I guess for me, the initial land grab only makes me want to use the ship builder immediately before i press TURN for the first time!I redesign th colony ships to be faster, much faster. This typically I can only build so many, but they have more manuevering ability when it comes to seeking out that planet gem.

I will say, I haven't played the humans since my first game simply because I cannot stand NOT knowing where the frigging planets are. I MUST have stellar cartography immediately!

I don't like this idea at all. The initial land grab pahse of GC2 is the most boring part of the game. Unlike Civ4 there isn't surrounding territory to worry about or resources nearby or if the city is coastal or the distance to your capital, it's just get as many planets as you can asap. I mean sure you can slow down the expansion, but why? You really want to drag out colonizing planets and getting them to usefulness? I think this was a very interesting design choice, the inital 5000 BC gets your empire up and pumping out warships fast.

Basic Logistics being very easy to research makes it trivial but beyond that the logistics techs get expensive. If you don't get the next logistics fast enough then the planets get close to being unusuable because you can't build basic buildings on a planet, only the upgraded versions. Actually all you are doing is spearating it into two colony rush phases, bleh.

I would rather prefer to evolve my owned planets, build everything and enjoy a nice game, but unless I pick that huge diplomacy boost at the beginning of the game, I'm toast. You just CAN'T win if you're not expanding or conniving yourself to victory, no way. Eventually you'll be a someone's dinner, no matter your defenses. We need the builder or lone researcher approach to stand a chance as well, don't you agree?

Here's a strat that has worked well for me. Build constructors like the wind and triple stack all of your worlds with military starbases. Make sure that they're behind your planets, so defending them is easier while you're teching up to build them their own defenses. Make fleets of cheap ships that have attack and defense of 1/1/1. While in the aura of 3 starbases, those have attack and defense of something like 7/7/7.

Once you've got that setup, no one is gonna give you any trouble, they'll all be too scared. I used this strat against a mix of bright and intellegent AIs to get my first research victory.

-Dewar

Frogboys statement that resources are = or + to planets is correct, however. Depending on your difficulty level

1. the AI already has a head start in terms of Scouts/Planets
2 the AI already KNOWS where they are...You have to first build the scouts, find the resources then build a constructor which does 3pcs per turn and get it out there.
3. By the time you do ALL of that the AI will have a decidedly serious planetary influence advantage.
4. the AI is NOT I repeat NOT bound by the same range limitatiions that you are.....of this I can prove reguardless of what the fan bois say.

Since for me it seems that if I play on normal level...the AI is building Eco/manufacturing Capitals and trade goods before I can even get my first factory built.

Here is how I do it

1. I play with planets on a tight cluster.
2. all research abilities maxed the left over i do to economy in the setup
3. make a mad dash to get nearby planets and the n research the heck out....staying as neutral as possible unless a 20+ planety quality bonus or something is offered.
4. build my trade routes
5. bide my time/avoid war
6 find the weakest civ with the most resources
7. build influence bases around civs and revolt take nearby planets
8 once I have a sizeable planet base, I build a few defensive ships
then I See whos allied with who. trade embargo the civ with planets under my area of influence and the skulls soon appear.
9. attack an seize the resources i need then. then usually they soon seek a peace treaty
wash rinse repeat

Here's a crazy game idea. I doubt it would fit into Galactic Civilizations, but...

The player has little to no control over colonization, just territory. You open up said planets to colonization, you don't immediately own them, or send millions of people over. Perhaps both the Drengin and the humans colonize the same planet, there certainly is enough room, I suppose. It would only be later that the planet would come under your complete control.

A historical parallel would be the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. It wasn't just the English that crossed over, and wars were eventually fought over control. In this case, however, it wouldn't be fighting for partial control of a planet, but complete control of a planet. Or, instead of fighting, the equivalent of the Lousiana purchase.

Instead of sending out colony ships, there would be a greater focus on exploring the galaxy and deciding what planets to strengthen and defend your claim on.

The last post by the bovine cannibal is certainly an interesting one. I agree that fitting it in to GalCiv2 would essentially change the dynamics of the early game to a huge extent. Though it does make sense that as new habitable planets are found people would gradually move over to them. An addition to that thought would be that you can only build ships on planets that you are essentially in near or complete control of, like your homeworld. Possibly a new UP resolution about a tax on foreigners living within the area of influence of another civ.

This also brings back the idea of destabilization spending on such planets, like the Drath wouldn't want to fund a covert Drengin mafia on a joint Drengin/Altarian planet. IE state sponsored terrorism to 'convince' those Altarians that life was better back on Altaria. Sure the Drengins get another planet, but hey who do they have to thank, all those kindly Drath gun-runners.

One more thing, doesn't the event 'Pro-Iconian activists have rushed the streets and begun to terrorize the inhabitants of the Little Korx section on (insert planet name here) causing the Korx government to advise it's citizens to return home to more secure Korx planets' Doesn't that sound like fun? A result of this would be something like increased Iconian influence on that planet, a complete abandonment of it by the Korx, and an increased Korx presence on another planet.

Dewwar, I tried that with one fully-developed starbase in late-game+9 Lucky rangers (I was REALLY lucky in that game ) and it didn't quite help. But I'll take your advice and try three or four of these, and see what happens this time. Sounds interesting. Thanks!

Early exploration and expansion is a core fundamental part of the genre. Why limit early expansion, especially in a space based 4X like GalCiv2 where there is always a limited number of habital worlds. It's not like you can just colonize endlessly.

I can see hindering expansion in a game like Civilzation, because there is a lot of landmass and you can build a huge number of cities just about anywhere - and it can be beyond ridiculous to pump out settlers nonstop. Civ doesn't have a limited number of areas to "colonize" (until the entire map is filled at least, which is what happens eventually.)

IMO, logistics has nothing to do with number of planets. You could have some other tech be a limiting factor on empire size, if you must make all players into clones. For example in RoN (not a TBS game but it's not a typical RTS either, it's kinda of an RTS/Civ hybrid) there is a civic tech category and you're number of cities is limited by your civics level. But I don't think this is appropriate.

What is appropriate is gearing up your empire to maximize early expansion. It's a race. It's a fun part of the game. If you don't enjoy that part of the game then...not sure what to tell you.

A common problem of 4X games is that initial colony/city placement can often decide the game within the first fifty turns. This leads inevitably to a game strategy of frantically pumping out as many colony ships/settlers to grab all the best sites. This can get rather repetitive to say the least, is limiting strategically, and means unassailable leads can all too quickly build up. The solution? Limit the number of colonies available according to the players logistics ability. Not only would each colony placement become more important lending a greater depth to colonisation, but this would make sense thematically as well - if logistics needs to be researched to shove a few ships together, surely it would be needed to co-ordinate a galaxy wide federation of planets, no?

I really like this idea, I think it is sheer brilliance... But I think a minor alteration should be made, the change would be this. You can colonise any planet you like up to your governmental logistics ability, but once you go over it the colonises suffer MASSIVE administration costs, these costs are based on the distance from the homeworld and on how many other planets are outside the logistics cover.

So for example...

A empire as 5 planets covered by the logistics...
3 planets exist outside the logistics cover

The planets range from 5 10 to 15 parsecs from the Homeworld.

The cover for the initial colony would of been only (distance x no of colonies x maintenance cost)

So say the agreed maintenance cost was +25% of normal colony costs then the cost to maintain that new colony which is the first to be colonised outside of the cover and at a range of 10 parsecs then the cost would be 10*1*maintenance+25% this is to show that maintaining a long distance colony outside of your logistics costs requires enormous resources from the homeworld to support it. All the resource need to be transported and special policing or forces or labour and equip needs to be sent to keep the colony in check.

In the above example we only covered one world, if it waws 3 worlds then the cost needs to be shifted to offset further expansion outside the cover. The cost would now be different and would increase for all colonies since resources would be stretched. So 3 colonies at 5,10,15 parsecs would cost 5*3*maintenance+25% + 10*3*maintenance+25%+ 15*3*maintenance+25%. So each colony is costing you increasingly more the more you grab.

Basically maintaining colonies outside the logistics cover should begin to cripple the entire empire. Resources, money etc would all be need to be diverted to maintain a few bordline colonies, this would make the logistics technology viable.

Now here is something you might want to consider, the ai and the player won't necessary all go for the logistics technology like the land grab. Why, well because while they are trying to achieve a better landgrabbing ability everyone else will be beefing up there industry, research, economy, weapons, invasion and speed techs. Its all well and good being able to support 10 colonies but if you can't protect them, you'll end up giving them to your enemies.

Only a fool would rush up one branch of the tech tree while their enemies are learning everything they need to kill them.

J

Here's an idea, although I don't know how this would play out in practice. For someone who doesn't want to do the colony rush, what if there was a new tech tree for building artificial space habitats? It would be a new type of starbase, basically.... something like an O'Neill Cylinder with room for population growth and slots for buildings. You'd build it with a constructor, and upgrade it over time, maybe eventually reaching the Halo, Ringworld, or Dyson Sphere phases (although the latter two would be game unbalancing.... think of the potential tax income!).

This would allow territorial expansion into sectors that were devoid of habitable planets, which could be an interesting way to use those areas.

A quick and dirty solution would be to just make each additional colony require more and more maintenance so if you just expanded like crazy in the beginning, your maintenance costs would be so high that you'd bankrupt yourself which would cripple research, social production, and military production. Civ 4 took a similar stance and it seems to work fairly well. You expand as fast as you can up to the point that your economy can afford and then you stop and build up. Then you expand again either through colonies or by conquest until you can't afford to go farther. Then you build up again. Repeat... It would also help if you started the game with zero money so you couldn't just buy a bunch of colony ships outright and operate at huge deficits until your money runs out. That drastically skews the game in favor of expansion at all costs.

For those who don't like land-grab, why not just a deathmatch mode? Every planet starts out colonized.

1. One solution would be to play pre-made scenarios w/balanced starting positions, w/all the habitable planets already inhabited (w/out buildings). No land grab, everyone starts equal w/the same number of same class planets.

The game seems to come w/scenarios, perhaps there is a way we can make more of our own.

2. someone suggested an accelerated start option - the game already has one. => Look for the pull down menu after you hit 'new game'.

3. as far as making the colony ships simply more expensive, I think such can be edited in the xml files. The file called "GC2Types.xml" seems to let you change the cost of the colony module.

I want to pipe in that I like the tying max colony number to a tech. Logistics is fine, and I like that, becasue the civ that races just to logistics will end up being handicapped in terms of trade, weapon tech, etc. I like it a lot.

And I do think the way it is is HIGHLY problematic becasue it is just too random. If you get lucky and in a good location, it makes it a CAKEWALK.

some of the rebuttals have implied that the author and others liek myself are NOT emphasizing early production for colony ships. that is not the case. I do the 100% social for two factories, buy an extra colony, and then 100% military for 4-5 colony ships. Its just way too luck dependent on the number of colonizable worlds on my half of the map.

Personally I think the number of colonys shoudl be tied to some government -type tech, or your new colonys will likely revolt. THis would provide the wonderful guns-and-butter descision making we all love.

I hope stardock considers this reasonable request!

MG

The last post by the bovine cannibal is certainly an interesting one. I agree that fitting it in to GalCiv2 would essentially change the dynamics of the early game to a huge extent. Though it does make sense that as new habitable planets are found people would gradually move over to them. An addition to that thought would be that you can only build ships on planets that you are essentially in near or complete control of, like your homeworld. Possibly a new UP resolution about a tax on foreigners living within the area of influence of another civ.

That was essentially the colonisation model in Moo3, citizens would automatically travel to planets within your space, eventually they would become colonies. Its not too bad an idea but I prefer an increasing maintenance cost per colony the further the planet is from your homeworld to simplify things.

The "initial colony" building has a relatively high upkeep cost (i think 25bc or so). What if this were increased substantially, or additional penalties were added (like -50% production, -80% income, etc)? This would be a substantial disincentive to rapid expansion. You could also add a chain of maybe 10 upgrades, that gradually bring it back down to the normal base cost. Make them relatively, cheap, but since you can't upgrade it again until the previous upgrade is done, it would make the colony take 10 or 20 turns to get up to speed. If one tried to expand too quickly, the increased upkeep costs (or lack of income from the new planets to offset this) would cripple you fairly quickly. However, eventually the upkeep would come down to the current rate.

I think two other factors exacerbate the importance of the initial rush.

It takes a fairly long amount of time to get up to the technology point that you can capture a planet (planetary invasion). By that time, the initially colonized planets will have a large enough population that they can't be taken without a substantial effort. So basically all you need to do is run a colony ship to a planet, and it's home free for a long while. Two things could possibly help here, either enabling earlier conquest somehow, or slowing the growth of early planets. Perhaps as mentioned above, the growth rate could be penalized for the first 10 (just to throw a number out there) turns or so, this would prevent the planet from being too firmly entrenched. You could allow blocking of colonization by allowing ships to enter orbit around uncontested planets and prevent colony ships from landing. This would allow players to still stake out planets in a slightly less permanent fashion. To allow easier conquest, perhaps
colonies below a certain age or size could be conquered by colony ships, rather than troop transports. The logic being that before a colony has some basic infrastructure built, it is poorly defended and can be overrun even by non-professional forces.

The flat population growth also makes it much easier to colonize rapidly. Since planets grow at a base rate of 200k, regardless of size, that means you aren't limited by population as far as rate of colonization. It doesn't make sense that populations would double in a week (or more than double if is jumps from say 10k to 210k). If you had to create colonies with smaller initial populations (say 10k or 50k) and combined this with easier conquest of small or new colonies as mentioned above, there would be some balance required between fast colonization and quality colonization. Slowing down population growth would also make it harder to go into massive debt early on and count on rapid tax base growth to bail you out.

I'm not clear on how very low population effects production, research, etc. Do improvements need a certain number of citizens to operate? Maybe this would make more sense than 10 upgrading versions of the initial colony tile. If the initial colony operated at 100% with 500k plus people, 50% with 250k or something like that, with maybe a minimum of 10% with 50k or below....

Anyway, nuff rambling. It's just I agree that it's frustrating that such a small percentage of the game has such a huge impact on the initial outcome.

Here's a long idea on this topic from an old timer:

Introduce different types of colony ships with differing costs and requirements to build:
- Standard colony ships filled with citizens
- Mining bases loaded with a factory and specialists
- Military bases with modest defenses and troops
- Research stations with labs and specialists, etc., etc ...
These new colony ships each have their own prerequisite tech. Any type of base can be established on any typically colonizable planet. However, a mineral rich planet would benefit tremendously from having a mining base instead of a regular colony, etc. The flipside of building one of these "specialty bases" is that only that type of colony ship would be available to build on that planet (except regular colonies which could still build any type). Since the "specialty bases" don't produce general population, they must pay taxes from the their respective industry, i.e., factories pay a percentage of their output, labs pay a percentage of their research, etc. The exception here would be Military bases which are 100% funded by the government. These new base types would intially be limited in what structures could be built but could later be "upgraded" to regular colonies.

Let's stretch reality a moment. Assume a "realisitic" approach to colonizing - if a new habitable planet was discovered here, say on Mars, you might find an initially large percentage of population willing to jump on the next rocket and blast off wily nilly without much though of consequences. However, after that initial group, it would be more and more difficult to convince the remaining population (and future populations) to continue expanding UNLESS there was good reason. So, back in the game now, parallel this idea with new structures or social activities on planets you want to populate from:
- On your home world, build some sort of "Colony Enrichment Club" or some such nonsense as that.
- After exploring other planets, instigate a propaganda campaign about the "beautiful new world"
- Good old fashioned cash - pay big bucks to entice new colonists

What I'm getting at here is that three factors need to be decided when expanding your empire:
- Researching a specific type of colony
- Building the appropriate ship
- Recruiting necessary colonists or specialists

These features would still allow for quick expansion for those who like to expand quickly but the lack of readily available colonists will force players to think carefully about how to distribute new colonies from which to produce more colonists. Specialty bases, being cheaper and quicker to build would be more prolific throughout the galaxy and regular colonies would be more sparse, as would seem to fit "real-life" situations. It would also provide some variety on your controlled planets instead of building up all planets the same, thus bringing another strategic element to the game and reducing "game-play redundancy" found in so many of these types of games (like Civ and MOO - plop a barracks, plop a university, plop a ... you know what I mean)

Here is my list of changes that would "fix" colony rushing. Of course all comments are welcome, and I hope that Stardock is reading =]:

1) Fix population growth. Deciding to ship off a billion colonists should be quite painful to the supplying colony.

2) Fix population growth. Here's another reason. There should be some benefit to the long-term development of the new colony, providing a compelling case to choose 500 million or a billion colonists vs the current standard of 100 million or fewer. If a player chooses a very small initial population, it should take a much longer time to grow. A modified (capped?) exponential growth rate would probably be best here.

3) There should be an increased benefit of a higher population for planet production. One possibility: factories should only be considered "fully staffed" when there are 1 billion colonists available per factory on the planet. Anything less than that would reduce production linearly. Since by endgame there are usually many more than 1 billion population per factory on planets, this should not be something that the player has to worry about for his established colonies (unless he completely neglects farms), only during initial expansion and planet conquest.

Together, these would make the decision to launch a colony ship a more difficult one. To kickstart a strong colony, it would require many more colonists than now. The decision to send that many colonists would need to be balanced against more noticeable effects on the home colony.

As always, values like population growth rates and various thresholds can be tweaked to achieve the "best" gameplay balance of the push to colonize versus the need to keep the colonists at the home planet. Optimally, the best strategies would colonize planets in descending quality order as the game progresses, leaving low-quality ones open until much later in the game, when there are excess populations.

I can't get as eloquent as the posters to this thread have been, but in perusing the xml files - based on some of the ideas here - I realized you could do the following:

1. The initial colony ship starts out with capacity 100
2. Modify Techtree.xml and add a "colony module" tech; requirement "basic logistics" (for example)
3. Modify GC2Types.xml; add the Tech_Requirement flag "colonization" (the ID name of the colony module in techtree.xml). Once colony module is researched you can now build a colony ship with capacity 500; without it you get your starting colony ship and no capability to build another one.

Additional thoughts:

* You could string together multiple "colony module" techs with different sizes and capacities.

* The 'Initial Colony' planet improvement (PlanetImprovements.xml) is added to every new settled planet automatically. Its possible to set the maintenance cost of this extremely high. Create colony upgrades in techtree.xml; much like the market center is upgraded over time, you can add planet improvements with tech requirements (colony improvement I/II/III) that upgrade the 'intial colony' by setting the new advanced colony's S_UpgradeTarget flag to the initial colony PI S_InternalName. Set the maintenance on the colony improvement advance lower so that over time as you research colony improvement I/II/III, the colony's maintenance goes down (this idea I did not test but I don't see why this could not be possible).

As I said, more rambling than anything else to fuel the discussion; its late

T

Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets.

Maybe this is just me, but I've found this is 100% true in 1-on-1 and 100% false in anything larger. In 1-on-1 I get rocked by my opponent if he gets a couple resources and pushes his early lead. But in a larger galaxy with more civilizations, colonies are king. More colonies = more research = more transports = eliminate anyone who dares take a resource near you and take it yourself. I'm playing a Gigantic with 9 opponents, and getting four colonies as opposed to my opponents' average of two has led to me owning nearly half the galaxy and having eliminated four other civilizations in about 3 game years. Granted, they're on Bright and not Intelligent yet, but it still seems that more colonies means more better in a very concrete way.

In response to the general feeling of the thread, though, I'm fine with that. I need every advantage I can get when my general strategy tends to be Kill Everyone, and being able to build my strategy around that (for instance, my custom civ starts with Stellar Cartography) gives me a fighting chance. GalCiv 2 is the first 4X game I've ever won on any difficulty via military strength, and I've been playing them since Civ 1. Either that means it's more suited to my mode of thought, or it's balanced in a way I've been able to understand.

Something the game Alpha Centauri did that was kind of nice was an "accelerated start". You pick that option, and everybody starts with empires that are similar in power and have about 50-100 turns of development. It was a way to skip the mad expansion rush and get on with the empire management and warfare. It also ensured that everyone had similar power at first (no one AI or player gobbling up the whole map and ending the game before it even started).

MOO2 had that feature too.

Galciv2 just needs to go more civ4 and make colonies EXPENSIVE AS HELL to maintain, so that its only feasible to get more colonies if your tech is higher. The system is in galciv2 already but its somewhat underpowered so its still better to rush colonies, which is repeptitive and boring and forces you to go through the same routine at the start of every game (set planet build, set spending levels to 100 and taxes to max that you can, drop military to 0, buy colony ships every round for a few rounds).

Just make it so that with starting tech and stuff its very hard to maintain even 3 colonies.
logistics could alleviate the expense and government types too, not to mention the financial techs that would help you along.

this should be easy to mod btw.


ALSO a TOTALLY important thing to the game is a building that stops invasion. like an orbital base that gets upgraded like any other building tile and acts as a ship in orbit with all the latest techs (so that you need a fleet to take it out).

it'll take a tile on the planet, but its important since you never quite feel safe with planets, which is silly. planets should have all kinds of crazy missile silos and laser turrets and stuff. I mean, you can fit that stuff on ships, but not on planets?!?

The problem for me isn't that an early desperate landgrab is a viable strategy (I quite enjoy the random mad excitement), the problem is that it is the ONLY viable early strategy. There should be a balance to that part of the game, just as there is to the latter stages, it should be possible to go for one of three or four different strategies that all would have their problems and advantages:

1) There should be a "military strategy" in the early game. If Planetary Invasion was a cheaper tech it would be possible to build up an early game navy of transports and scouts and simply grab the good planets from the hands of those that have spent their resources discovering and developing them. This would force land-grabbers to balance the use of ressources between expansion and defense.

2) There should be an "economic" strategy where your early focus would be getting the good trade routes and developing valuable trade goods (these things could be made a much larger part of the game, perhaps in a mod) and building up your economy and/or productivity to dominate the other civs financially (has anyone else noticed the viability of buying expensive techs from other civs and reselling them for profit to everybody else in the galaxy? One can make trillions off of the minor races alone!) Why not let civs place orders for goods and services with other civs? I think it would be cool if I could place an order with e.g. the Alterians to build entertainment centers on my worlds if they happened to be really productive and I happened to be filthy rich!

3) There should be a "tech" strategy. All those resources that goes into early colonyship production should give much greater strategic reward if funnelled into getting an early technological edge. The monopoly on certain goods and techs could be made far more important (i.e. a civ could develop and gain a monopoly on something that no one else could do without and would have to give up some of that early gained territory in trade for)

Anyway, these are loose ideas. The important thing is that players/ai's should have important early descisions to make other than where to send those precious ships.

benjamin, that's more or less how it works in civ4, like I said before--
if more planets = insane upkeep fees, then colonizing more straight away would put you in a bad position at first but if you survive you might be stronger much later on, but if you don't overexpand you can use 100% spending and focus on tech or military or whatever you want

benjamin, that's more or less how it works in civ4, like I said before--
if more planets = insane upkeep fees, then colonizing more straight away would put you in a bad position at first but if you survive you might be stronger much later on, but if you don't overexpand you can use 100% spending and focus on tech or military or whatever you want

What I liked especially in civ4 is that if you over-expanded, your economy will simply grind to a complete halt and you'd die.
you could push it, but at some point it would kill you outright.. you won't just be behind on tech than everyone else, you'll have NO tech research and no nothing

ALSO a TOTALLY important thing to the game is a building that stops invasion. like an orbital base that gets upgraded like any other building tile and acts as a ship in orbit with all the latest techs (so that you need a fleet to take it out). it'll take a tile on the planet, but its important since you never quite feel safe with planets, which is silly. planets should have all kinds of crazy missile silos and laser turrets and stuff. I mean, you can fit that stuff on ships, but not on planets?!?

EXACTLY! Very well put! There should be a way to build some really strong defensive fortresses, so even that you're small, you can still hold your own with very developed colonies. I thought that I'm in the minority here, and that most of you guys enjoy rushing, expanding and killing all day long, but it really seems that you also think that there should be some more viable strategies. I'm happy to know that!

Benjamin Lunoe, yeah, you're right. You just can't tech-up due to constant tech-trades. You put everything you've got on research, and research like mad, only to see other races have even more techs than you even on your chosen "tech-route" because of tech trading (or in same cases, due to intimidation, in case of the evil races), and that's just frustrating.