General Strategy Hints?

1. Set the spending to 100% at the start of the game
2. After your second colony ships has left increase your tax rate to about 40% as everyone should be happy
3. Use your survey ship to find anomolies esp ships
4. Get manufacturing capital as soon as possible on your highest class planet
5. Use this planet to produce ships and trade items.
But don't let the morale drop too low
6. Research things off the beaten track but give you good bonuses then use the trade items to get the regular tech

No one else willing to step up and share their secrets

I was going to, but I want to see what other people say first; being one of the developers, I don't want to influence anyone's opinions.

sell tech to minor races.
If you declare war on another race first make sure that you have a chance in hell of beating him.
Use the money gained from selling techs to minor races to buy the enemy races best ships (that way there already nearby). then beat the hell out of em.

Okay. Should I try to colonize as many planets as possible? Only colonize planets with ratings above a certain number (15 seems to be what the manual says is the cut off for a "good" planet, but I have habitable worlds set to "uncommon", so there aren't too many of those)? What tech advances allow you to raise the rating (other than Soil Enhancement)?

So far, my biggest problem seems to be that the computer's populations are totally out of whack compared to mine, even though I seem to do okay in the production department. This usually means that the computer transports smoke even my established colonies without too much trouble once my space fleets are out of the way, and they just keep on coming. :/ It
sounds like this might have been a "cheat" added for the computers in the older betas -- has this changed in 3A then?

Strategy suggestions:

- buy enemy colony ships early in the game especially if you see them moving towaards an empty planet.

- send 1 construction ship to every resource you see as a priority.

- Keep an eye on race relations and bribe potential enemies until you're ready to deal with them. This lets you spend nearly all your early to mid game resources on non military research and building, giving you a huge advantage.

- keep a few loaded transports near any weak race. If the race looks like it will be wiped out send the transports in to capture the planets when the other races destroy the defending ships. Better you take the planets than someone else.

- keep spare constructor ships near other empire economic resources. When wars occur these can often become available.

I tend to avoid military conflicts early on and use the tricks above to gain an advantage. If another race is also becoming powerful then I bribe ALL the other races to attack it!!! Let them do the hard work while my spare transports pick off the undefended planets.

Paul.

The computer will not colonize planets with less than 15 quality, and for a good reason : morale will drop very low if you do. In the beginning of the game, shoot for 15+ planets, as quickly as possible. The AI knows where they are, so you must hurry to grab the one available. Do not hesitate to build a little fleet of colony ship ASAP, and buy colony ships of alien civ if you see them approaching a good planet.

However, if you spot some very influent planet, in the 13-14 range, it may be worth it, since Soil Improvement and Habitat Improvement will rise it to acceptable level. And maybe you'll be lucky with a planet improving event. No need to hurry anyway : the AI won't take them. By the time you get Terraforming, you can use a lot more viable planets than the AI, thus reversing the cultural influence on a sector by colonizing second hand planets.

As soon as possible, build the love mushrooms. It will help offset the initial pop advantage of the alien civs (in case you're not playing with version 3A), and you'll quickly lead in population.

Military fleets are costly, do not build more than you need to deter the opponents, unless you're aiming at a conquest victory, of course. The monthly cost would be used better elsewhere... When you feel the war is coming (hostile neighbour) put 100% of your money to military, you should be able to garrison your planet with that. When at peace, alternate 100% research and 100% social when you have enough improvements to build. I found it worked better than sharing, because the sharing is done at the empire level and not planet by planet.

I think you might want to not buy colony ships from the alien races that's just plain cheesy, I can insure you that you will not be able to do this in the final build

Same with you guys camping by the resources and enemy planets, eventually (we hope) the AI will get a bit pissed off and may start attacking you these those actions. I recommend playing the game the way it should be played and that's not by using cheese tactics and fining loop holes in the AI. The only one your fooling is your self. I understand there will always be people out always trying to get the highest score no matter what, I mean you see it all the time online in games like Warcraft 3 and Age of empire with that damn tower rush.

If you guys can PLEASE post things like that, it would be really cool. I think we should add something in the AI that if in figures out your doing something cheap, the AI should all declare war on you and wipe you out like the cheating plague!! I have to make sure of course it lets you know the reason it's wiping you out.

That would be really sweet... heh.

Alex,

Isn't this a Beta test? Shouldn't we be looking for holes in the game for you to fill? If we ignored the cheesy tricks and they ended up on the final release, wouldn't that be due to incomplete testing? Wouldn't we be failing the duties we volunteered for if we just tried to play the game and keep the cheesy tricks to ourselves?

And one more question: Why do you think buying colony ships off of aliens is cheesy? If the aliens are dumb enough to sell them to us (whether set to dumb intellegence or because the AI is still too primitive), why not take advantage of it? As far as I am conserned the "tower rush" you are refering to is a sign that the game developers failed to establish the rules "in the code" rather than the players are cheating. Since AOE is a MicroSoft game I can understand why the game may not be tightly coded, but GC is another matter, what with all of the testing it is getting. I expect GC to enforce ALL of the rules in the code, and I think that is what we are getting when I see all of the posts on this forum.

But I think he means that it is still a cheesy strategy... I agree that as beta testers it is our duty to sniff out the cheese, but if someone asks for a good strategy, you might as well give them something that will work beyond the beta

Yes, but why does Alex consider buying colony ships cheesy? Why shouldn't we be able to trade for colony ships? Why shouldn't the AI be willing to trade them if the price is right (within the AI's intelligence setting)?

A rule has to have a good basis. If not, the rule is bad, or is a rule just for the rule's sake (which is still bad).

It's dumb of the AI to sell its colony ships. I don't think it's cheesy as much as a demonstration of stupid AI.

And since I write the AI, I think I can say what's stupid of it to do and what's not.

Certainly if the AI always chooses NOT to sell colony ships, that's fine. It is a choice, not a rule. It should not prevent a terran, however, from offering colony ships for trade. (If the habitable planets are all colonized and an AI is stupid enough to accept the ship, who cares? It gets it off my inventory and I can get cash for it.)

Tell you what. Let me get cash for disbanning ships and I will give up on this argument. Any disbanned ship has to have salvage and/or recycle value.

I think the trading of colony ships should still be allowed, even though the AI seems to undervalue them, especially as they are reaching their destination. This is very true for colony ships, but also for other, regular ships. A ship near the battlefield is more useful than a fleet at the other end of the universe.

If this can't be taken into account, perhaps the trading of ships could imply their auto delivery in the home system of the buyer. So you could still trade ships, even colony ships, that can be helpful if you concentrate your production on social building or research at the beginning of the game, without the cheese of buying only ships on the brink of reaching their destination. It would also solve the problem of "can the AI trade ships that were not seen". The AI could propose them, and deliver them, but the player could not ask for them. I suppose the Diplo screen shows everything now because the AI is not diplomatically active to propose bargains.

If you buy the colony ships don't you get the people on board as well? Do you think people would really like being sold like cattle? I agree that yes this is a beta and I would like to hear some more cheese tactics so we can fix them. At the same time if we want to balance the game the best we can we have to make sure you can win the game with out being cheesy.

I don't see why the code forces the people onto the ships if they haven't been launched yet. For colony/transport ships that are still in dock, that shouldn't be an issue at all.

Colony ships and transports ships en route, I can understand, for just that reason...they already have people on them.

In my opinion, it should still be possible, at least for neutral/evil civs if not the good ones, to trade away their citizens (the evils already can incinerate them for cash, at least according to one of the improvements [and one of the techs, but I'm not sure about that], which I would think people would be less inclined to accept than being sold away), but it should definatly be an expensive undertaking for the aquirer.

Selling colony ships or transports sounds perfectly fine. It should affect your moral though. Selling those slave soldiers to another race for invasion!

The AI just needs to be tweaked to take distance to potential obectives into account as well as any moral implications. A good race should never sell planets or people. An evil race might for the right cost.

Paul.

Even a good race may decide to sell planets and/or ships, depending on how much over a barrel it is. Is it going to loose next turn if it doesn't? Can it get a peace accord in trade for a planet where it is too weak to stay at war? I think a leader that fails to consider these points does so very selfishly. ("I don't care what happens to my people, I will not be known as a quitter!", or "It would ruin my reputation if I considered a peace treaty under those conditions.") A good ruler may have to make very hard decisions to save some of his people.

AlexG : as a cheesehunter, you'll probably be interested by the following idea : follow an enemy colony ship with your colony ship. As the AI know where to go, you'll find a good planet. And team with a cheap scout to stand in the square in front of the enemy colony ship to delay it while you cruise to the planet.

Is it necessary for the game to forbid ships from different civs to stack ? After all, a parsec cube is large enough for to colony ships to fit...

'Is it necessary for the game to forbid ships from different civs to stack ? After all, a parsec cube is large enough for to colony ships to fit... '

Last time I saw it happen, it caused all kinds of odd quirks, among them involuntarily declaring war on whomever else was in the 'square' parsec if you were already at war with any of the others, and attack ships occasionally moving onto the square instead of attacking enemy ships there.