Winning DA on Max Difficulty (long)

I’m halfway through my first suicidal game (max difficulty) on huge with max major and minors and am winning (I think.) Just so you know what you’re getting into here, I am a old school Civ and Galciv player. I know how to exploit cheese and I’m not afraid to do it. You will notice that I reload many times in this game. If this playstyle sounds like something that bothers you, don’t bother reading

My game to date:

I restarted until I found a corner with three minor races nearby but no majors. I love minors. Good trading to start and good expansion later. I usually prefer to start in the middle, but I have found it to be impossible to get any decent colonization footprint at suicidal difficulty. The AI sends colonizers towards you on turn one. I go crazy doing a breakneck colony rush to get a decent footprint. Overall I have about 12 worlds total. I’m on a business trip and can’t look at reloads. If I was home I’d be playing, not writing about it!

I am lucky or have just been persistent in my restarting. I colonize two worlds with 700% prod tiles and two worlds with 700% research tiles. I do some cheap reloading as I colonize the PQ 12, 700% research bonus tile world to generate a 57% research bonus. This will be my tech capital. The other bonus tile worlds get similar bonuses. I find a PQ 26 world in the very corner which will eventually be my economic capital. Unfortunately it is out of range with my fast colonization ships. I create a long range colonizer and send him on his way. Many turns later I will upgrade this ship in flight to beat the Drath to this world as they will send a technologically advanced colonizer towards this planet also.

I was able to trade for the two colonization techs which applied to the majority of unique environments in my area. I have contact with Korx and the Drath who are my nearest neighbors and three minors. The Drath and Korx each manage to colonize a planet within the star clusters I consider to be "mine." (As an aside, although my influence will eventually be pretty overwhelming, these planets never seem close to flipping. The influence dynamics must be unfavorable at suicidal.)

When the dust settles I have two military resource starbases and one morale. There are two tech and one econ resources within my sphere of influence, but the AI must have sent constructors there within the first few moves of the game. I have no chance to grab them.

I’m playing as a human and have had a lot of success at lower difficulties abusing diplomacy/trading strategies. I try the same this time. I build diplomatic translators but run into trouble when the Korx build the Galactic Bazaar. They must have started building it on turn one since they start with the Master Trader tech. This throws me for a bit of a loop as I consider the Bazaar to be overpowered and absolutely necessary for my diplo/trade cheese. I spend a good amount of time thinking about this. I consider either just letting them have it or conquering them later. I decide that the Bazaar is essential for my strategy.

Several reloads later and after a heroic effort to obtain the Master Trader tech via trading I buy the Bazaar outright the turn before they build it. This obviously turbocharges my trading strategy, particularly given that I have it at an extremely early point in the game. On the downside, my economy is now hamstrung by 119 BC payments. My flagship falls into a wormhole and quickly gives me contact with five other civs which helps multiply the benefits of my trade cheese.

Everyone loves me except the Korx. Perhaps this is because I essentially stole the Bazaar from them. They declare war. I screw around for a bit since they are a good distance away and don’t seem to be too strong militarily. I have very little military to speak of. I build three medium hull ships with nano rippers and nine movement. I prefer the movement bonus as it gives me a better chance at intercepting marauders in wars like this and I have a pretty decent tech advantage over them. I take the one Korx planet in my footprint which started as a PQ 2 but is secretly a PQ 11 or so with my tech level.

I run into major trouble when I encounter the "war has expanded" event. The Drath have been close until now. In fact, two turns ago, they gave me warships to use against the Korx. But with this event they declare war and suddenly hate me. As I’ve already noted, I’m obviously not afraid of a cheap reload, but I decide to play it out. This will prove to be a mistake at suicidal difficulty. The Drath mop me up militarily. And they ***will not*** make peace. I try everything over the next few days of gameplay. Equally problematic is that all civs cancel their trade with me which kills my economy.

Several days and many hours later I will reload to this point and make peace with Korx to prevent this event. When I reload I start asking all civs to declare war on the Drath. Not many take the bait, but I will persist with this over the rest of the game. I have identified the Drath as (for the moment) my greatest threat. They are relatively close, and have a strong military and strongest economy.

I am able to trade for one econ treaty and about five research treaties. Although I’d prefer the econ treaties, the AI seems to value them more highly than research. Somewhat ominously the Drath will never consider giving me a treaty despite the fact that we are by turns either friendly or close.

I conquer all three minors in my area with my three medium hull ships. I have actually delayed this conquest to give them a chance to build something worthwhile. They all have economic capitals. Yum.

I have run my economy at 100% for most of the game primarily off the cash generated by abusing tech trading (particularly the colonization techs to the minors who never colonize. I’ve commented on this elsewhere but in my opinion this needs balancing.) I’m getting my morale up also and am running at 81% taxation with 80% approval. I run into that thing where increasing my taxation even just 1% higher drops my approval from 80% to 1%. I’ve never been sure if this is a bug or intended or if there is a game dynamic I'm missing. At any rate, my economy is starting to run green which is a good thing.

I feel like I’m in a pretty good position. I have built most of the major trade goods (and traded for the others) and have all the galactic achievements. I am #1 for influence and population. I am close to the top for industry and slightly below average for tech and economy. (Although I am definitely number one if you consider the absolute number of techs owned.) I am down in the basement for military.

I’d have to look again at a savegame, but I’d guess that we’re maybe 40% of the way through the tech tree. My only really high level techs are star federation and industrial sector. (I was very careful about timing the development of industrial sector.) I have chosen neutral ethics and have neutrality learning centers in place on most worlds.

I’m trying to decide my endgame strategy. Influence is an option, but conquest is the most fun for me. Perhaps when I return home tomorrow I’ll put up the battle standards and convert my quiet little civilization to an aggressive, fascist war machine.

Thanks for reading. And thanks to the GalCiv developers. I agree with some of the criticisms and suggestions that others have posted, but overall it’s a great game and a great expansion.

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Take care that one of the AI empires doesn't win a tech victory; other than that it sounds like you can win this one. Congrats.

Two questions:
1) how big is the galaxy?
2) what super ability is your race using? (more generally, what's your race config)

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I have found Thalans (i.e. Super Hive) to be very much winnable on Maso. I'm sure it's winnable on Suicidal as well, but I'm busy trying new things--it is, after all, a beta. BTW Suicidal is not the max difficulty, Obscene is. I give the Thalans +30 Econ, +10 Morale, Federalist, and the remaining 3 AP is flexible (+30% Pop is not a bad choice). Super Hive + money = a winning combo.

I'm trying out Super Annihilator (i.e. Spore ship) right now. I bet they're winnable, too, if you do a Spore rush.

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Super Hive does certainly make things a lot easier. I go with a custom super-hiver with +20% planet quality, +30 econ, +20 morale. I've thought of using custom Thalans but I would have to choose between the PQ bonus (which uses all their flexible points) or some combination of morale and econ bonus, and I haven't managed to get myself to do that. The +33 to both types of production is really nice, though, and +10 miniturization sure doesn't hurt.

Briefly, how I use super-hive:
- start game, set spending to 100%, military production to 100%, taxes to whatever I can get away with with >75% morale
- fill all planets (capital and colonized) with factories + starport at end of queue (I'll typically skip the starport for low PQ planets)
- have all planets use focus on research unless it needs to focus social for something (like a starport or trade good) or needs the extra points in military
- have as many shipyard planets as I can afford produce ships; if they have the population, colony ships, if not, then scout ships. Military ships produced as needed to keep the AI off my back.

This usually gets me through the colony rush without adjustment, though I've usually deficit-spent my initial 5000bc by running more shipyards than my income supports. I'd discuss mid-game stuff but this is long enough a post as is.

The key is the fact that first-level factories have 0 maintenance, and in the case of super-hive cost 0 bc and 0 production points to build. I eventually (*eventually*) upgrade to higher-level factories, but usually only toward the end of the mid-game when I'm pretty solidly in first place.

I've only used this on Tough thus far, so there are probably significant problems in my strategy, but I tend to roll those games over without serious challenge.

BTW, I went through the new game screens to check the difficulty level names, and on mine it puts suicidal after obscene. My computer can be somewhat innovative in its approach to reality, though.

And a spore-ship rush might work well, though I think it would depend on a fairly small map and if you messed up the early rush you could be in big trouble. But I could be wrong.

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I can check into the Suicidal vs. Obscene thing. Maybe it's my bad.

I'm doing the same thing as you with the Basic Factories & zero maintenance. We probably should start a dedicated Super Hive strategy thread.

I did try the Super Hive + PQ combo, and I don't think it's a good one. The first reason I don't like it is because I think 8 ability points for +20% PQ is far too expensive for DA. All those class 1-5 planets are actually special in their own way now, since they have all those soil improvement tiles. The +PQ ruins it (don't get me wrong, it's still helpful...just not worth 8 points).

The biggest reason I don't like Super Hive + PQ anymore is because the Hive is a serious money hog. What are you going to do with those extra tiles the vast majority of the time? Factories. That's the last thing you need. 4 ability points gives +30 economy, which yields far more than two Market Centers on those extra tiles.

I noticed Super Hive also has one very cool ability the other races don't: Decommission!! You can decommission Industrial Sectors all you want, who cares. It only takes one turn to rebuild.

I'm tending to agree with you about the Spore ship rush, but it's not so much a function of a smaller map as it is a crowded map. You just blitz all your neighbors' high-PQ worlds before they can build any respectable Defenders. It beats the tar out of a colony rush--and those poor Torians really suck vs. Spore. This is making for a really fun game, but I'm still tweaking the settings for it to make the most sense. I just did a Tiny map with three races, and the entire game was over in a couple hours. Reminds me of the last scenario in the DL campaign.

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Thanks for the replies. In response to some of the questions:

First of all, on my computer Suicidal is the max difficulty with Obscene one step below. Perhaps one of us is running a bugged version?

More detailed startup info for keith:
Galaxy size: Gigantic
Number of Planets: Occasional
Habitable Planets: Common
Stars: Common (and in clusters)
Tech Rate: Slow
Minors: Eight
Resources and Asteroids: Abundant

Race Config:
I play humans with their default "Super Diplomat" ability as it plays best to my current playstyle which is to abuse trading and diplomacy strategies. Regarding more detailed configuration info, I use Federalists for the econ bonus and put racial ability points into Economics (+30). I sprinkle the rest of the points around into a variety of categories, usually military ones.

And as a brief update of my game: My strategy of asking other races to dogpile the Drath worked pretty well. In fact, I had good success keeping everyone at war with everyone else through most of the game which allowed me to develop in peace and keep my top rivals dogpiled. I made the shift to a conquest strategy after building huge hulled ships with black hole generators and zero point armor (most other civs went with projectile weapons). A single one of my large hulled ships can conquer an entire Drath fleet with the tech imbalance as I accidentally found out. I am currently about twice the population of any other civ and have a huge tech imbalance. I may not finish this game, but it has been a fun ride.

Moral of the story: Abusing diplo/trade strategies with Super Diplomat ability, diplomatic translators, and Galactic Bazaar works well even on Suicidal. The key elements are trading for enough cash to keep your econ running near 100% (easy with the new colonization techs), keeping everyone else at war with each other, knowing when to grovel, and then having fun while your technologically superior military cleans house. It did require a lot of restarts to generate a favorable map where I could get a nice foothold.

For anyone who is curious, I never had a planet do a influence flip to me the whole game although I was number one for influence and there were several likely candidates. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough with starbases. The influence dynamics seem pretty rough though.

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Do you postpone your Econ/Research treaties till after you get the Bazaar?

Also, how do you keep the more powerful alien races in check? In DL, I had a problem with the Drengin getting too powerful (obviously not so in DA beta) because I could never get a decent deal in place to get multiple alien races to agree to attack the Drengin. How do you manipulate aliens to team up on the most powerful guy?

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I'm doing the same thing as you with the Basic Factories & zero maintenance. We probably should start a dedicated Super Hive strategy thread.

I started one, so as to not excessively hijack this thread.

I'm tending to agree with you about the Spore ship rush, but it's not so much a function of a smaller map as it is a crowded map. You just blitz all your neighbors' high-PQ worlds before they can build any respectable Defenders.

It does sound good (if cheesy) as a "establish big advantage early on" strategy rather than "quick win" strategy, at least for non-tiny maps. Rush to spore ships and build and send them, and perhaps then research space weapons to get the first gun and slap one on the front of each subsequent spore ship so that it can blow away non-combatant ships that act as planet cover. That sounds like a viable "suicidal" strat, but the AI could prove more resilient than I expect.

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Thanks for the replies. In response to some of the questions I’m going to post a few general comments on how I played the diplo/trader whore in this game. Most of these ideas are of course not mine but are borrowed from strategies that work in the Civilization series. (This is pretty long again, sorry for that.)

First of all, there are two ways to play the trader. The first is a “zero” tech strategy (you spend nothing on tech), the second is a “selective” tech strategy. I prefer the “selective” tech strategy, which involves researching techs that have trade value. This rarely leads to researching what you need but ensures that you always have something that has trade value. It involves having some understanding of what the AI likes to research so that you can research the other techs.

The thing to bear in mind is that these trades will look like you’re being robbed if you consider them one at a time (particularly in the early game before you have diplo trans or the Bazaar). You need to think about them in aggregate rather than as individual trades. Even if I trade four techs for each AI tech, if at the end of the turn I have traded the same four techs to each civ and gotten five or six techs and cash from them collectively, I’ve improved my standing relative to the AI. And early on when I’m weakest I’ll make clear losing trades if they keep the gap between the AI and me from growing too fast. The new colonization techs play an important role in this regard. It is difficult to trade for the first one, but once you have one you can usually trade it successively to the other AI civs for the rest of them. And once you have these techs, it is easy to turn them into big cash. The minors play an important role here as I discussed previously.

As I mentioned, the reason this strategy works is that you use the cash to run your economy at or near 100% spending. This gives you time to build a formidable infrastructure. After the initial colony rush I typically drop my military spending to 5-10% with all that spent on constructors. As usual, my starbases are heavily biased around my tech capital (which happened to be near my super-producing planets) and my major trading planet (Earth in this case) for the respective bonuses.

I spent most of my game with only three medium-hulled nano ripper ships on patrol. I did this for two reasons. First, it gave the necessary might to conquer the minors. Secondly, I hoped it would mislead the AI into thinking I was pursuing particle weapons. In the end game I timed my production planets to start dumping torpedo-class “black hole generator” ships at the same time. At that point the AIs ships were covered in armor rather than torpedo-class defenses, and I really cleaned up.

As an extension of this let me mention that playing a zero military strategy is far more viable than you would guess, even at suicidal. It is much more viable than it was in the Civilization series (in my opinion.) I learned this after in a previous suicidal game I essentially stopped playing and just hit turn successively. It was almost endgame before someone declared war on me, and even then I instantly had warship donations from other races. There is probably at least one important factor for this to work – in all these games I was quite distant from other civs.

As I mentioned in another post, the best location for a trader is usually in the center. The reason for this is that you want quick contact with the maximum number of races. The problem I encountered was that the AI just colonized my start point far too quickly with a central start on suicidal. While a corner location doesn’t naturally play to a trader’s strengths, it does have some other nice benefits. A corner allows you to garrison your border with far fewer ships. It also gives you the potential for more profitable trade routes, even if they are a bit harder to establish. And finally, as previously mentioned, I suspect that the distance discourages enemy civs from coming after you too aggressively when they declare war.

With regard to treaties, I definitely didn’t ask for any until I had the Bazaar. Of note, the Bazaar came very early in my game. I was forced to buy it or cede it to the Korx. I was probably lucky that I started near them which gave me access to the Master Trade tech. I like to get these treaties for two reasons. First for their obvious value in stimulating my research and economy. Secondly, I hoped that they would discourage these civs from attacking me. I can’t be certain how well they work in maintaining peace, but I will mention that your greatest enemy in these games is the “war has expanded” event. Civs don’t care about these treaties if it occurs. I had given both my econ and research treaties to the Torians in exchange for theirs, but they declared war immediately when the event hit. If you do declare war, keep your wars short to avoid this event.

With regard to encouraging alien civs to dogpile the leader, I never really had a problem in this regard although I’m not afraid to offer multiple techs for their declaration and I had a lot of diplomatic strength (Bazaar, etc.) Early on I was concerned about the Drath. I was able to get the Drengin, Yor and Thalans to declare war, albeit not in the same turn. They along with the Torians represented the other strong races in my game. Of note, I started getting these declarations long before the Drath could become aggressive to me.

Later in the game the Yor became strong. At this point it didn’t matter too much given my own strength, but the Drengins, Arceans and Thalans were happy to declare. My big worry (which I’ve encountered in other games) was that the “strong” race would defeat and gobble up one of the smaller, weaker ones that I’d convinced to declare war. Perhaps I was just lucky, but it didn’t happen. In retrospect, getting these stronger races to attack the strongest probably had multiple benefits. The Drengins were next to the pitifully weak Arceans and Iconians the whole game, but never attacked them, presumably because they were occupied with the Drath.

As one final note, the point again of the trader strategy is to give you time to develop a strong infrastructure and a strong economy. In my opinion people underestimate the importance of economy (hence my choice of Federalists and ability points into economy). It won’t matter endgame how many ships you try to build if you can’t pay for them. This was more difficult than I’d have guessed at suicidal. I think the zero military was pretty essential. I also made more “cash” planets than I normally do.

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A few final thoughts regarding manipulating the other AIs into attacking the leaders. I suspect a lot of it had to do with the fact that everyone in the game was friendly or close to me for most of the game. Of note, this is nothing I actually labored over. Although I gave in to every demand for tribute, I never spontaneously offered tribute to anyone. While I can't be certain, I suspect that the following play a role:

1. Constant trading appears to cause your relations to go up gradually over time. It's admittedly a bit tedious, but I usually try to trade with all civilizations as soon as my diplo lockout exipres. I suspect that this works because my trades end up incompletely "maximized." By this I mean that while I ask for cash to fill out every trade, I suspect that I don't get the absolute maximum amount (I use the button that changes the value in increments of 10 BC.) And I suspect that the AI somehow interprets that extra money as tribute which gradually improves our relations.

2. Giving in to tribute demands produces a very noticeable jump in relations. Although I haven't tested this, it appears to be much larger than if you had just offered them the same outside of a "demand." And with zero military, chances are pretty good that everyone is going to come knocking sooner or later. In this way it becomes pretty easy not only to buy off hostile AIs, but to make them your friends.

3. Starting in a corner means no borders to cause tension with other races.

4. Trading with your important allies obviously makes them like you even more.

5. Neutral ethics helps. It appears to be the least "offensive" ethic. It also gives you access to neutral shipping which (believe it or not) is really a diplomacy tool as it gives you more trade routes to use in strengthening important relationships.

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Many very interesting points. I don't have time for a large reply right now, but your way of playing is dramatically different than mine. I always play with tech-trading off and typically have less than 5 trips to the "negotiation screen" the entire game in a Gigantic/Abundant galaxy. Your trade/diplomacy based strategy sounds like it will be interesting to try some time, and will probably be more effective than my super hive strategies after they nerf super hive (which I agree with from a balance perspective).

Corner starts are very nice, and I particularly try for corners where the distribution of other players makes it much easier for me to grab large swaths of the galaxy (I once played a Gigantic/Abundant/Tough/8-opponent game where the "colony rush" ended with me in control of 350 planets or so and something like 65-70% of the map).

What are your goals expansion wise? Grab as many planets as you can? Grab only if they won't cause border conflicts?

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I hear ya about the good diplomacy allowing you to get weaker civs to declare war on stronger civs. What I did in DL was I got the stronger civ (almost always the Drengin) to declare war on the weaker. That was much cheaper. The hard part was getting the second and third civ to team up on them. It cost much more to bribe the Drengin to open a second front. Frequently I wound up just attacking him myself; but that carried the pitfall in that the other civ would make peace before too long, and now I'm stuck fighting the strongest race alone. Oops.

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Keith,

I'm probably not as scientific about my corner start as your question suggests. Frankly I just want an unpopulated section of the galaxy that looks "doable." By this I mean something that I can realistically colonize before getting deluged by the AI. It usually involves grabbing everything on my side of the "void" between me and other majors. As discussed, I hate contested borders (I hate them because the AI hates them.)

As I look back at savegames this is usually somewhere greater than fourteen planets (with my typical gigantic galaxy setup with only occasional planets but common habitable planets). I like slightly fewer planets on my gigantic maps as it hightens the imbalance of generating a better start for myself.

If you pin me down, the things I do look for are:

1. Two or three minors in my clusters. (I love minors! Trade now, conquer later.)
2. At least one planet with a 700% production tile (Earth or this becomes production capital depending on how I feel)
3. At least one planet with a 700% research tile (tech capital)
4. At least one high PQ planet (econ capital)
5. No Majors nearby (As we've discussed, this is for two reasons: I need the distance to give me time to colonize and also for the "buffer" value of the dead space.)
6. Planets that I can colonize without needing lots of techs. I don't mind if they require a tech, but I want it to be one or two techs only for my clusters. I don't want to be trading for five colonization techs.

Again, I don't claim that the above represents the key to success. But I like to specialize planets, and if I find those things I think I can have a fun and competitive game even at suicidal. I've played lots of starts that violate the above if they seemed interesting for one reason or another.

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I am on the verge of winning my first game on Painful level.

I am using the same Human/Diplomat/Tech Trade Abuse strategy. But I cranked out the Cultural Conquest Tech Tree while relying on tech trading to keep up on techs.

Trading Techs and groveling usually keeps me out of trouble while I quietly build Influence Starbases to capture planets. No one seems to mind me building the Starbases for some reason (bug?).

Once the game is down to the last two Alien races, I work on getting them to fight each other while maintaining the best relations I can. I then really start building up military in earnest. Before I just tried not to fall too far behind and make myself an easy target. But now I build up a massive Huge Starship fleet and continue to put pressure on with the Influence Starbases. Once I have an insurmountable advantage via my military, I go on a Conquest rampage to finish off the game.

This strategy has gotten me all the way up to Painful level, even though this level was the hardest to win as I almost got wiped out on more than one occasion. It will be interesting to see how it works higher levels.

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