and another one:
when your flagship flies from anomaly to anomaly watch every turn to what anomaly it will fly next.
If it is a "Civilization Graveyard" switch research to something insanly expensive fly the ship manually to that anomaly ...and with some luck it's a 25%-research-database-anomaly. Afterwards you can switch back to your normal research.

Of course, you can use it also for your current research, but if it's something relatively cheap it's quite a waste.

That's how I usually get "Planetary invasion" relatively fast (or in my current game the Spore-Tech...that was well over 100 turns of normal research at the start...3x25%-anomalies allowed me to have it before Year Zero was over)

How do you see them complete it?

Check your toggles, then. You ARE informed of such events in TA - even for races you haven't met yet.

How do you launch a ship in a different direction? In which expansion was this included first?

Thanks for your answers.

I'm not sure when this came in, but when you click on a planet there is a button near the ships in orbit area. Once clicked it'll allow you to pick one of the 8 exit directions for that planet.

I find you have to zoom in to get it to be accurate. Since I play the game mostly zoomed out to icon level view, its a bit annoying.

Sentient species taste better...

So the option is not available in DL?

Sorry for disturbing this cool thread with this question. Continue please!

See? I never knew that you couldn't pick the launch direction in DL.


This can be called a trick or maybe an exploit but its still probably too much of a pain to do anyway. Personally I haven't done this, but...

I once took an AI planet that had noting but factory type buildings on it. It was fully developed but didn't have a starport or any other buildings, just factories. So the AI was spending a lot to build nothing. My trick would be to sell / give the AI a planet(s) full of industrial sectors and nothing else just to damage its economy. Since the AI never over builds existing structures it won't ever get anything useful out of that planet except costs.

Also, because of the way the AI queues up its improvements, if you give it a tech like Neutrality Learning Centers before it gets stock exchanges or industrial sectors, it will be stuck building the NLC for a long time before it will ever get to build anything else that it might need more. I used NLC as an example because they have such a huge build time. You might be able to do the same with industrial sectors but then after each is built the next will be done a bit faster. If the AI gets industrial sectors befoe it has built manufacturing centers it will take it a long time before its done updating.

I guess that brings up another "trick", I always build manufacturing centers first, even on empty tiles because of the MP to cost ratio. A quick build will cost you something like 1400 bc or a full build that takes about half the time as an industrial sector from scratch. You get almost the ability of industrial sectors for a lot less in build time and maintenance cost.

Always make sure you have constructors near bonus resource starbases of other races. In the event of a war between two races it's very common to get the resource as the starbases are destroyed in the war.

I'm not sure if this has been posted here or not.

Since the center of the galaxy can be a strong strategic location, build a cargo hull ship with three life supports and as many engines as you can very early. Send it toward the center of the map. When it gets there, upgrade it to a colony ship with three life supports and no engines. 1 million colonists will automatically appear and you can grab one of the center planets.

Build a starport and you can reach anywhere on the map from there. A nice side effect is that your survey ships will be able to reach more anomalies too.

Must be the crew of the ship

How do you think ships get more speed in heavy battles? They carry a ballast of slaves.

Seen as this thread holds a lot of tips a new player would find useful i hereby give it a large bump