Welcome aboard Avalastrius.    

The tech tree bugs are confined to TA.  If you'd like a relatively bug free and fun game, I'd suggest playing DA instead.  DL might be a tad primitive these days, but it can be a good diversion as well.

To start, I'd probably go with the Terrans as a beginning race.  Their diplomatic skills are a bit overpowered, but you'll need them if you don't want to get squashed like a bug in year 1.

Gigantic map, abundant everything and scattered stars makes the game run a bit smoother and you won't be bored waiting until you finally get to see another star.  If you clump them together, you'll spend a lot of time travelling in empty space.

I'd go with at least 4 enemies, but 9 makes for a nice crowded galaxy.  You should pick the max minor races (8) as they can be key to recovering from the inevitable economic crunch.

Economy is very important.  More population = more tax money, but less approval (morale).  Your morale and population needs to be balanced or you'll either be broke but happy or rich but miserable.  Either of these extremes will change quickly to broke, miserable and dying.  If your approval (morale) drops below 20%, your people start dying from depression.  At 100%, they multiply like rabbits.

Easy difficulty is way too wimpy, even for a beginner.  The AI sits and drools enough even at normal difficulty to make you want to upgrade to something harder quickly.  I'd say normal for absolute beginners and challenging for those with some good 4x experience.

Reading the AARs helped me a lot in the beginning and they can be entertaining after you've mastered the game as well.

Good hunting.

If you must play the Twilight of Anor, then take note that some of the AI's (Drengin, Korath, Drath, Iconians, Acereans, and Yor) is somewhat broken and does not play optimally. This can be rectified by switching the AI personalities to something more challenging (Generic or Thalan personality gives out big challenges).

The Ultimate Edition will automatically start TotA. To play DL or DA, you must use the exe in the game folder. For a standard installation this is: "C:\Program Fils (x86)\Stardock Games\Galactic Civilizations II - Ultimate Edition". For DL use GalCiv2.exe and for DA GC2DarkAvatar.exe in the DarkAvatar subfolder.

There are currently two mods available that fix the tech tree issues. "Space Weapons Fix" by MarvinKosh and "TotA Tech Tree Fix" by Tolmekian. You can find both in the modding subforum. One word of caution though. Both alter the layout of the tech tree. Especially MarvinKosh is quite radical in his approach. You should probably familiarize yourself with the game first, before deciding to use them.

Thanks! 

what in the hell is up with the quotes today??? Look at my edits for the above post...if you dare..

I'd give +2 also, but I never made it to ambassador.  Remember to hit the finger thingy there.  It hasn't shown up for him yet.

Looks good to me.  (LOL) But you should see my edits on a normal basis.  

And yes, you've made some very good points.  Fast tech would run counter to his needs and econ will come in handy for the whole game. 

+1k  

  I thought I was the only one that got the quotes problem .

It's all those darned ribbons on your chest. 

I dunno really.  Maybe Brad is resynchronizing the warp field structure of the server.

I really appreciate all the answers people, I can't thank you enough.

Are the tech tree problems mainly for TA (because I'll start playing this only after DL and DA and hopefully there will be a patch by then or mods)?

Also, about the difficulty, should I be using bright or normal for my DL game? Should I tick "allow CPU to use intensive algoritmhs?)

Thanks!

I only recently bought the UE, because I didn't want to install Gamestop/Impulse on my new computer and the old versions aren't yet available to download directly from Stardock. 

Hey there, and welcome to the game.

It's true that Twilight has some serious issues, but there is hope.  My mod has been mentioned as one that fixes many of the issues.  If you're interested, here it is: Tolmekian's TechTree Fix

It's on version 2.0, with 2.1 to be released soon.  So, if you're going to start at the beginning, I guess you should wait for a while to download it.

I'm sorry, I was going to try to comment on the sliders, but I think that others can do a way better job of explaining it. It's both simple and complex.

Population growth in DL is a value of between 3 to 7% (Torians are the only 7%) up to a maximum of a base growth of 75M population/turn, before bonuses (which are shown under Civilization Manager-->Stats & Graphs:Abilities).  Unfortunately, there's nowhere in the game that this value is actually shown, but 4% is a safe estimate.

In DA/TA, the 75M maximum base is calculated with growth factored in, which means that if you have say 1250M pop with a 4% racial growth factor and a 50% pop growth bonus (Aphrodisiac, for instance) that gives you a 50 base times the 1.5 = 75 base (maximum base) times 1.5 pop growth bonus (again) = 112 (the .5 is truncated) actual base growth, times approval bonus.  But this extra term doesn't apply to DL; in DL it would only be 50 base growth times 1.5 racial bonus = 75 base pop per turn times approval bonuses.

Hope that made sense.

The sliders have been explained as employment, but that doesn't make a great deal of sense, either.  In any case, in order to build improvements, build ships, or research, you must have the appropriate infrastructure: factories, factories, or labs.  But your total infrastructure funding must add up to 100%, which means you can't run all three (or even two) of them at 100% capacity simultaneously.

How much you pay is equal to total funding * individual funding * infrastructure capacity (counted on a planetary basis) * (1 + racial bonuses / 100) * (1 + building bonuses / 100).  Research is summed at the end of this, but industry is on a per-planet basis.  Oh, and as with almost everything in GC2, the final result is truncated (rounded down to the nearest 1).

Side note: In the above equation, bonuses from techs, anomalies, customization points, inherent abilities, political parties, both planetary and civ-wide events, mining starbases, and economic starbases, are all considered racial bonuses; they stack, rather than multiply.

Additionally, in TA 2.x, the Technological Capital no longer increases actual research output by 100% (doubling effect assuming no other research-modifier buildings are present) for the planet, but instead is counted as a racial bonus, which means that due to the hidden research bonus on higher difficulties than Tough, at a certain point that is achieved relatively early, you'll actually have less research output as compared to the same setup in DA.

I've forgotten how asteroid mines factor in, though.  Apologies for that.

And, in the above equation, you pay for all of the (funded) base production of a given type, but only half of the (funded) bonus production-the other half is free.

Finally, there's the focus mechanic, which allows you to transfer (funded) base production only to another production type, losing 25% of your (funded) base production of type A and transferring it to type B at an efficiency of 100% (DL/DA) or 80% (TA)-and after it is transferred to type B, it gets type B's bonus, not type A's.

Let me know if that wasn't clear enough, or if you were asking questions that I didn't answer.

One last thing: The Artificial Slave Center, which increases your military production by 50% via a multiplier (that is, *1.5, not +base*1.5) interacts in strange ways with how military costs are calculated, so if you have it built and you see numbers that don't match the above, then that's why.