Bonus Abilities (Points) Balance Question

I'm not quite sure how you're getting these results (the ability you're thinking of is actually Creativity, not Luck). You can only put one point in it normally, and its effects are supposed to be random.

To add to qrtian's statement: it is indeed Creativity that you are talking about. Luck is definitely a factor in space combat (lucky races do more damage than they should) and some other things, but it is Creativity that can give you a tech you are researching significantly before it is due. Combining creativity as an ability point with a political faction that boosts this and perhaps some research that also gives + Creativity should increase chances of it happening, but in my experience Creativity can be very fickle. Sometimes you get lucky (and overpowered) and sometimes you don't (very annoying).

First things first though: the ability points that you can spend are hardly balanced. Some abilities are simply more valuable than others. If I remember correctly, Creativity has been nerfed since earlier versions of Twilight, but it is still pretty good (though you have to get lucky). Others that might be considered "overpowered" are, for instance, Morale and Population Growth (especially combined). Whether you want to use your ability points for something useful, or instead for something useless (sensors comes to mind)) is entirely up to you.

To answer your other question: the game does NOT automatically assign ability points to AI races, you have to do this yourself. You can do this by creating a new game, selecting the race you want to modify, select the abilities you want them to have, then SAVE the race configuration and go back to do it for the next race. Once you've done them all you can then randomize your opponents, whichever opponent you get should still get the abilities you selected for him/her (I think, I am not sure). If you manually select your opponents, they will use the abilities you've assigned them.

Once again, whether you want to play "fair" or not, is entirely up to you. You can give the AI good abilities, bad abilities, or simply no abilities at all (giving you the edge).

 Thank you both for your answers.

 When that happened where I could get high-end techs quickly was maybe 5 or so months ago, so maybe they've patched it since then. I guess it must have been creativity, because I had chosen that as well as luck. It had seemed odd that creativity and/or luck only cost 1 ability point each, where I think they should cost much more.

 Anyways now that I know the AI won't automatically get ability points I think I'll continue to play without any myself. When I was starting up games with no ability points I was just a little unsure whether the AI would have that extra advantage or not, now I can rest assured we are playing on equal terms, more or less.

 With regards to saving the AI race configuration, I was actually wondering about this the other day. If you load a race and change it just a little, like it's ability points, etc and save it; will it stay saved as that race? I mean I remember when I used to play GalCiv II awhile ago and I customized my race, Terran Alliance, and saved it, then when I randomized AI races I ran across another Terran Alliance. Though thinking back I'm not 100% sure but I might have changed my race name and that might have affected it.

 Anyways thanks again for your answers, those questions were itching my brain for awhile.

Yes, if you save a stock race, they will stay that way until you clear them.  But you shouldn't run into a 'mirror race' unless you have intentionally set them to be a custom race.  I haven't randomised races in a long time though so hey, who knows.

Creativity is still as crazy as ever.  I played Iconians with the Creativity pick and well, I have to say that for one point it really is one of the best picks in a slow research game.

Rest assured, the game hasn't been patched in those 5 months and creativity hasn't been nerfed since then. It's just that during the beta I recall it being even more awesome than it is now.

Using creativity to get to the end of short tech trees with high cost (just as terror stars) can be a bit cheesy. Problem with games like these, and especially rather complex ones like GalCiv2 is that balance inevitably becomes an issue. As you are only playing against the AI, you can afford the luxury of not exploiting unbalanced features though!

Devil's Advocate: As for "equal terms", that's a bit tricky: not every race gets the same amount of free-to-spend ability points. This is officially linked with some of the awesomeness of their abilities, or racial penalties. One could argue that having none of them spend any ability points, is unfair to the races that get to spend more... Also, some races are just poorly equipped to survive in certain conditions, tailoring them with the ability points can in fact level the playing field, not saying you must, just saying consider the options.

In the end it is you who decides what's fair in your game and what's not.

It's worth noting that not all techs can be completed ahead of schedule using Creativity.  There's a checkbox in the tech tree editor for denying it.

 Well I've been playing with no ability points for any race. I slightly customized all the races to set the political party to what seems to suit that race.

 So far I've been playing almost constantly and having a blast. I played for at least 10 hours yesterday and at one point after playing for a few hours straight I actually got an out of memory error. I applied a 4GB RAM patch so hopefully that helps. The game I was playing I played on the Metaverse, and it went for 22 in-game years before I decided to give up since the Iconians owned more than half the map.

 On my new game I switched the difficulty to normal, but I'm forcing max cpu so I'll see how the AI is like that, so far everything's going well.

 I've found a pretty good balance of the map settings. Occasional/Common habitable planets, abundant stars, abundant extreme planets, occasional dead planets, very slow research.                                                                                      With this balance, there's enough areas to colonize that empires are more centralized, instead of spreading out into weird formations quite so much, and more incentive to research extreme planet colonization.

 Sorry for rambling but this is the first time I've been able to fully enjoy this game in years. I've been checking every single button in every nook I can find while playing and have learned so many new things. (I didn't even know about the 'details' button on the colony screen which shows the planet, etc.

 Didn't realize it had been that long since the last patch, I thought it was less than a few months since 2.04, but I haven't been paying too close attention though. I'm happy the game is still being patched, it truly deserves it. I really wish they would add multiplayer at some point though, even hotseat I might be happy with. I understand their reasoning though.

Well Stardock might have been able to justify adding multiplayer if people weren't so multiphobic.  I don't think it would work especially well in GC2, but one man's floor is another man's ceiling as the saying goes.

Multiplayer would have been nice, and I think it could've worked in DL and DA, as the races are still very similar there, but in ToA there are just too many differences, making one race definitely not equal to the next. Another big problem is the time it takes to play a GalCiv game: it simply lasts waaaay to many turns, imagine having to wait for other players to finish theirs before you can do one more turn...

You can already play hotseat, the how-to can be found on this forum. Never tried it though.

Well, I've used the hotseat command in testing and okay it's a bit clunky (you need to really be able to see a ship belonging to the other player to switch to the other player) but everything basically works.

 Well they could make it simultaneously turn based.

 Civ IV/V and Endless Space are doing this. (Technically ES will do this eventually.)

 And the only multiplayer I play is usually with family members so typically I enjoy more complex and long, drawn-out games.

Changing the game to a multiplayer-friendly design would take some serious time and effort that isn't likely going to be invested in GalCiv II any more.  I could be wrong about that of course, would love it if I was, however I've been waiting on some kind of news for a while now, and nothing seems to be forthcoming.

That only fixes part of the problem, as those with bigger empires simply have more to do. You could implement a timer, but that would handicap the bigger player (though perhaps he/she should be handicapped). I've seen it done in Civ, where a single pop-up dialogue can mean you lost the battle you would've won, because the other guy got to click first.

This is true and also exactly the problem. The only people I'd play this game with in multiplayer are people I know very well in real life. People you can taunt when they give up before it's all over, and people you can harass when they take too damn long to finish their turns.

For multiplayer to be "useful" to the community, it'd have to have at least some success playing with strangers. GalCiv games generally last too long for that:

Many games against the AI last a good 4-5 gameyears (some much longer). That's 4 or 5 times 48 turns, so 192-240 turns for an average games. Even assuming a timer is implemented, cutting turnlength to 5 minutes (which is about what you need on the big maps), that still means games lasting 16-20 hours. Thats a long time to play with strangers, and unfeasible to play in one sitting, meaning you'd have to agree on a time and date to continue. Which the person who already knows that he's going to lose is unlikely to show up for... Even limiting turns to 2 minutes still means 6 to 8 hours of total gametime!

And then there's balance... GalCiv2 is an awesome game, but balanced it is NOT. Especially ToA. In what corner you start and what kind of planets and resources are nearby has a huge impact on your potential strength. Playing against the AI, this is no real problem, but when playing multiplayer, most people prefer the playing field fair. The amount of time it'd take to make GalCiv2 a "fair" game would be rather large, and it would problably require making the game much simpler than any of us want it to be...

I agree with you that GalCiv multiplayer would be awesome. Despite my arguments that the math siply doesn't add up, and the required overhaul to the game itself too great, I would still pay for a multiplayer expansion. I'd love to play the game with my friends, in spite of all the frustration it's going to cost waiting for that turn button to appear, etc. etc...