What's the point of creating good graphics if there's little time to enjoy the fight?

4) Please put most of the game controls on screen and mouse-clickable. In Starcraft and Age of Empires, I rarely had to go to my keyboard. Unlike a turned-based game like GalCiv II or the Civilization games, where I have plenty of time to play with keyboard shortcuts, in an RTS, I don't want to have to hunt my keyboard. Everything I need should be clickable on-screen.

5) Please don't try to make this RTS GalCiv II (I'm hoping GalCiv III will accomplish that). I think a better model is the Total War franchise which uses a turn-based strategy map for managing and RTS for combat. It's a balance that brings together the best of both worlds. True 3D like Homeworld would also be a lot of fun.

Sins DID keep my attention for many hours, so I look forward to the next beta. Thanks.

Oops. Sorry, guys. Posted this on the wrong screen. Disregard.