xpyre

The more I play the game, the more I think the developers have got it about right. Has anyone just sat there and watched what the other Civs do to each other? Has anyone noticed good or evil prevailing more than the other? It is fairly balanced, but I would say if anything the good guys beat up the bad guys. Certainly the Dregnim and Yor are possibly the strongest individual AI civs, but in my games the good guys tend to gang up, trade with each other and just out last the strong lo

Longer is "you can't no matter what you try". You could try not researching any tech

Yet more anacdotal (and therefore maybe wrong!) observations from 1.2 combat: 1. Logistics got a lot more important. If every ship gets an attack then the number of ships is more important. The balance has swung from huge hulls having a big advantage to them probably still having a slight advantage. 2. Keeping ships alive so that they get to extreme HP's is harder. This means that that defence heavy ships that cost so much more are more likely to get killed. Therefore th

@starlost. My games are generally won/lost by the time Huge hulls are available. Not literally but certainly it has been decided in the earlish years. My strategies are all based on what to do for the first 1-2 years... I found using cargo hulls with one advanced module as troup ships with huge number of engines to work best for my style. The AI doesn't even see the troup ships coming. You can make an invasion force which can take over a whole civ in one turn if you troup

Great analogy shirt145... I'll keep you posted as to my success.

Having had a little time to think about this I agree with the sentiment of the OP (but not the solution). I think there should be real problems associated with having a big empire. Morale is the obvious one to suffer first. However you could also have problems with economy and production based on "corruption" or higher colony and maintenance costs based on distance from the homeworld. All large empires thoughout history have fallen. In the real world large empires don't keep gettin

I think that for the strategy to work it will have to be on large or above galaxies... where the AI does spend a long time colonizing rather than getting their planets up and running properly. I will push my espionage right up to make sure I see what effect it has on the different civs. I think the farms will only really work in helping me invade. I tend to race up the invasion techs... often leading to 7-1 tech advantage... If I'm getting 2000 of their troups too it will

Please don't get me wrong, I know how the economy works in GalCiv2... and most people undervalue population. It is just that very high populations bring trouble in building the correct ratio of morale vs farms. I'm sure that in general I'll make a better job of it than the AI will so I guess I'm exploiting the AI to some extent. Also by controlling the timing of it... and giving it way too early it may really mess up some civs.

Moosetek13 Sorry I've not explained myself well. I usually build farms, lots of them for exactly the econ bonus you say. But I don't go racing up the farm tree without racing up the morale tree at the same time. What I'm suggesting is purposely going for "bad" early techs and giving them away. Knowing that I've avoided the pitfalls of why they are "bad" early on.

V interesting cos I always think that the Torians are the "best" colonizers. There are some races which always seem to start in bad positions... The Thalans are the worst for this... I wonder if there is just a random thing going on or whether the location of start is "rigged".

Perhaps the greatest thing about this game is that there are a zillion ways to win. One that I haven't yet tried but I intend to shortly is based on two "trojan horse" techs. The top line factory and farm buildings. The first of these requires so many mp to create it can completely stop your ability to churn out buildings on small planets (unless you can rush build one to start with). The second can give you terrible morale problems as your population cap needs a huge

Most of the time the home world should be designated a economy world. Follow the basic outline for all such worlds. 2-3 factories - most other tiles markets. Homeworld has an implicit farm in it so one extra entertainment building is needed. When you reach pop max convert one market into a farm and another into an enterainment building. Of course, special tiles mean you might have in effect more tiles to play with. E.g. A manufacturing 300% tile means that you could survi

@bodyless I was just being sensitive as your post immediately followed mine. It is never my intention to flame people, but I do often disagree with them. I try to read and understand before I reply. In this case I felt the OP complaints about the AI were unjustified and that the new behaviour was actually an improvement that should be applauded.

I really don't see why you are complaining about losing. The AI has not been tweaked to single you out. Your circumstances have just triggered various AI's to attack you. The AI always has liked to attack weak militaries. How low had your military got? What alignment were you? What diplomacy had you researched. What were the trade links between the other AI's... this often seams to be treated as an informal alliance by the AI. You say it was on tiny so every

I'm a Yor man personally. They suck at diplomacy but then again I don't do that. The Yor suit my style. I always switch tech trading off, and I love to go on the attack early. They rock at combat and their bonuses are best in the early game. The change to combat rules has not swayed me much in terms of attack/defence... What it has done is improved the chances of the fleet of the small/tiny ships against the large/huge single ship. The inate logistics of the Yor are second to none. So it make

@Bodyless Good advice, but I'm not sure who or which comment you are referring to. Maybe you could enlighten me?

How can you say... "It is now beating me so it is getting worse"? The AI is recognising you are on the ropes and is taking the opportunity to take you down. If someone has reduced your military strength to the point where you are vulnerable then it is correct AI to take advantage to grab a few of your planets. I do it all the time if one of my ex-allies is taking a pounding and no longer look to be able to be of benifit to me. <img src="http://images.stardock.com/sd_com/smiles/Laugh.gi

Lots of the canned ships have sensors/defences/life support and engines on them. You probably are lagging behind in one or more of these areas... but really the canned ships are very poor. The AI designs its own, you will eventually need to.

It is difficult to identify how good a ship CAN be. A few things that occur to me are: a)What did they choose for alignment (maybe if they chose good they have bonus defence techs), b)Do they have any mining starbases (bonuses to attack and defence), c)Have they captured any other planets with miniturization bonus buildings on them? d)Has one of their planets received a ship building quality affecting planartary event? e)Is it in the area of effect of a military star

Once you work out that it is for switching rally points rather than using it to reasign the "None" option as you have done it can be quite useful. I tend to put a separate rally point on each border. Then set the planets with warships to my most vulnerable rally point say border A. Then if I need to re-inforce one particular border I can switch all the planets from border A to re-inforce border B without micro managing them. Also I tend to have rally points near each of

42... surprised to be fairly average for this board.

I meant the numbers before ANY imporvements. Obviously the PQ planet ends up being great. However purely from memory it looked to have less mp than my other planets before I started building. If the base is race specific has anyone listed the numbers and if so what are they?

Artagel They had some big memory problems in 1.11. This caused crashes around saving especially on PC's with 1G or less with a relatively small page file. I love the game but it is ever so memory hungry, my poor laptop still struggles with page swapping every now and again, however it no longer crashes. So maybe you are lucky.

Are there any attirbutes/stats based on races or planets that are not obviously visable? Most buildings/starbases are modifiers to a base figure e.g. econ +20%, military production +30% modifiers. Does every race/planet have the same base or are they different? Purely by guesswork it appears that there are significant racial and/or planatary variations. I.e. the Altarians seem better at research than the Yor. Am I just imagining it? Was it due the the racial di

Sorry I wasn't meaning to be condecending it is hardly cutting corners... It is difficult to evaluate which of the civs it is at war with has had a significant impact on its demise. How many ships would you have had to kill before the mesage was appropriate? What other factors would it have to weigh? Much of the dialogue is appropriate. But some situations are "off the beaten track" e.g. your war where nothing happened... What was it supposed to say "We are at war but don't kid yourself that y