Brad's "Did you know you could do this" thread

Tips, tricks, and more

By Frogboy Posted February 22, 2006 22:17:05

Welcome to another (or first) edition of "Did you know..."

Standing in for a dialog with a "show me more tips" checkbox is your host, me with a series of fairly random but hopefully useful suggestions that might make your gameplay more fun!

#1 You can "grab" the map with the left mouse button and move it around by holding it down. You may never want to edge scroll again.

#2 You can RIGHT-CLICK on the ship built block notifications that flow down on the right and your ship will automatically be launched.

#3 On the planet screen, you can put your mouse over the approval and influence and it will explain where that number is derived from.

#4 In the Diplomacy screen, you can RIGHT-CLICK on tiems to bring up a dialog that gives info on that item.

#5 You can play a quasi-Hot seat game with someone by loading up the game as GalCiv2 cheat (use the cheat parameter). Then when you set up the game, you let the AI play out a few turns and then have your friend pick one of the races they want to control. Have them select that unit and hit CTRL-SHIFT-Z.

#6 CTRL-S is the quick save.

#7 You can double click on planets and various other items to take the place of having to place, or install or build or go to their screen.

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Is there a way to get a transport to automatically launch with 1 passenger? I hate dragging the scroll bar all the way to the left and then having to go back and click the other side of the scroll bar to add 1 passenger. If one passenger is the minimum required to launch, then the scroll bar should only go down to 1, not 0.

Nope you can't auto-launch with one passenger, it's either full or partially full - if a full transport would remove more than one quarter of the current population, it instead auto-launches with however many are represented by one quarter. At least that's the proportion that I think is used.

However you should note that with manual launching the mouse wheel does work on the scroll bar, so that can be a click saver.

I've got a few how-to questions regarding Twilight 1.96:

a) when a dialog appears stating that Mining Base X197 thinks you suck and wants to give all their stuff to the culturally superior Daleks or what have you, is there any way to instantly go to that mining base from that dialog so I don't have to scroll all over my empire looking for that one base?

b) when looking at a planet's available buildings, is there any way to ensure that each main building type (economy, farm, influence, morale, production) always appears in a fixed location, or to assign a building a hotkey so that when I press it the game queues it up to be built? It gets really annoying trying to find any one building type because, due to their name changes, they move all over the list during the course of the game (e.g. sometimes it's Xeno Farming conveniently at the bottom of the list, and sometimes it's Intensive Farming right in the middle). I waste a bunch of time on a planet scrolling about trying to find the one slot upgrade I want; multiply that by several slots per planet, by 20+ planets, and by several hundred game turns and you have a lot of wasted time.

c) is there a ship upgrade option that *doesn't* completely wipe all modules from a hull when you select it? I almost always just want to modify an existing design rather than reinvent the wheel, all the while keeping the same general module placement locations for thematic purposes. It would be much faster to just be able to take your Mauler I, slap on two new Photon Torpedo launchers, and call it the Mauler II, rather than also having to add back all the old stuff it already had while trying to remember exactly what hardpoint had what.

C - Go to options, click the interface tab and you'll see a Ship Designers section. You'll see an option for removing functional component from your ships when upgrading, uncheck it and when you upgrade all the old components will still be on the ship.

Only thing I see under the Ship Designer heading after hitting the interface tab is the selection for rotating parts.

Here is a screenshot of where the option is. Using the latest version of Twilight.

It doesn't show at the lower resolution of 1024 x 768.